Alliances, Aggravations, and Sources in Musical Theater Research
The relationship between music and dance—two time-based arts that, despite inherent differences, often communicate in beguilingly similar ways—has posed challenges to musical theater research. The musical score, on one hand, is traditionally the first stop a musicologist will take on his or her quest to meaning. While manuscripts of scores and sketches offer essential insights and avenues to meaning that may simply not exist elsewhere, there is always the danger that one might mistake the score for the aural phenomenon itself, ignoring music’s intrinsic corporeality. The study of dance typically makes use of a wider, and sometimes less precise, array of evidence—including widely varying notation styles (if they exist at all), as well as photography, film, and video— to get at its aesthetic qualities.
Understanding dance in musical theater—and its relationship to music—becomes exceedingly vexing when little evidence exists to aid in its reconstruction. This paper considers the relationship between music and dance in Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey (1940), a show whose dance, or at least much of it, is lost to history (Robert Alton claims to have forgotten most of the original choreography by the time he began working on the 1952 revival). A large collection of high quality photographs exist (including the Rodger Wood Collection at the New York Public Library), and reveal the acrobatic nature of dance accompanying the club tunes, and the balletic quality of the dream sequence. Interviews, dance features, and critical reviews of the original run also aid in the reconstruction of dance. Still, what disciplinary rigidity has kept me, a musicologist, from asking certain questions, and led me to privilege some sources above others, or to seek out types of sources that simply do not exist? What new alliances might these aggravations provoke?