Matthew Malone

Subways are for Sleeping: Creating and Performing a new Critical Edition.

Subways are for Sleeping, with music by Jule Styne and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, opened December 27, 1961 and ran for a total of 205 performances. As a result of its limited run and relatively lukewarm reviews, the show has remained mostly untouched since its opening and therefore, not surprisingly, no scholarly work has been carried out on the show. A major reason for the lack of attention the score and the show has received is the state of the original scores, which are in terrible condition. As no digitised parts are available to hire and because the original sources are scattered across various archives, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas; The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, the task of recreating this score is quite a drastic undertaking. The recent critical edition of Kiss Me, Kate which was performed at Yale University, the BBC Proms in 2014 and Opera North in 2015 has called for a surge of critically-informed performances texts of musical theatre, promoted further by the obvious public attention the work is receiving. Although Subways are for Sleeping is somewhat lost to the Broadway world, the scholarly attention required on the score still remains.

Traditionally, the critical edition has acted as a monument to the composer of any musical work in the form of an ‘authentic’ version of the score, which is accompanied by a critical report explaining all editorial decisions. The omniscience of a composer of musical theatre is debatable as musicals, as we know, by their very nature are collaborative and although a composer will sketch the tunes our ears are familiar with, they rely on orchestrators, dance arrangers and vocal arrangers to develop their work further. In order to create a truly authentic critical edition, therefore, one must draw upon a multitude of sources including the original instrumental parts, different versions of the script, the copyist’s piano conductor score, and letters of correspondence between the creatives. Because of the level of editorial intervention needed, a critical report is appropriate. This will detail all editorial decisions describing in detail why certain changes have been made, why a specific passage has been cut or added, why one lyric is chosen over another, all the while consulting the original sources to make sure the edition is true to the show’s performance origins.

This paper will not only focus on how one creates an effective working critical edition, establishing and utilising the most relevant sources i.e. scripts, scores, orchestral parts to achieve the edition, but also the relationship between the text and performance. How does one create a truly authentic performance representative of the period style and original production? Also included in the paper are several case studies highlighting editorial difficulties accompanied by with audio-visual examples.