Robert Gordon

‘Why Can’t the English?’: the significance of audio-visual sources for musical theatre research

Great musicals are as much visual as aural experiences. Nevertheless dramatic criticism has traditionally privileged the analysis of spoken or sung words over other performative elements. Apart from the National Video Archive of Performance at the V & A Museum, there has not until the late nineties been an official British equivalent of New York’s Theatre on Film and Tape Project (TOFT), which inevitably means that audio-visual recordings of significant British musicals either do not exist or are scattered, inaccessible or lost to scholars. Given very limited resources, the V & A must make difficult choices and, of only thirteen musicals in the archive, seven are British. Although these have been intelligently chosen they cannot adequately represent the range and diversity of the genre. Inevitably there have been many tragically missed opportunities: the historically significant revivals at the Finborough (e.g. Our Miss Gibbs, Gay’s the Word, Free as Air, The Roar of the Greasepaint) and elsewhere (e.g. Blitz, Quasimodo, Spend, Spend Spend) would seem to demand recording and archiving, as would ambitious and visually sophisticated commercial productions like Martin Guerre, The Witches of Eastwick and Made in Dagenham.

By examining a ‘musical scene’ from Billy Elliot the paper aims to explore the reasons why detailed analysis of choreography and scenography can be as important as analysis of music and libretto in comprehending a musical as a performance text and to argue for better resourcing, coordination and archiving of audio-visual recordings in order to preserve sources for musical theatre scholarship.