Musicals and the envoicing of mental illness and madness: From Lady in the Dark to Man of La Mancha (and beyond)

Because musicals routinely position musical expression as an enabling form of madness, they can have a difficult time when they try to consider mental illness in thoughtful ways. This essay considers four prominent musicals that deal overtly with mental illness and/or madness to delineate these difficulties and show how musicals try to surmount them. The relatively few musical numbers in Lady in the Dark (1941) allow its protagonist Liza Elliott to both confront her mental block and give voice to her emancipation. In Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Hapgood's ambiguous mental status allows him to swing from absurdities to rebellion to the touchingly human, each phase differently opposing the insanities of the world. Quixote, in Man of La Mancha (1965), defies reality in favour of impossible dreams. And the songs of next to normal (2008) provide a panoply of escapes from the painful realities of the dysfunctional Goodman family, none of whom quite finds a way to a desired 'normal'. As these shows exemplify, mentally unstable women and men generally have different options in musicals: women (at least, Liza and Diana Goodman) are obliged to chart paths to mental wholeness, with decidedly mixed results, whereas men (at least, Hapgood and Quixote) are allowed to indulge their flights from reality as forms of romanticized idealism, becoming heroes and liberators in the process. next to normal exemplifies a renewed determination to take mental illness seriously in musicals, further advanced in the four-season television series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Opening Doors

This chapter examines Sondheim’s musicals from West Side Story to Company. West Side Story and Gypsy mark both an apotheosis of the Rodgers and Hammerstein aesthetic and an introduction of postmodern styles and ideas into the musical. West Side Story is concerned with the operations of power and the reproduction of ideology. Gypsy presents a theatricalization of the American Dream, turning it into a series of images without substance. In Forum a trickster protagonist generates multiple, clashing realities. Anyone Can Whistle examines the problem of identity construction. Company dispenses with plot and thus examines narrative as a structure of knowledge and identity. The play’s drama is generated by the tension between its own cyclical structure and the goal-driven linear narrative implied by marriage.

as Experimental Theater

Stephen Sondheim and his critics usually ascribe the failure ofAnyone Can Whistle, Sondheim’s most revered flop, to the volatile social and political context in the United States, claiming that it was ahead of its time. This chapter argues, in contrast, that it is very much of its time and that no other musical of the period epitomizes the social and cultural contradictions of the mid-1960s as vividly asWhistle. Attempting to bring the kind of theatrical and political provocation that was flourishing Off-Off-Broadway to Broadway audiences unfamiliar with experimental idioms,Whistlerepresents a determined hybrid: part satire, part romance, part musical comedy, part Broadway razzle-dazzle, part political polemic. It is also symptomatic of the contradictions inherent in the dominant political philosophy of the 1960s, liberal individualism, in its opposition to standardization and conformism and its inclination toward an arrogant egocentrism. ThatWhistlehad to wait decades to find an audience is a tribute less to Sondheim’s prescience than to his ascendency since the 1970s as his generation’s preeminent architect of experimental music theatre.

Sondheim’s America; America’s Sondheim

Although Stephen Sondheim has long been considered the leading writer for the American musical stage in his generation, and although many of his shows have become repertory fixtures, their original runs have tended to be relatively short, and his thematic engagements with conventional ideas of “America” have often been querulous. To understand better why “Sondheim” and “America” have thus often seemed not to map easily to each other, this chapter considers one of his famous flops,Anyone Can Whistle, in the context of his earlier collaborations with Arthur Laurents and as a show that set an agenda quite different from that of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II; this new agenda would sustain the remainder of his career to date.

Sondheim's ‘Sweeney Todd’—The Case for the Defence

As both lyricist and composer, Stephen Sondheim has proved to be the most original and innovative force on Broadway since the late 1950's, when he first attracted attention as the lyricist for some of the songs in Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957), including ‘Maria’ and ‘Tonight’. Few composers for the musical stage have such a record of success as Sondheim. In addition to these lyrics for Bernstein, he also wrote all the lyrics for Jule Styne's Gypsy (1959); then, as composer as well as lyricist, he wrote a number of musicals over the next two decades: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd (1979), and Merrily We Roll Along (1981).