A Beckett Full of Wine or Albee Alright in a Weill (formally Morning)

My day job is at a children’s arts enrichment facility.  The children I work with range from 6 months to five years old.  Children this young obviously have a very small vocabulary and communication is a challenge.  You can tell a group of 2 year olds to come sit down twenty times and they do not understand, but if you sing it once “everybody over here and sit right down” their heads turn and they understand what they need to do. 

 

A friend of mine told me the other day that if you hear a song and then 10 years later you hear the same song, most people will remember the music.  Even if you read a story or are told a story 10 times, it is very likely that you will not remember it in 10 years.  This is why I can watch re-runs of “CSI” or “Law and Order” and have no idea how they are going to end.  Music has the ability to go beyond the intellectual experience and physically move its listeners.  As musical notes and chords vibrate through our bones we are physically changed by that experience.  We understand.  We are forced to feel something.  A person cannot be physically shaken and remain apathetic to what they have been moved by. 

 

This is why I think the American Musical has a place beyond mere entertainment.  When I talk to people about musical theatre there is a stigma that suggests it is not real art or that it is simply entertainment.  But with the potential to have such a lasting and powerful effect, it is also an area of theatre that has the ability to create lasting change and hope.  That’s what a musical like Oklahoma! did.  It gave soldiers going off to war a reminder of the beautiful and incredible country they were fighting for.  It left them with a lasting image of hope, freedom and the life they were fighting to preserve.

 

Ride on the subway or sit in a doctor’s waiting room and listen.  Music is inherent in our world, it’s all around us.  Nature, machines, our bodies all make rhythms and sounds.  A musical should not be a weird land where people break out into song for no good reason, it should be a celebration of the world we live in.  When life takes a person to a point where they no longer can express themselves in words – that is when the musical form becomes necessary.  If that feeling can be transmitted with music, absorbed into an audiences bones, then it becomes more than theatre…it becomes an experience.  Suddenly the audience has literally felt the vibrations of despair or ecstasy.  They have shared a monumental moment with another human being.  This is the type of experience that can be unforgettable. 

 

This is not to suggest that I think most audiences have the intelligence of a 6 month old and therefore need music to understand a play.  But I do believe that there is something unbelievably powerful and lasting that can be experienced through musical theatre.                             

 

Written by:  Ryan Emmons