![]() Loesser’s detachment anticipates Beckett and Pinter. Loesser in Guys and Dolls throws the emotions into neutral: feel what you like, he tells audiences, it’s your show as much as mine. Both of those classics demand an emotional response to the love story without it, they fail. ![]() But his little guys were criminal hustlers, and Runyon, a night-desk newspaper hack, worshipped the power of thugs like Arnold Rothstein and Al Capone whose whim sent men to sleep in cement waistcoats… What Frank Loesser did in his music and lyrics in 1950 was to take a long step back from the material, allowing viewers to choose their own level of involvement with the people on stage… To appreciate how far ahead this was of its times you have only to set Guys and Dolls beside its immediate rivals, South Pacific and The King and I. Runyon’s apologists claim that he identified with the little guy, the outsider. The Damon Runyon tales on which the musical is founded are unblushing glorifications of mob rule in Prohibition Noo Yawk. is superficially a comic romance between two reformed gangsters and their everloving molls. Lebrecht wrote about a London revival of Guys and Dolls: It was once true that the whole point of musicals was expressing big emotions with the help of the very powerful and abstract language of music, a language that surpasses even the greatest poetry in its ability to express human emotion, precisely because it is an abstract language but one we all understand.īut not all musicals behave as they should. Though this approach has not been standard practice for most of the history of musical theatre, it has cropped up now and then, in Of Thee I Sing (1931), The Cradle Will Rock (1937), Guys and Dolls (1950), The Threepenny Opera (1954), How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), Hair (1968), Company (1970), Grease (1972), Chicago (1975), 42nd Street (1980), Assassins (1990), Bat Boy (1997), and others.Īll these shows broke the big rule of musical comedy, rejecting emotional attachment. Urinetown is a prime example of Ironic Detachment, but it wasn’t the first musical to navigate these conceptual waters. Its application is unique to the musical comedy, an ephemeral entertainment which has found new relevance through its philosophical engagement with 21st century concepts of irony and alienation. requires musical inflexion it is impossible in opera and ballet, which are stiffened by tradition against self-mockery. Ironic Detachment would be unattainable in a Tom Stoppard play because I.D. This degree of Ironic Detachment is the very making of the postmodern hit musical. ![]() Background and analysis by Scott Miller The music amplifies this element of separation, licensing us to stand apart from what we are seeing and enter a third dimension where each of us can individually decide whether to take the plot literally or sardonically, whether to take offense or simply collapse in giggles. ![]()
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