Ebook PDF Twenty First Century Musicals From Stage To Screen PDF

(eBook PDF) Twenty-First Century
Musicals: From Stage to Screen

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebooksecure.com/download/ebook-pdf-twenty-first-century-musicals-from-stag
e-to-screen/
FIGURES
0.1 Catherine Zeta-Jones as Velma Kelly in Chicago 3

0.2 Ensemble cast in Across the Universe (2007) 5
0.3 The cast of Disney’s Newsies from the filmed live version 6
0.4 Anna Kendrick as Cinderella and Emily Blunt as Baker’s Wife
in Into the Woods 10
1.1 John Cameron Mitchell as Hedwig/Hansel Schmidt in Hedwig 20
2.1 Richard Gere as Billy Flynn in Chicago 48
3.1 Michael Crawford in The Phantom of the Opera make up session 59
6.1 Marty (Roy L. Jones) watches as C.C. (Kevyn Morrow),
Jimmy Early (Herbert Rawlings Jr) and Curtis Taylor Jr
(Weyman Thompson) sing and dance about creating a
‘smoother sound’ in the first section of ‘Cadillac Car’
(Dreamgirls international tour, NYPL) 99
6.2 Curtis, C.C., Jimmy, and Wayne in the first section of ‘Steppin’
to the Bad Side’ (Dreamgirls international tour, NYPL) 100
6.3 Black power in a 45 single, as Curtis initiates his payola scheme
in the second section of ‘Steppin’ to the Bad Side’
(Dreamgirls international tour, NYPL) 101
9.1 Nicole Kidman in Nine 144
11.1 Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in Sweeney Todd 174
13.1 Quvenzhané Wallis as Annie in Annie 203
14.1 Tom Hardy as Taxi Driver Mark in London Road 220
CONTRIBUTORS
Sarah Browne is Head of Music and Principal Lecturer at the University of

Wolverhampton. She has worked extensively as conductor, arranger and musical
director. Her research interests include the politics of race and gender in musical
theatre, American musical theatre of the 1960s, and stage-to-screen transitions of
musicals. Previous work includes a number of papers and book chapters on British
revivals of the American canon, the male gaze in film musicals, the music of Hamilton,
and the musical Hair, which was the primary focus of Sarah’s doctoral thesis.
Todd Decker is Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at

Washington University. He has published four books on American popular music
and media: Hymns for the Fallen: Combat Movie Music and Sound after Vietnam
(California, 2017), Who Should Sing Ol’ Man River?: The Lives of an American Song
(Oxford, 2015), Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical (Oxford, 2013)
and Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz (California, 2011). Decker has lectured
on the stage and screen musical at the Library of Congress and London’s Victoria
and Albert Museum. In autumn 2016 he was a visiting International Chair at Labex
Arts-H2H, a humanities centre at Université Paris 8.
Robert Gordon is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Director of the

Pinter Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he established
the first MA in Europe in Musical Theatre for writers and producers. His
publications include The Purpose of Playing (2006), Pinter’s Theatre of Power (2012),
and The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies (2014). An actor, director and
playwright who has worked in South Africa, Ireland, USA, Italy, Czech Republic
and the UK, he has recently completed the book for a children’s musical and is
co-author of British Musical Theatre since 1950 (Bloomsbury, 2016) and The Oxford
Handbook of the British Musical (OUP, 2016).
Contributors ix
Olaf Jubin is Reader in Media Studies and Musical Theatre at Regent’s

University London and Associate Lecturer on the MA in Musical Theatre at
Goldsmiths, University of London. He gained his PhD from the Ruhr-Universität
Bochum, Germany and has written and co-edited several books on the mass
media and musical theatre, including a study of the German dubbing and
subtitling of Hollywood musicals and a comparative analysis of reviews of the
musicals of Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Among his recent
publications as co-author and co-editor are British Musical Theatre Since 1950
(Bloomsbury, 2016) and The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical (Oxford
University Press, 2016).
Helen Deborah Lewis is an Assistant Professor in the Theater Division at The

Boston Conservatory at Berklee in Boston, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on
musical theatre, popular entertainment, queer theory and historiography, and gay
urban culture. Recently she was a featured speaker on the pedagogy of drag history
and performance at the Tedx-Berklee Conference in Valencia, Spain. Lewis holds
a Ph.D. from Tufts University.
Linda Mokdad is an Assistant Professor of Film and English, and the Director of
the Film Studies programme at St. Olaf College, Minnesota. She is co-editor of
The International Film Musical (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and is currently
finishing a book on post-9/11 American cinema (under contract with Rutgers
University Press). Her teaching and research topics are diverse, and include
everything from classical Hollywood to world cinema.
Arthur Pritchard is a retired Senior Teaching Fellow in the School of Performance

and Cultural Industries of the University of Leeds. He is co-founder with Mike
Casey of Plain Quakers, a touring theatre company that explores themes of
economic and social justice by re-telling historical Quaker stories from a
contemporary perspective. He has co-written and performed Nine Parts a Quaker
on Thomas Clarkson’s work to end the slave trade; On Human Folly about the
American anti-slavery campaigner John Woolman’s 1772 visit to England; and The
Chocolate Paradox about ethical issues in the sourcing of cocoa. The most recent
project For Conscience Sake considers conscientious objection in The Great War
beside present-day militarism in education. The company has given over 250
performances in the United Kingdom, Ireland, The Netherlands and France.
George Rodosthenous is Associate Professor in Theatre Directing at the School

of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds. His research
interests are the body in performance, refining improvisational techniques and
compositional practices for performance, devising pieces with live musical
soundscapes as interdisciplinary process, theatre directing, updating Greek
tragedy and the British musical. He has edited the books Theatre as Voyeurism: the
Pleasures of Watching (Palgrave), Contemporary Approaches to Greek Tragedy:
x Contributors
Auteurship and Directorial Visions (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama) and The Disney
Musical on Stage and Screen: Critical Approaches from Snow White to Frozen
(Bloomsbury Methuen Drama).
Mark Shields is a graduate of the University of Leeds (2011) and the Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama (2016). His research interests include queer theory
and actor training pedagogy, verbatim theatre techniques and practices, and
research ethics. Mark has worked as an educator and activist with the HIV
community for the past eleven years, holding positions at the Terrence Higgins
Trust, the leading HIV and sexual health charity in the UK, and as a member of
the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP), London. Mark is currently a
visiting lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Tim Stephenson is Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds in Creative and

Cultural Industries (Socio-political Analysis of the Performing Arts, Cultural
Analysis of Musical Theatre and the Management of Performance). His career in
higher education has encompassed the Universities of Westminster, Northumbria,
Bretton Hall and Leeds, fulfilling various roles from Head of School, through Dean
of Faculty, to Director of Teaching and Research. Tim trained initially as a
professional musician (percussionist and composer) and maintains a musical career
alongside research and teaching, which now focuses on the theory and practice of
cultural management and the socio-political analysis of the performing arts, with a
particular focus upon musicals and music theatre. Recently he has published on
Hair, Mary Poppins and the work of Stephen Sondheim.
Jessica Sternfeld (Ph.D. Princeton 2002) specializes in the cultural work of

stage, film, and TV musicals of the last fifty years. Her book The Megamusical
(2006) explored the reception history of blockbusters of the 1980s. Her work
appears in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, The Oxford Handbook of the
American Musical, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, and the
journal Studies in Musical Theatre. She is co-editing, with Elizabeth Wollman, The
Routledge Companion to the Contemporary American Stage Musical, the first
interdisciplinary collection focusing on recent repertoire. She also has a book
forthcoming that focuses on musicals and presentations of trauma. She is Associate
Professor and Director of the BA in Music at Chapman University in Orange,
California.
Dominic Symonds is Reader in Drama at the University of Lincoln, UK. He is

joint editor of Studies in Musical Theatre and co-founder of the conference series
‘Song, Stage and Screen’. From 2010–2014 he was co-convenor of the Music
Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. His
monograph We’ll Have Manhattan: the Early Work of Rodgers and Hart (2015) is part
of OUP’s ‘Broadway Legacies’ series; meanwhile, his book Broadway Rhythm:
Imaging the City in Song is forthcoming with University of Michigan Press (2017).
Contributors xi
Other publications include The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience
and Performance (Rodopi, 2013), Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song
and Dance (OUP, 2013), and Studying Musical Theatre: Theory and Practice (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014). He is also a co-editor of the book series Palgrave Studies in
British Musical Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan) and Critical Perspectives in Musical
Theatre (OUP).
Sarah Whitﬁeld is a Senior Lecturer in Musical Theatre, practitioner and

academic, and course leader for the MA in Musical Theatre at the University of
Wolverhampton. She writes about musical theatre history with a particular focus
on uncovering the work that women do, and reconsiderations of race, gender
and sexuality in the genre. As a dramaturg she has collaborated and advised on a
range of projects from site-specific immersive theatre to West End musicals. Her
PhD thesis proposed a cultural materialist approach to revealing collaborative
practices in musical theatre, with a focus on the projects that Kurt Weill became
involved with after his exile to New York. She has published work on rethinking
the labour of composition in musical theatre; Sondheim and contemporary music
theatre; and on feminist readings of Frozen. She is editing a forthcoming collection
Re-framing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity, to be published by Palgrave
Macmillan in 2018.
Julian Woolford is a British theatre director, playwright and lyricist, based in the
UK and working internationally. He is currently the Head of Musical Theatre at
Guildford School of Acting at the University of Surrey. Julian’s plays and musicals
have been produced in the UK, the USA, the Netherlands, New Zealand and
Bermuda and he has directed productions in the West End, off-Broadway,
Germany, Australia, Poland, Holland and Austria. In 2015 he became the first
person to direct a commercial musical in Egypt when he staged The Sound of Music
in a tent in the desert outside Cairo. Julian is the author of How Musicals Work
(Nick Hern Books) and a forthcoming book in Routledge’s The Fourth Wall
Series on The Sound of Music.
Demetris Zavros is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Course Leader of BA Acting

at the University of Wolverhampton. He teaches across the BA Drama, BA Acting
and the MA in Contemporary Theatre and Performance. Demetris is research
group depute for CCHIP (Centre for Creativity, History and Identity in
Performance). His research interests lie in the areas of contemporary theatre and
performance praxis; postdramatic theatre; composed theatre and musical
dramaturgies; and intermedial theatre practices and Practice-as-Research
methodologies. Zavros has a special interest in verbatim (musical) theatre (aesthetics
and politics) and is currently involved in a PaR project exploring intermediality
and compositional practice in site-specific verbatim musical theatre for Pafos 2017
European Capital of Culture. He has published in the areas of composed theatre,
Jan Fabre, postdramatic music theatre, and music-centric re-conceptualisations of
xii Contributors
myth in theatre and performance (through practice and publication). He is Associate

Director of the theatre company Altitude North and has also worked as a freelance
composer for the theatre internationally. In 2012 he received the Best Music
Award for Electra and Orestes: The Trial (THOC).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Ben Piggott at Routledge for his genuine interest in my
research on Musical Theatre, Kate Edwards and the editorial team at Routledge for
all their help and guidance towards the final steps of the publishing process.
I am grateful to all the contributors of the volume for their excellent contributions
and working together to ensure the smooth publication of this volume. I also need
to thank Dr Duška Radosavljeviü for her feedback on the initial proposal and
constructive presence in everything I do.
Sincere thanks to the editors of Studies in Musical Theatre, Dr Dominic Symonds
and Dr George Burrows; the members of the Music Theatre Working Group of
the International Federation of Theatre Research for all their feedback, discussions
and encouragement throughout the years; Arthur Pritchard for his guidance in the
past fifteen years; Dr Tim Stephenson for our inspiring co-teaching on the
‘Exploring the Musical’ modules; Ms Susan Daniels, Professor Alice O’Grady, Dr
Joslin McKinney, Professor Jonathan Pitches, Dr Scott Palmer, Dr Kara McKechnie,
Dr Fiona Bannon, Dr Tony Gardner, Dr Philip Kiszely, Dr Ben Walmsley, Dr
David Shearing, Dr Anna Fenemore, Steve Ansell and all my colleagues, technical
and support staff, stage@leeds and students at the School of Performance and
Cultural Industries for their support.
Additional thanks to Professor Barry Keith Grant, Professor Robert Gordon, Dr
Olaf Jubin, Dr Demetris Zavros, Dr Angela Hadjipanteli, Georgea Solomontos,
Varnavas Kyriazis, Stergios Mavrikis, Jordan James Taylor, Dave Wright, Kate
Hughes, Kelli Zezulka, Michael Fentiman, Michalis Christodoulou, Dimitri
Biniaris, Scott Harris, Todd Cijunelis, Joel Jenkins, Tom Colley, Rebecca Young,
Patrick Bannon, Jon Dean, Sheila Howarth, Nikolai Foster, the West Yorkshire
Playhouse, the cast and creative team of Body Faded Blue at the Theatrical
Organization of Cyprus (THOC), and all the performers I worked with for helping
me develop and shape my directorial practice in Musical Theatre. Special thanks to
xiv Acknowledgments
Biddy Hayward and Mike Markiewicz at ArenaPAL for their tireless help regarding
the photographic material and Ken Cerniglia at Disney Theatrical Group.
I would like to thank my sister Marina Rodosthenous and my brother Nektarios
Rodosthenous for their continuous support of my work. And, finally, my mother
Aphrodite and my late father Andreas who generously introduced me to the
pleasures of musical theatre.
Dr George Rodosthenous
Associate Professor in Theatre Directing
FOREWORD
Barry Keith Grant
There may be fewer musicals today than in the past, but they are as important now
as they have ever been. True, the golden ages of the Broadway stage musical and
the Hollywood film musical may be gone. The great songwriters are no longer
producing great tunes, and in the cinema Hollywood is producing fewer musicals
than before, certainly fewer than during the classical era when the studios, as one
historian of the genre has written, ground them out like sausages. During the
period of the New Hollywood in the 1970s, with few exceptions male cinephile
auteurs concentrated on the ‘masculine’ genres of the western, horror, and gangster
and crime film while virtually ignoring the musical. It has never recovered its
dominant place in the genre system since.
In today’s uncertain and dangerous world, perhaps audiences find it more
difficult to be charmed by song and dance. Yet musicals continue to loom large in
the cultural landscape. Some, like Mamma Mia!, The Phantom of the Opera and
Beauty and the Beast, for example, are now fully ensconced in popular culture, no
longer merely theatrical productions but, as the hyperbolic publicity for blockbuster
movies is fond of putting it, significant events. Musicals today, such as those
mentioned above, often participate in, and are part of, larger cultural mega-texts:
each belongs to a larger network generated by a cultural property comprised of
multiple texts in a range of cultural forms, including various forms of print, recorded
and live music, a panoply of merchandising possibilities and, of course, film
adaptation.
For this reason musicals are at the centre of the evolving structures of cultural
production, distribution and consumption within today’s corporate and globalized
cultural industries. As media corporations have merged in recent decades, franchise
synergies have become an increasingly important and defining feature of the
contemporary mediascape. Narratives, characters and concepts migrate across a
range of media forms and platforms, and fans follow the developing ‘universe’ of
xvi Foreword
properties while media producers gain increased brand awareness. Just as the stage
musical and cinema are hybrid forms, a transmedia confluence of cultural forms, so
film adaptations of stage musicals are by their nature an essential component of
contemporary transmedia and convergence culture.
The musical should be of more interest to scholars than has been the case. While
there has been a more or less steady trickle of work on the genre for decades, some
contributing greatly to our understanding of its history and ideology and the
workings of the genre system, the musical hasn’t enjoyed nearly the same degree
of attention as, say, westerns, science fiction or horror. When the musical film is
discussed, scholars today sometime seem more interested in the cultural signification
of sound design and the various levels of the soundtrack than in detailed explication
of specific musicals and their life across media. Given the increasing transmediality
of musicals in the twenty-first century, the musical film adaptation offers a
potentially rich but thus far largely unexamined area of study.
George Rodosthenous’ Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen is thus
an especially timely and welcome book. The first scholarly collection to focus on
film musicals adapted from the stage, the book brings together scholars with the
kind of interdisciplinary knowledge required to understand musicals today. In
these pages the authors discuss the most important musicals since the millennium.
And in doing so, they reveal a keen understanding of multiple areas of cultural
studies including, but not limited to, camp, popular music, gender studies, and
adaptation theory. At the same time they make a major contribution by remaining
sensitive to, and appreciative of, the particulars of both theatre and cinema as
distinct and different expressive forms.
INTRODUCTION
George Rodosthenous
The key area of investigation of Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen
is to understand the different ways that the film adaptations provide new contexts,
layers and dimensions of meaning. The volume aims to revisit the genre by
discussing fifteen case studies of film musicals from the early twenty-first century
that have been adapted from the stage. How does each case study make the ‘move’
from a work of stage musical theatre to the medium of film? The authors provide
detailed and extremely articulate critical analyses of the works, in juxtaposition
with issues of drag, camp, race, identity and performativity, satire, irony and failure.
Cari McDonnell’s extensive survey, ‘Genre Theory and the Film Musical’ in the
Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies identifies some gaps in the study of the film
musical and suggests that new academic writing should cover these unrepresented
areas of ‘style, structure, and specific musical makeup of performance’, ‘the
relationship between character and star persona’ and ‘the genre’s relationship with
the popular music industry and the star system’ (McDonnell 2014: 245). Through
the range of case studies, this book aims to address other under-represented areas
and also answer some of the questions raised above.
After Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Moulin Rouge (2001) the film musical changed
for ever. In the former, the songs became the only moments of happiness in a sombre
narrative that, despite paying homage to the classic The Sound of Music, usurped the
traditional narrative formula, concluding in the gloomy Bjorkian despair of the
execution of a coerced murderess. Along the way, its infamous director Lars von
Trier broke nearly every single rule from the Dogme 95 Vows of Chastity. In Moulin
Rouge we had the opposite: an excess of spectacle, innovative treatments of well-
known songs (‘Like a Virgin’ by the Duke) and flirtations with Bollywood (‘Hindi
Sad Diamonds’). Its excesses redefined entertainment and star casting, and brought
MTV and reality show TV culture to the forefront of the film musical. These
novelties have affected the way musicals are created and experienced ever since.
2 George Rodosthenous
The case studies offer narratives that develop our understanding of the traditional
norms of film musicals, which stem from the Golden Age of the film musical and
reach to the works produced at the end of the twentieth century. Barry Keith
Grant, in the Foreword to this volume, reminds us that ‘[j]ust as the stage musical
and cinema are hybrid forms, a transmedia confluence of cultural forms, so film
adaptations of stage musicals are by nature an essential component of contemporary
transmedia and convergence culture’ (xvi). And it is this hybridity that essentially
makes binary discussions ineffectual. In the film musicals produced since the
beginning of the millennium, relationships no longer have to conform to the dual
boy meets girl formula (Dyer 2002), and non-heteronormative narratives emerge
(Rent) featuring characters who were originally marginalised (Hedwig). Impressive
female personas achieve emancipation (Chicago) and liberated taverna-owners are
having fun on Greek islands (Mamma Mia!), while original classics such as Phantom
of the Opera and Sweeney Todd are reinvigorated through receiving the full post-
millennial cinematic treatment. The aesthetic of the musical becomes heavily
politicised (Dreamgirls) and important racial issues are no longer overlooked but
explored in depth (Hairspray). The theme of disaster becomes a structural device to
create new narratives in Nine and The Producers, and even if the end products of the
film versions have themselves proved to be non-commercial successes, the formula
of rags to riches is now challenged. The jukebox musical gains a new heightened
role within the production of The Jersey Boys, while film companies such as Disney
take risks by exploring dark, adult Sondheim works that were previously regarded
as solely suitable for the stage (Into the Woods). Perceptions of time are also
challenged in works such as The Last Five Years, where linear narratives are reversed
and juxtaposed, while multiple adaptations of works such as Annie from TV to
stage and film and then vice versa provide a platform for new, diverse readings.
Finally, the twenty-first-century revolution abandons traditional melody completely
and uses speech patterns and intonations to provide the vocal lines for new verbatim
works such as London Road, where the lyrics, pitch and rhythm are constructed
entirely from everyday spoken utterances.
These revolutions in narrative, sexual and racial politics, linear representation
and thematic content give us the opportunity to see the musical in a different light.
The structural revolutions (in the musical’s form) are intimately connected to the
thematic considerations and politics of musical theatre performance, including the
politics of its reception. Mike Alfreds writes about the power of the theatre:
‘During a performance, we are all growing old together, actors, audience – and
characters. The transience of theatre is part of its uniqueness, its poignancy. As
soon as it’s happened, it’s gone’ (Alfreds 2007: 18). The ‘transplantation’ into the
new medium inadvertently invites a discussion of the resulting aesthetics and
audience reception, as well as politics. This is yet another gap in the literature that
is expanded upon by the chapters of this book. The millennial generation has been
raised on Disney musicals and Glee, so it comes as no surprise to anybody of
that age group when people on screen suddenly burst out singing and dancing.
Indeed, they expect characters to burst out singing and dancing, which contradicts
Introduction 3
FIGURE 0.1 Catherine Zeta-Jones as Velma Kelly in Chicago.

Credit: Collection Christophel/ArenaPAL.
Dyer’s (1979) earlier writings about the ontology of the film musical (Dyer 2012).
One cannot underestimate the effect of reality competition shows and the television
series Glee (as well as Smash) and this revitalised, positive-effect attitude towards
musicals. The shift is reflected in the attitudes towards works that are now designed
for younger audiences (Billy Elliot, Frozen, Matilda, The Lion King and Wicked). In
the same way, the presence of political statements is evidently more prominent.
Musical theatre is not just mere entertainment – it never was. But when it deals
with immigrants, deaths of prostitutes, AIDS, weight issues, racial issues and
deformity, then it transforms into a powerful tool for political change.
Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen endeavours to provide
multiple perspectives on key film musicals of the twenty-first century, to unlock
hidden narratives and sub-texts that are evident in the film adaptations, to critique
and expose the differences of the film adaptations in relation to the original stage
works, and to offer new insights and contexts. All the authors were prompted to
tackle the same research questions covering areas such as:
• How does the film adaptation provide a different viewing experience from the
stage version?
• What themes are highlighted in the film adaptation?
• What does the new casting bring to the work?
• Do camera angles dictate a different reading from the stage version?
• What is lost/gained in the process of adaptation to film?
Contemporary trends in the ﬁlm musical genre

Since the beginning of the century other works, such as Newsies (2011), Frozen
(2013) and Mrs Henderson Presents (2015), have undergone a reverse process,
making the transition from screen to the stage. New original film musicals such
as Moulin Rouge and Dancer in the Dark are not included in this volume because
they fall outside its scope. Other notable absences are Les Misérables (2012), the
sensitive Scottish musical that received a filmic adaptation in Sunshine on Leith
(2013), the eagerly awaited forthcoming Wicked (directed by Stephen Daldry)
and Miss Saigon (directed by Danny Boyle); all will hopefully be included in a
second volume covering work up to 2020. During the period discussed in this
book there has also been a television adaptation of South Pacific (2001), headed by
the feisty Glenn Close, and NBC’s The Sound of Music Live! (2013), Peter Pan
Live! (2014), The Wiz Live! (2015), Hairspray Live! (2016), and Fox’s Grease Live!
(2016). In addition, there has been a musical biopic of Cole Porter’s life in which
most of his songs get new, inventive orchestrations and are performed by a star-
led cast in De-Lovely (2004).
Billy Elliot (2005) became a musical after being a successful film, and that is
also the case with the folk musical Once (2006), which started as a low-budget film.
The High School Musical TV musicals enjoyed huge financial success, and in 2007
Julie Taymor used a young, unknown cast and divided the critics in Across the
Universe, perhaps the most successful attempt to create a jukebox film musical. She
‘elevated the film “jukebox musical” genre into a panorama of filmic abundance
through a barrage of visual surprises and inventions that characterize her own
recklessly extravagant directorial style, thus inspiring the makers of the stage and
television musicals of the future’ (Rodosthenous 2014: 52). This also relates to the
notion of ‘ghosting’ and how this has a very real impact on our perception of the
‘real’ in experiencing musical theatre (see Rodosthenous 2014). Fame received an
Introduction 5
FIGURE 0.2 Ensemble cast in Across the Universe (2007).

Credit: Collection Christophel/ArenaPAL
unmemorable remake in 2009, and Cher starred in the song-packed Burlesque

(2010), while Walking on Sunshine (2014) is a glaring example of a banal jukebox
musical that was instantly forgettable.
In a detailed discussion of the Disney musical elsewhere,1 I suggest that
Disney has been around for over ninety years, so it is possible that some
audiences associate watching a Disney musical with how they felt when they
(or their parents, or grandparents, or great grandparents) first encountered
the source material. This creates an invaluable dynamic: the nostalgia of
reimagining one’s childhood.
(Rodosthenous 2017: 12)
Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast (2017), directed by Bill Condon, will be
followed by 22 more live-action movies of its animated classics.
With the regular production of ‘filmed live versions’ of musicals such as Love
Never Dies (2010), Billy Elliot (2014), Gypsy (2015), Miss Saigon (2016) and Disney’s
Newsies (2017), the producers take on the ‘challenge of translating stage to screen
to create premium theatrical content’.2 The filmed production of Newsies (see
Figure 0.3) had an original three-day cinematic release, which took $3.47 million
at the box office3 and will be released digitally and on demand, thus providing a
FIGURE 0.3 The cast of Disney’s Newsies from the filmed live version.
Photo © Disney
new digital form of engagement with the work. Steam Motion and Sound managed
to deliver stage versions of musical theatre to its audience, shot and finished in 4K.
Its co-founder Brett Sullivan reflects that
[i]t’s got to be filmic because it’s going to be projected onto a big screen, but
it also has to feel like live entertainment … Those two worlds can be hard to
reconcile. Often in live cuts, the cameras are all at the back of the room and
you feel removed from the action. We want to get close, so close that you
can see into the eyes of the actors. When you see the eyes of actors on the
screen, the story becomes much deeper.4
And as The Stage reviewer Mark Shenton remarks, the audiences get some
additional bonus shots: ‘Once or twice, we also get a view no theatre audience
would get, as the camera observes the action from above.’5
A plethora of new film musicals is being prepared, or are rumoured to be in
development for the immediate future, which proves that the revised interest in
the film musical genre continues unabated. Film adaptations in progress include the
musicals Hello Again (an adaptation of Michael John LaChiusa’s musical based on
Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde), Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again!, West Side Story
(Steven Spielberg), South Pacific (Michael Mayer), Oliver (Toby Haynes), Guys and
Dolls (Michael Grandage), Jason Robert Brown’s 13, plus American Idiot, Beautiful:
The Carole King Musical, Cats, Finding Neverland, Gypsy, In the Heights, Jekyll &
Introduction 7
Hyde, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Little Shop of Horrors, Lysistrata
Jones, Matilda, Memphis, Pippin, Spring Awakening and Sunset Boulevard.6
In discussing the creative teams of the (film) musical, the contributors to this
book expose the issue of gender inequality. Out of the fifteen case studies it
becomes clear that the film musical world remains stubbornly patriarchal and male
dominated, with only two film musicals being directed by women (interestingly,
both of them are directed by the original stage director: Phyllida Lloyd for Mamma
Mia! and Susan Stroman for The Producers). All the composers of the film musicals
discussed here are male.7 What is also noteworthy is the inclusion of British stage
directors in the film musical-making canon. One of the most eagerly awaited new
film musicals, Wicked, is directed by eminent British stage director Stephen Daldry.
In addition, Michael Grandage, another celebrated British director, will be
responsible for Disney’s stage version of Frozen.
Celebrity casting has always been a major part of film musicals. There were
some fortunate surprises in Moulin Rouge, with both Ewan McGregor and Nicole
Kidman singing wonderfully – but this trend has led to some embarrassing moments
in the recent history of the film musical. It must be really frustrating for triple threat
actors to see major films being cast with celebrities who cannot sing, at least at the
standard audiences are used to in stage productions of musicals. While the work’s
artistic integrity may have been slightly compromised, the decision will be justified
by the box office benefits. Even so, die-hard fans of Russell Crowe walked out
when they realised Les Misérables was not an action film but a musical. With Nine,
not even the decision to cast seven female celebrities managed to save the film from
being regarded as a financial and critical catastrophe.
Film musicals usually operate in linear time fashion, using flash-forwards/backs
and (day-)dream sequences as a means to disrupt this conformity. While in Merrily
We Roll Along the whole narrative is presented backwards, this is still an exception
to the canon. Only a few other composers have experimented with non-linear and
experimental time narratives, most notably found in concept musicals. The Last
Five Years is a fine example of mixing the timescales of the two protagonists and
presenting them in opposing time (Jason Robert Brown was inspired by his
mentor’s Merrily We Roll Along). This device gets an even more complex treatment
in the film version, as discussed by Sarah Browne in Chapter 12.
Back in 1951, Singin’ in the Rain exposed, and made comedy from, one of the
film making techniques used extensively: dubbing the voice. And there are
plenty of examples where the actual actor the audience sees on the screen is not
the one whose voice the audience is actually hearing.8 Tom Hooper’s adaptation
of Les Misérables, though, has brought a double revolution. The singing takes
place live during the filming, so that moment is captured live. This process
removes the divide between voice and image, ‘severing the body from the voice’
(Dyer 2012: 16), and provides new opportunities for discussion, evaluation and
analysis.
Live singing was a common practice in some of the first movie musicals (Love
Me Tonight, The Gay Divorcee), but the idea of capturing the image and the voice
live still offers a closer, intensely intimate and perhaps more authentic single
performance than the obvious attempt to lip-sync to an existing pre-recorded
soundtrack. According to Mordden, it offers ‘a solution to a problem almost as
old as the talkie itself: how to project above all dramatic music when the actors
aren’t being musically dramatic during the actual shooting’ (Mordden 2016:
223). Demetris Zavros discusses this further in his chapter on London Road and
concludes that it tries to capture (but actually inescapably fails to capture) the
‘reality of the moment’ and its ‘transient quality’ by not resorting to the more
‘traditional dubbing of the singing’. In addition, he comments on the fact that
the ensemble numbers sung by the chorus are occasionally treated through rather
intimate sound localisations (effectively, extreme sound ‘close-ups’ coupled with
their visual counterparts) as we focus down to a particular performer’s voice
within the ensemble sound. This last technique produces ‘an illusion of a (hyper)
“realistic” approach and also acts as a faint reminder of performing these pieces
live’ (Zavros: 224).
The notion of ‘faithfulness’ in the adaptation, and the departure from it, can
take different guises in the case of a cross-medial adaptation. But this is an essential
part of the discussion in the book. Zavros is suggesting that the adaptation needs to
use the new medium’s aesthetics to get to the core of the politics of the original
performance (and perhaps how this is not completely achieved in the case of
London Road). What counts as ‘failure’ or ‘success’ in the adaptation is not exhausted
at the box office. As film critic Andrew Lapin asserts,
Musicals excite senses and erase distances, and audiences shouldn’t need to
be weeded out for them. The walkouts […] could be a blessing in disguise:
They’re an excellent opportunity to rid the landscape of such knee-jerk
aversion to the form, and start critical dialogue about a place for musicals in
today’s cinematic ecosystem. Maybe a few walkouts are just what this genre
needs to check in.
(Lapin 2015)
Existing academic writing: identifying the gaps

Admittedly, academic writing about (film) musicals has gained momentum in
recent years. Alongside the Studies in Musical Theatre journal, a number of new
books and anthologies have been published addressing current issues in musical
theatre. Previously, the study of the film musical paralleled film criticism of the
1980s and focused, as Altman stated, on auteurship, ideology, structuralism, ritual
and technology (Altman 1981). More recently, the musical has been discussed in
terms of film music analysis (Cochran 1990, Cook 1998), dual focus narrative
(Altman 1987), theories of adaptation (Hutcheon 2006), the self-reflexivity of
the musical (Feuer 1977, Altman 1987), gender (Dolan 1993, Fischer 2000, Wolf
2002, 2011), representation (Farmer 2000, Dyer 2002, 2012), narrative subtexts
and performativity (Symonds and Taylor 2014), ideology (Feuer 1977), politics
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
of the other members of our social whole. To realise your own ends,
you have to take note of the partly coincident, partly conflicting, ends
of your social fellows, precisely as you have to take note of your
own. You cannot come to the knowledge of the one without coming
by the same route and in the same degree to the knowledge of the
other. Precisely because our lives and purposes are not self-
contained, self-explaining wholes, we cannot possibly know our own
meaning except in so far as we know the meaning of our immediate
fellows. Self-knowledge, apart from the knowledge of myself as a
being with aims and purposes conditioned by those of like beings in
social relations with myself, is an empty and senseless word.
The recent psychological studies of the part which imitation plays
in all learning make this result still more palpably manifest. For they
reveal the fact that, to an enormous extent, it is by first repeating
without conscious aim of its own the significant purposive acts of
others that a child first comes to behave with conscious significance
itself. It is largely by learning what others mean when they utter a
word or execute a movement that the child comes to know his own
meaning in using the same word or performing the same movement.
Thus we may confidently say that the reality of purposive significant
experience which is not my own is as directly certain as the reality of
my own experience, and that the knowledge of both realities is
inevitably gained together in the process of coming to clear insight
into my own practical aims and interests. The inner experience of my
fellows is indubitably real to the same degree as my own, because
the very existence of my own purposive life is meaningless apart
from the equal existence of theirs.[122]
§ 4. We may now apply the results obtained in the previous
section to the general question as to the “independent” existence of
the physical order. In doing so we observe two consequences of the
highest importance. (1) Now that we have found that at least a part
of that order, namely, the bodies of our fellow-men, are not mere
complexes of presentations in our own experience, but have a
further existence as themselves experiencing subjects, and are so
far “independent” of their actual presentation in our own experience,
we can no longer conclude, from the dependence of the physical
order for its sensible properties upon presentation to ourselves, that
it has no further existence of its own. If one part of that order, which
as presented stands on the same footing with the rest, and is, like it,
dependent on presentation for its sensible properties, is certainly
known to be more than a mere presentation-complex, the same may
at least be true of other parts. We can no longer assert of any part of
the physical order, without special proof, that its esse is merely
percipi.
We may go a step further. Not only may other parts of the physical
order possess a reality beyond the mere fact of being presented to
our sense-perception, but they must. For (a) we have to take note,
for the obtaining of our own practical ends, of the factors in our
material environment precisely as we have to take note of the
purposive behaviour not our own which forms our social
environment. Just as our own inner life has no coherent significance
except as part of a wider whole of purposive human life, so human
society as a system of significant conduct directed to the attainment
of ends, cannot be understood without reference to its non-human
surroundings and conditions. To understand my own experience,
reference must be made to the aims, ideals, beliefs, etc. of the social
whole in which I am a member; and to understand these, reference
has again to be made to geographical, climatic, economical, and
other conditions. Thus of the physical order at large, no less than of
that special part of it which consists of the bodies of my fellows, it is
true to say that its existence means a great deal more than the fact
of its presentation. Unperceived physical existence must be real if I
am myself real, because my own inner life is unintelligible without
reference to it.
(b) This conclusion is further strengthened by the evidence
supplied by the various sciences, that human life forms part of a
great system characterised by evolution or development. If one part
of a connected historical development is more than a complex of
presentations, the other stages of that development cannot possibly
be mere presentation-complexes. Against any “Idealism” which is
mere Subjectivism or Presentationism calling itself by a less
suspicious name, it would be a sound and fair argument to contend
that it reduces evolution to a dream, and must therefore be false.[123]
It cannot, then, be true of the physical order as a whole, that it has
no reality beyond the fact of its presentation to my senses. Elements
in it not so presented must yet have reality, inasmuch as my own
inner life requires the recognition of their reality as a fundamental
condition of the realisation of my own “subjective” ends. As the facts
of hallucination, “suggestion,” and subjective sensation show, what
appears to us as an element in the physical order may sometimes
have no reality beyond the fact of its appearance; there may be
presented contents of which it would be true to say that their esse is
percipi. But the very possibility of distinguishing such hallucinatory
presentations from others as illusory, is enough to prove that this
cannot be true of the whole physical order. It is precisely because
physical existence in general is something more than a collective
hallucination, that we are able in Psychology to recognise the
occurrence of such hallucinations. As has been already observed,
you are never justified in dismissing an apparent fact of the physical
order as mere presentation without any further reality behind it,
unless you can produce special grounds for making this inference
based upon the circumstances of the special case.
(2) The second important consequence of our previous conclusion
is this,—We have now seen what was really meant, in the crucial
case of our fellow-men, by maintaining an existence “independent” of
the fact of presentation to our sense-organs. Their “independent”
existence meant existence as centres of experience, as feeling,
purposive beings. The whole concept of “independent” existence
was thus social in its origin. We have also seen that the grounds on
which an “independent” existence must be ascribed to the rest of the
physical order are essentially of the same kind as those on which we
asserted the “independent” existence of our fellow-men. It appears
patent, then, that “independent” existence must have the same
general sense in both cases. It can and must mean the existence of
centres of sentient purposive experience. If we are serious in holding
that the esse of the physical order, like that of ourselves and our
fellows, is not mere percipi, we must hold that it is percipere or
sentire. What appears to us in sense-perception as physical nature
must be a community, or a complex of communities of sentient
experiencing beings: behind the appearance the reality[124] must be
of the same general type as that which we, for the same reasons,
assert to be behind the appearances we call the bodies of our
fellows.
This conclusion is not in the least invalidated by our own inability
to say what in particular are the special types of sentient experience
which correspond to that part of the physical order which lies outside
the narrow circle of our own immediate human and animal
congeners. Our failure to detect specific forms of sentience and
purpose in what we commonly call “inorganic” nature, need mean no
more than that we are here dealing with types of experience too
remote from our own for detection. The apparent deadness and
purposelessness of so much of nature may easily be illustrated by
comparison with the apparent senselessness of a composition in a
language of which we are personally ignorant. Much of nature
presumably appears lifeless and purposeless to us for the same
reason that the speech of a foreigner seems senseless jargon to a
rustic who knows no language but his own.
It would be easy, but superfluous, to develop these ideas more in
detail by the free use of imaginative conjecture. The one point of vital
principle involved is that on which we have already insisted, that
existence “independent” of sense-perception has only one intelligible
meaning. Hence it must have this same meaning whenever we are
compelled to ascribe to any part of the perceived physical order a
reality which goes beyond the mere fact of its being perceived. The
assertion that the physical order, though dependent for its perceived
qualities upon the presence of a percipient with sense-organs of a
particular type, is not dependent on any such relation for its
existence, if it is to have any definite meaning at all, must mean for
us that that order is phenomenal of, or is the appearance to our
special human sense-organs of, a system or complex of systems of
beings possessing the same general kind of sentient purposive
experience as ourselves, though conceivably infinitely various in the
degree of clearness with which they are aware of their own
subjective aims and interests, and in the special nature of those
interests.
§ 5. We may end this chapter by drawing certain conclusions
which follow naturally from the acceptance of this doctrine. (1) It is
clear that the result we have reached by analysis of what is implied
in the “independent” existence of the physical order agrees with our
previous conclusions as to the general structure of Reality. For we
saw in our last Book that it seemed necessary to hold not only that
Reality as a whole forms a single individual experience, but also that
it is composed of members or elements which are themselves
sentient experiences of varying degrees of individuality. And in our
discussion of the unity of the thing we saw reason to hold that
nothing but a sentient experience can be individual; thus we had
already convinced ourselves that if there are things which are more
than complexes of presentations arbitrarily thrown together for the
convenience of human percipients in dealing with them as unities,
those things must be sentient experiences on subjects of some kind.
We have now inferred from the actual consideration of the physical
order that it does, in point of fact, consist of things of this kind. Our
result may thus be said to amount in principle to the logical
application to physical existence of the previously ascertained
conclusion, that only what is to some degree truly individual can be
real.
It is interesting to contrast with this consequence of our
metaphysical attempt to interpret the course of physical nature, the
result which inevitably follows from consistent adherence to the
procedure of descriptive science. The whole procedure of descriptive
science depends upon our willingness to shelve, for certain
purposes, the problem wherein consists the reality of the physical
order, and to concentrate our interest upon the task of adequately
and with the greatest possible economy of hypothesis describing the
system of presented contents in which it reveals itself to our senses.
For purely descriptive purposes, our sole interest in the physical
order is to know according to what laws of sequence one presented
content follows upon another. Hence, so long as we can establish
such laws of connection between presented contents, it is for purely
scientific purposes indifferent how we imagine the Reality in which
the sequence of presentation has its ground. Whether we think of it
as a system of finite subjects, the will of a personal Deity, a complex
of primary qualities, or an unknown substratum, or whether we
decline to raise any question whatever about the matter, the results
are the same, so long as our sole object is to exhibit the sequence of
presented sense-contents as regulated by laws which admit of
calculation. Science can go its way in entire indifference to all these
alternative metaphysical interpretations of the Reality which is
behind the phenomenal order.
The logical consequence of this absorption in the problem of
describing the phenomenal sequence of events, apart from inquiry
into their ground, is that the more thoroughly the task is carried out
the more completely does individuality disappear from the physical
order as scientifically described. Everyday thought looks on the
physical order as composed of interacting things, each of which is a
unique individual; current science, with its insistence on the uniform
behaviour of the different elements of the material world, inevitably
dissolves this appearance of individuality. In the more familiar atomic
theories, though the differences between the behaviour of the atoms
of different elements are still retained as ultimate, the atoms of the
same element are commonly thought of as exact replicas of each
other, devoid of all individual uniqueness of behaviour. And in the
attempts of contemporary science to get behind atomism, and to
reduce all material existence to motions in a homogeneous medium,
we see a still more radical consequence of the exclusive adoption of
an attitude of description. Individuality has here disappeared entirely,
except in so far as the origination of differential motion in a perfectly
homogeneous medium remains an ultimate inexplicability which has
to be accepted as a fact, but cannot be reconciled with the
theoretical assumptions which have led to the insistence upon the
homogeneity of the supposed medium.
The logical reason for this progressive elimination of individuality
from scientific descriptions of the processes of the physical order
should now be manifest. If all individuality is that of individual
subjects of experience, it is clear that in disregarding the question of
the metaphysical ground of the physical order we have already in
principle excluded all that gives it individuality from our purview; the
more rigorously logical our procedure in dealing exclusively with the
phenomenal contents of the physical order, the less room is left for
any recognition of an element of individuality within it. Our purpose to
describe the phenomenal logically involves description in purely
general terms. It is only when, in Metaphysics, we seek to convert
description of the phenomenal into interpretation of it as the
appearance to sense of a more ultimate Reality, that the principle of
the individuality of all real existence can come once more to its
rights.
(2) It is perhaps necessary at this point to repeat, with special
reference to the interpretation of the physical order, what has already
been said of all interpretation of the detail of existence by reference
to its ground. We must be careful not to assume that lines of division
which we find it convenient for practical or scientific purposes to
draw between things, correspond to the more vital distinctions
between the different individual subjects of experience which we
have seen reason to regard as the more real existences of which the
physical order is phenomenal. This is, e.g., an error which is
committed by confident theories of the animation of matter which
attribute a “soul” to each chemical atom. We must remember that
many of the divisions between things which we adopt in our
descriptive science may be merely subjective demarcations,
convenient for our own special purposes but possibly not answering
to any more fundamental distinctions founded on the nature of the
realities of the physical order themselves. It does not in the least
follow from our view of nature as the manifestation to our senses of a
system of sentient individuals, that the relations between those
individuals are adequately represented by the relations between the
different factors of the material world as it is constructed in our
various scientific hypotheses.
Thus, e.g., our own self-knowledge and knowledge of our fellows
show that in some sense there is a single experience corresponding
to what, for physical science, is the enormous complex of elements
forming the dominant centres of the human nervous system. But
apart from our direct insight into human experience, if we only knew
the human nervous system as we know a part of inorganic nature,
we should be quite unable to determine that this particular complex
was thus connected with an individual experience. In general we
have to admit that, except for that small portion of physical nature in
which we can directly read purposive experience of a type specially
akin to our own, we are quite unable to say with any confidence how
nature is organised, and what portions of it are “organic” to an
individual experience. This caution must be constantly borne in mind
if we are to avoid the abuse of our general theory of the meaning of
the physical order in the interests of “spiritualistic” and other
superstitions. It may also serve to guard against over-hasty
“Philosophies of Nature,” like those of Schelling and Hegel, which
start with the unproved assumption that approximation to the human
external form of organisation is a trustworthy indication of the degree
in which intelligent experience is present in physical nature.
(3) One more point may receive passing notice. It is clear that if
physical nature is really a society or a number of societies[125] of
experiencing subjects, we must admit that, from the special
character of our human experience with its peculiar interests and
purposes, we are normally debarred from social communion with any
members of the system except those who are most akin in their
special type of purposive life to ourselves. Of the vast majority of the
constituents of the physical order it must always be true that, while
we may be convinced, on grounds of general metaphysical theory,
that they possess the character we have ascribed to them, we have
no means of verifying this conclusion in specific cases by the actual
direct recognition of the individual life to which they belong, and
consequent establishment of actual social relations with them. Yet it
does not follow that we are always absolutely debarred from such
direct social relations with extra-human sentient life. The “threshold
of intercommunicability” between physical nature and human
intelligence may conceivably be liable to fluctuations under
conditions at present almost entirely unknown. Conceivably the type
of experience represented in literature by the great poets to whom
the sentient purposive character of physical nature has appealed
with the force of a direct revelation of truth, and known in some
degree to most men in certain moods, may depend upon a
psychological lowering of this threshold. It is thus at least a
possibility that the poet’s “communion with nature” may be more than
a metaphor, and may represent some degree of a social relation as
real as our more normal relations with our human fellows and the
higher animals. It may be true that in the relations of man with
nature, as in his relations with man, it is the identity of purpose and
interest we call love which is the great remover of barriers.
(4) It should hardly be needful to point out that such a view of the
meaning of nature as has been defended in this chapter is in no way
opposed to, or designed to set artificial restrictions on, the unfettered
development of descriptive physical science. Whatever our view of
the ultimate nature of the physical order, it is equally necessary on
any theory for the practical control of natural processes in the service
of man to formulate laws of connection between these processes.
And the work of formulating those laws can only be satisfactorily
done when the analysis of the physical order as a system of sense-
contents is carried on with complete disregard of all metaphysical
problems as to its non-phenomenal ground. It would not even be
correct to say that, if our metaphysical interpretation is valid, the view
of nature presented in descriptive physical science is untrue. For a
proposition is never untrue simply because it is not the whole truth,
but only when, not being the whole truth, it is mistakenly taken to be
so. If we sometimes speak in Philosophy as though whatever is less
than the whole truth must be untrue, that is because we mean it is
untrue for our special purposes as metaphysicians, whose business
is not to stop short of the whole truth. For purposes of another kind it
may be not only true, but the truth.[126]
Our metaphysical interpretation of the physical order is no more
incompatible with full belief in the value and validity for their own
purposes of the results of abstract descriptive science, than the
recognition of the singleness and purposiveness of a human
experience with the equal recognition of the value of physiological
and anatomical investigation into the functions and mechanism of
the human body. Of course a man, as he really exists, is something
quite different from the physiologist’s or anatomist’s object of study.
No man is a mere walking specimen of the “human organism”; every
man is really first and foremost a purposive sentient agent. But this
consideration in no way affects the practical value of anatomical and
physiological research into the structure of the man as he appears in
another man’s system of sense-presentations. What is true in this
case is, of course, equally applicable in all others.
We have yet to discuss the most serious stumbling-block in the
way of the idealist interpretation of nature, the apparent conformity of
its processes to rigid laws of sequence, which at first sight might
seem to exclude the possibility of their being really the acts of
purposive subjects. This difficulty will form the topic of our
succeeding chapter.
Consult further:—F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 22;

L. T. Hobhouse, Theory of Knowledge, pt. 3, chap. 3; H. Lotze,
Metaphysic, bk. ii. chaps. 5, 6; H. Münsterberg, Grundzüge der
Psychologie, i. pp. 65-92; K. Pearson, Grammar of Science, chap. 2
(The Facts of Science), 8 (Matter) [mainly written from the
“phenomenalist” standpoint, but with unconscious lapses into a more
materialistic view]; J. Royce, Nature, Consciousness, and Self-
Consciousness” (in Studies of Good and Evil); The World and the
Individual, Second Series, Lect. 4; J. Ward, Naturalism and
Agnosticism, Lects. 1-5, 14, 19. Of the older philosophical literature,
Descartes, Meditation 6; Leibnitz, Monadology and New System;
Locke, Essays, bk. iv. chap. 11; Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism,” in the
second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, in addition to the
already cited works of Berkeley will probably be found most
important.
119. This definition of the physical order approximates very closely

to that adopted by Prof. Münsterberg in his Grundzüge der
Psychologie, vol. i. pp. 65-77. Prof. Münsterberg defines a physical
fact as one which is directly accessible to the perception of a plurality
of sentient individuals, as opposed to the psychical fact which can be
directly experienced only by one individual. It must be remembered,
of course, that my body as directly experienced in “common
sensation” and “emotional mood” belongs to the psychical order. It is
only my body as perceptible by other men that is a member of the
physical order.
120. Cf. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 22, pp. 260-267
(1st ed.). The attempts which have been made to exempt “primary”
qualities from this relativity do not seem to demand serious criticism.
The argument in the text applies as directly to extension and shape
as to colour or smell. It is not defensible to contend, as Mr.
Hobhouse does, that qualities, whether primary or secondary,
depend on the percipient organ only for their perception, not for their
existence. The contention rests upon taking two aspects of
experience which are always given together, the that and the what of
a sense-content, and arguing that because these two aspects of a
single whole can be distinguished, therefore the one can exist in
actual separation from the other. It would be quite as logical to infer
by the same method and from the same premisses that there can be
a perceptive state without any content, as that the contents can exist
as we know them, apart from the state.
121. See particularly the detailed statement of his contention and
the elaborate examination of objections in the Three Dialogues
between Hylas and Philonous, which form a commentary on the
briefer exposition of Principles of Human Knowledge, §§ 1-134.
122. See the fuller exposition of this line of argument in Royce,
Studies in Good and Evil, essay on “Nature, Consciousness and
Self-Consciousness,” to which I am largely indebted throughout the
present chapter, and for a detailed criticism of the alleged
“analogical” inference the closely related reasoning of my own essay
on “Mind and Nature” in International Journal of Ethics, October
1902. The similar but briefer criticism in Royce, The World and the
Individual, Second Series, lecture 4, “Physical and Social Reality,” p.
170, I had not had the opportunity to study when the above was
written. For the whole subject of imitation, see in particular Professor
Baldwin’s Mental Development in the Child and the Race.
123. For a study of the significance of the “partial independence”
of the physical world on my will as a factor in producing belief in its
“external reality,” see Stout, Manual of Psychology,3 bk. iii. pt. 2,
chaps. 1-2, “The Perception of External Reality.”
124. The doctrine of degrees of reality must be borne in mind
throughout this discussion. The reality of which the physical order is
phenomenal may itself be phenomenal of a higher reality.
125. Societies would be the more natural supposition. We have no
reason to deny that the various types of non-human intelligence may
be cut off from social intercourse with each other, as they are from
intercourse with ourselves.
126. That is, there are degrees of truth as well as of reality, and
the two do not necessarily coincide. The degree of truth a doctrine
contains cannot be determined apart from consideration of the
purpose it is meant to fulfil. For the special purposes of Metaphysics,
the purpose of thinking of the world in a finally consistent way,
whatever is not the whole truth is untrue. But what the metaphysician
regards as the lesser truth may be the higher truth relatively to other
purposes than his own. Compare the doctrine of Dr. Stout’s essay on
“Error” in Personal Idealism.
CHAPTER III
THE MEANING OF LAW

§ 1. The popular conception of the physical order as exhibiting a rigid mechanical
conformity to general laws, conflicts with our metaphysical interpretation. § 2.
Our interpretation would, however, admit of the establishment of averages or
approximately realised uniformities by the statistical method, which deals with
occurrence en bloc to the neglect of their individual detail. § 3. “Uniformity” in
nature is neither an axiom nor an empirically verifiable fact, but a postulate. A
consideration of the methods actually employed for the establishment of such
uniformities or “laws” of nature shows that we have no guarantee that actual
concrete cases exhibit exact conformity to law. § 4. Uniformity is a postulate
arising from our need of practical rules for the control of nature. It need not for
this purpose be exact, and in point of fact our scientific formulae are only
exact so long as they remain abstract and hypothetical. They do not enable us
to determine the actual course of an individual process with certainty. § 5. The
concept of the physical order as mechanical is the abstract expression of the
postulate, and is therefore essential to the empirical sciences which deal with
the physical order. § 6. Consideration of the character of genuine machines
suggests that the mechanical only exists as a subordinate aspect of
processes which, in their full nature, are intelligent and purposive.
§ 1. In our view of the underlying reality of the physical order, as

explained in the last chapter, we have scarcely gone further, except
in the explicitness of our phraseology, than we should be followed by
many who profess a complete disbelief in metaphysical construction
and an exclusive devotion to positive natural science. From the side
of positive science we have often been reminded that no hard-and-
fast line can logically be drawn between the organic and the
inorganic, that we are not entitled to assume that the continuity of
evolution ceases when we are no longer able to follow it with our
microscopes, that we are, with the eye of scientific faith, to discern in
the meanest particle of matter the “promise and potency” of all life,
and so forth. All which statements seem to be confused ways of
suggesting some such conception of the physical order as we have
attempted to put into more precise and logical form. It is not until we
come to deal with the problem indicated by the title of this chapter
that our most serious difficulties begin. We have to face the
objections which may be urged against our view of the physical order
on the strength of the principle known in inductive Logic as the
“Uniformity of Nature.”
The events of the physical order, it may be urged, cannot be
expressions of the more or less conscious purposes and interests of
individual centres of experience, and that for a simple reason. How a
purposive agent will behave is always a mystery, except to those
who actually understand his purposes. It is impossible, apart from
actual insight into those purposes, to infer from the mere
examination of his past behaviour what his behaviour in the future
will be. For the special characteristic of purposive action is its power
to find new ways of response to stimulus. Hence it is that we rightly
regard the power to learn by experience, that is, to acquire more and
more appropriate reactions to stimulus, as the test of a creature’s
intelligence. Where there is no progressive adaptability there is no
ground to assume intelligence and purpose. Hence again the
impossibility of calculating beforehand with any certainty what course
the behaviour of an intelligent being will take, unless you are actually
aware of the purposes he is seeking to realise.
Now, except in the case of the organic world, it may be urged, we
do not find progressive adaptability in Nature. The inorganic
constituents of the physical order always react with absolute
uniformity in the same way upon the same environment. Their
behaviour exhibits absolutely undeviating conformity to general
routine laws of sequence, and can therefore be calculated
beforehand, provided that the resources of our mathematics are
adequate to deal with the problems it presents, with absolute
exactitude and certainty. That this routine uniformity exists in
physical nature is, in fact, a fundamental principle in the logic of
inductive science. Every indication of sentience and purpose is thus
absent from physical nature, outside the world of living organisms; it
is a realm of rigid conformity to laws of sequence. And these
sequences, because absolutely without exception and incapable of
modification, are purely mechanical, i.e. non-purposive and non-
intelligent. Nature is, in fact, a complicated mechanism, in which
every event follows from its conditions with undeviating necessity.
Views of this kind are often supposed to be logically necessitated
by the principles of physical science. It is manifest that if they are
sound our whole preceding interpretation of the physical order is
invalidated. For this reason, as well as because of the far-reaching
consequences often drawn from them as to human freedom and
moral responsibility, it will be necessary to examine their foundation
in some detail.
§ 2. The main problems confronting us in this examination will then
be—(1) How far is calculable uniformity of sequence really
incompatible with the presence of purpose and intelligence? (2)
Have we any real ground for ascribing such uniformity to the actual
sequences of physical nature? (3) if not, What is the real logical
character of the principle of the so-called uniformity of nature? (4)
and What amount of truth is contained in the conception of the
physical order as a mechanism? Into the problem suggested by the
popular contrast between the necessity of mechanical sequence and
the freedom of purposive action, it will be needless to enter at any
length. For, as we saw in dealing with the popular view of necessary
causal relation, the necessity of a mechanical sequence is a purely
subjective and logical one. The sequence is necessary only in the
sense that we are constrained, so long as we adhere to the purpose
of thinking logically, to affirm the consequent when we affirm the
antecedent. True necessity is always compulsion, and therefore, so
far from being opposed to purposive action, can only exist where an
actual purpose is overruled or thwarted.[127] So long as we are
dealing solely with phenomenal sequence in the physical order,
necessity is a mere anthropomorphic name for routine undeviating
uniformity of sequence.
(1) Calculable Uniformity and Intelligent Purpose. It is sometimes
assumed that all successful prediction of a thing’s behaviour is
incompatible with the ascription of intelligence or purpose to the
thing. Thus it has been argued, and continues to be argued in moral
philosophy of a popular type, that if we are intelligent beings with
purposes of our own, it must always be impossible for an onlooker to
predict how we shall behave in circumstances which have not yet
arisen. This extreme view of the incompatibility of calculability with
intelligent purpose, however, manifestly rests on a double confusion.
To begin with, those who assert this view commonly make the
mistake of supposing that prediction of the future stands somehow
on a different logical level from calculation of the past from present
data. Prediction of my future behaviour is supposed somehow to
conflict with my character as a purposive being in a way in which
inference as to my past behaviour does not. This is, of course, an
elementary fallacy in Logic. The conditions required for the
successful inference of the absent from the present are identical in
the two cases, as we have already seen in dealing with the problems
of Causality. Precisely the same kind of insight is requisite to judge
how a given man must have behaved in a certain situation in his past
history as are needed to determine how he will behave in a situation
which is yet to arise. We may thus dismiss from consideration the
special case of prediction, and confine ourselves to the general
question, how far the general calculability of the course of a process
is incompatible with its purposive and intelligent character.
An answer to this question is at once suggested by reflection upon
our ordinary attitude towards such attempts to calculate the course
of our own behaviour.[128] It is by no means every such calculation
that we resent. So far from being affronted by the assumption that
our conduct exhibits sufficient uniformity to admit of calculation, we
expect our personal friends to have sufficient reliance on its
uniformity to assume with confidence that we shall certainly do some
things and refuse to do others, that we must have acted in certain
ways and cannot have acted in others. “You ought to know me better
than to suppose me capable of that” is between friends a tolerably
keen expression of reproach, “I know I can count on you to do it,” a
common expression of confidence. On the other hand, we should
certainly resent the assumption on the part of a comparative stranger
of such a knowledge of our character as would warrant confident
calculation of our conduct, and if the calculation was avowedly drawn
not from personal knowledge at all, but from general propositions of
Psychology or Anthropology, we should pretty certainly feel that a
more than accidental success threatened our moral individuality.
Now, what is the explanation of this difference of feeling?
Manifestly it must be sought in the great difference between the
grounds on which the calculation is based in the two cases. In the
first case we expected and welcomed the calculation, because we
felt it to be founded upon our friend’s personal acquaintance with the
guiding interests and purposes of our life; it was an inference based
upon insight into our individual character. In the other case we
resented the success of the calculation, because we assumed it to
be made in the absence of any such personal insight into our
individual purposes and interests, on the basis of mere general
propositions about human nature. We rightly feel that the regular
success of calculation of this second sort is inconsistent with the
ascription of any reality to our individual character. If all our actions
can be calculated from general theorems in a science of human
nature, without taking individual purpose into account, then the
apparent efficacy of individual interests and purposes in determining
the course of our history must be an empty illusion; we cannot be
truly intelligent agents, seeing that we never really do anything at all.
Thus we see that it seems necessary to draw a marked distinction
between two types of calculability. Calculation based on insight into
individual character and purpose is so far from being inconsistent
with purposiveness and intelligence, that the more coherent and
systematic the purposes by which a life is controlled, the more
confident does such calculation become. Calculation without such
special knowledge, and based upon mere general propositions, on
the other hand, cannot be regularly successful where one has to
deal with the behaviour of individual purposive beings.[129]
Now, the difficulty as to our interpretation of the physical order as
the presentation to our sense of a system of intelligent purposive
beings, is that the successes of physical science seem at first sight
to show that just this “mechanical” calculation of the course of events
from observed sequence, without insight into underlying individual
purpose, is possible when we are dealing with physical nature. For,
on the one hand, we ourselves admitted that if physical nature is
permeated by individual purposes, we do not know what those
purposes in detail are; and, on the other, it is undeniable that
physical science, which systematically disregards their presence,
has been signally successful in the past, and may be expected to be
even more successful in the future, in detecting uniformities in
physical nature, and so submitting it to exact calculation. Hence it
might be thought that the actual success of the empirical sciences
cannot be reconciled with the principles of our metaphysical
interpretation of the course of nature.
We must, however, draw a very important distinction. There is one
method by which uniformities of a certain kind can be detected in the
behaviour of purposive intelligent beings, without insight into the
nature of their individual purposes—the method of statistical
averages. Thus, though it would be quite impossible to say with
certainty of any individual man that he will shoot himself or will get
married, except on the strength of insight into his individual character
and interests, we find by experience that it is possible to say, within a
certain narrow range of error, what percentage of Englishmen will
shoot themselves or will get married in the year. The percentage is,
of course, rarely or never precisely realised in any one year, but the
longer the period of years we take for examination, the more exactly
do the deviations from the average in individual years compensate
one another. The explanation is, of course, that on the whole the
incentives to marriage or suicide, in a reasonably stable state of
society, remain constant from year to year, so that by taking an
average of several years we can eliminate results which are due to
individual peculiarities of temperament and situation, and obtain
something like a measure of the degree in which the general
conditions of social existence impose a certain common trend or
character on the interests and purposes of individuals.
Two things are at once noticeable in connection with all
uniformities obtained by the method of averages. One is that the
result formulated in the statistical law is always one to which the
actual course of events may reasonably be expected to conform
within certain limits of deviation, never one to which we have a right
to expect absolute conformity. Not only is the actual number of
marriages, e.g., in any one year, usually slightly above or below the
average percentage computed, e.g., for a ten years’ period, but as
we compare one longer period with others, the average percentage
for the longer period itself fluctuates. It is only in the “long run,” that
is, in the impossible case of the actual completion of an interminable
series, that the computed average would be exactly realised. As
every one who has to deal with averages in any form knows, precise
realisation of the computed average within a finite series of cases
would at once awaken suspicions of an error somewhere in our
calculations. Thus the uniformities of this kind are never absolutely
rigid; they are ideal limits to which the actual course of events is
found to approximate within certain limits of divergence.
The second point is that the existence of such a uniformity never
affords logical ground for confident affirmation as to the actual event
in a particular concrete case. To revert to our illustration, just as we
have no right to infer from the approximately constant percentage of
marriages per year in a given society, that this precise percentage
will be realised in any one special year, so we have still less right to
infer that a particular member of that society will or will not marry.
Nothing but insight into the character, situation, and interests of this
special member of society can give me the right to judge with
confidence how he will actually behave. Similarly, it is possible to say
within certain limits of error how many persons over sixty years of
age may be expected to die in the next twelve months, but it would
be the height of logical presumption to infer that a particular man will
die during the year, except on the strength of special information
about his pursuits, habits, and general state of health.[130] Thus our
general conclusion must be, that calculation and the establishment
of uniformities is possible, without insight into individual purpose, but
that the uniformities thus obtained are always variable and
approximate, and afford no safe ground for inference as to special
concrete cases.
§ 3. (2) Uniformity in Physical Nature. The existence of
ascertainable uniformities in physical nature, then, will not conflict
with our general interpretation of the physical order, provided that
these uniformities are of the type just illustrated by reference to
ordinary social statistics. On the other hand, the exact and rigid
conformity of the actual course of concrete events with such uniform
general “laws,” would certainly be inconsistent with the presence of
teleological adaptation to ends. A reign of rigid routine conformity to
general law cannot co-exist with individual purposive life. Now, it is
commonly assumed, and we shall shortly see that the assumption is
both necessary and justified as a practical methodological postulate,
that the “reign of law” in physical nature is absolute. But are there
any grounds for recognising this assumption as more than a possibly
unrealised postulate made for human practical purposes? I think it is
easy to show that there are none whatever, and that the conception
of a nature devoid of purpose and sentience, and swayed absolutely
by mechanical “laws,” is simply a metaphysical nightmare of our own
invention.
To begin with, it is clear that the undeviating conformity of the
actual course of any concrete process to scientific “law” cannot be
verified as an empirical fact by observation or experiment. For in no
observation or experiment can we ever deal with the whole of any
concrete actual event or process. We have always, for the purposes
of our observation, to select certain of the general aspects of the
process, to which we attend as the “relevant factors” or “conditions”
of the result, while we disregard other aspects as “immaterial” or
“accidental” circumstances. And this artificial abstraction, as we saw
in discussing Causality, though indispensable for our practical
purposes, is logically indefensible. Again, within the aspects selected
for attention, all that experiment can establish is that the deviation
from uniform law, if there is any deviation, is not sufficiently great to
affect our measurements and calculations. But how far our standards
of measurement are from rigid precision may be readily learned from
the chapter on physical standards in any good work on the logic of
the inductive sciences.[131] Our failure to detect deviation from law is
absolutely worthless as evidence that no deviation has taken place.
Thus, if the absolute uniformity of natural processes is more than a
practical postulate, it must be an axiom, that is, it must be implied in
the very notion of those processes as elements in a systematic
whole. But it should at once be clear that we have no more ground
for asserting such uniformity as an axiom, than we had for treating
the causal postulate as axiomatic. It is by no means implied in the
concept of a systematic whole that its parts shall be connected by
uniform law. For the unity of the system may be teleological, that is,
the parts may be connected by the fact that they work together to
realise the same end, to execute the same function. In that case the
behaviour of any one part will depend on the demands laid upon it by
the plan which the working of the system fulfils. As these demands
vary from time to time, the behaviour of the part under consideration

Ebook PDF Twenty First Century Musicals From Stage To Screen PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ebook PDF Twenty First Century Musicals From Stage To Screen PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ebook PDF Twenty First Century Musicals From Stage To Screen PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

(eBook PDF) Twenty-First Century

Musicals: From Stage to Screen

0.1 Catherine Zeta-Jones as Velma Kelly in Chicago 3

Sarah Browne is Head of Music and Principal Lecturer at the University of

Todd Decker is Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at

Robert Gordon is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Director of the

Olaf Jubin is Reader in Media Studies and Musical Theatre at Regent’s

Helen Deborah Lewis is an Assistant Professor in the Theater Division at The

Arthur Pritchard is a retired Senior Teaching Fellow in the School of Performance

George Rodosthenous is Associate Professor in Theatre Directing at the School

Tim Stephenson is Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds in Creative and

Jessica Sternfeld (Ph.D. Princeton 2002) specializes in the cultural work of

Dominic Symonds is Reader in Drama at the University of Lincoln, UK. He is

Sarah Whitﬁeld is a Senior Lecturer in Musical Theatre, practitioner and

Demetris Zavros is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Course Leader of BA Acting

myth in theatre and performance (through practice and publication). He is Associate

FIGURE 0.1 Catherine Zeta-Jones as Velma Kelly in Chicago.

Contemporary trends in the ﬁlm musical genre

FIGURE 0.2 Ensemble cast in Across the Universe (2007).

unmemorable remake in 2009, and Cher starred in the song-packed Burlesque

Existing academic writing: identifying the gaps

Consult further:—F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 22;

119. This definition of the physical order approximates very closely

THE MEANING OF LAW

§ 1. In our view of the underlying reality of the physical order, as

You might also like