Wolf Gennaro 2015
Notes on Wolf Gennaro (2015) Dance in Musical Theater.pdf.
In addition to its unique, deceptively casual opening moment, A Chorus Line broke other musical theater conventions that had solidified (or to some, ossified) by the mid-1970s. Its
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A Chorus Line was also the first show to use a computerized light plot and among the first to eschew an overture, a front curtain, and an intermission.
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they came to be dancers. In this way, every song in A Chorus Line functions as a character’s typical first number according to mid-20th-century Broadway musical theater conventions: the “I am/I want” song, which tells the audience who the character is, how
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8 Analyzing dance in musical theater is particularly challenging.First, like all dance, musi cal theater dance is fleeting and ephemeral. What does the scholar see to analyze the work? What is the archive that remains for analysis and interpretation? Must a scholar experience the show—in person or on tape—to be able to write about it responsibly? Se
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cond, musicals are, as Bruce Kirle argues, always in process and constantly reinvented 9 with each new production.The nominal opening night of a musical, the day after which
reinvention, gesture record, what is the show, what is a work
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Dance, in the words of theater scholar Marvin Carlson, is “haunted.”
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“Before I started my choreography I spent a great deal of time observing what really went on in the remaining half-dozen dance halls in New York. They are as close to prosti 38 tution as anything you can find.”Fosse’s depiction of the women in “Big Spender” is, as
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conflict between the opposing gangs, the Jets and Sharks. Originally conceived to be sung, the opening’s lyrics were eventually eliminated in favor of a pure (that is, only) danced narrative that establishes from the very start of the show that dance will function
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Finally, in West Side Story, Robbins developed an original movement style by using mod ernist distortion methods to create a dance lexicon rooted in the social dances of urban 1950s America. Anna Sokolow was also experimenting with a fusion of jazz and modern
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express the taboo subject of sex. What is deemed to be too explicit for the spoken word to express finds “voice” in dance. Each number serves a different function, though. “Laurey
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