The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (review)

In the last few years, musical theater studies has seen the growth of new critical work that aims to push the discipline to new academic heights. Raymond Knapp’s recent text The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity joins in the discussion, but despite engaging with a wide range of materials, feels unfocused and does not advance the field in productive ways.

The premise of Knapp’s text is to focus on “personal identity” or issues that highlight the individual, in contrast to his previous text on the musical which examined “national identity.” An examination of personal identity in the musical makes sense, but standing back from this assertion for a moment, one has to ask, doesn’t this notion apply to virtually all musicals? For this reason, the book often seems vague and rambling in its arguments. Knapp’s chapters and analyses frequently lose track of the larger thesis, and I was often left wondering where the theme and/or relevance of “personal identity” was in the discussion.

What is equally contentious about Knapp’s study is his choice of texts. While in fairness the book is about the “American Musical” and not explicitly the “Broadway Musical,” the texts and genres Knapp chooses often seem random and not entirely justified. The first part of the book includes a chapter on the connection between Viennese and American operetta as well as a chapter on the movie musical. In other chapters, such as the one about “fairy tales and fantasy,” texts include an animated film (Snow White), two movies (The Wizard of Oz and Mary Poppins), and the stage musical Into the Woods, making the text feel more like a hodgepodge than a unified work. Knapp also includes texts that might cause some readers to scratch their heads with curiosity at their inclusion; the text features what is probably the only scholarly analysis of the critical flop The Scarlet Pimpernel, as well as a discussion of the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Do such texts really warrant critical discussion? Perhaps, but it seems that there might be more compelling musicals out there.

Knapp’s text also unconsciously points to what is an on-going tension in musical theater studies, the conflict between a musicological vs. a more textual/historical approach to analyzing musical theater texts. Knapp is a musicologist and the text, for this reader who is not a musicologist, often suffers from stylistic constructions and jargon that tend to obscure rather than illuminate. Consider the following line in Knapp’s discussion of the song “Chim Chim Cher-ee”: “Hidden in an inner voice, and cycling as a hypnotic ostinato through every phrase, is a line descending chromatically from the tonic, producing the odd magic of an augmented triad in the second bar, a double image of minor and relative major in the third, an unexpected major triad in the fourth, and an inevitable fade to the minor in the fifth” (144). While such language might be common parlance for musicologists, Knapp’s hope that his book can be used as a textbook for a general public seems to be wishful thinking (13).

Stylistically, the text is, unfortunately, something of a tedious, overlong read. While Knapp is clearly well versed in the histories and backgrounds of the musicals he discusses, his desire to seemingly prove such knowledge to the reader causes the text to get bogged down in miniscule details that continually divert the reader away from the text’s larger thematics. In trying to be all things to all readers (historical background of the shows, musicological engagement, thematic inquiry into “personal identity”), the result is an unfocused study that does not serve any single population particularly well.

While a book about personal identity and the American musical is not a bad idea, Knapp’s text fails to fully capitalize on the premise or provide a useful entry into this important musical genre.