“Once Upon a Time….”

I fell in love with music and storytelling via musicals and musical theater. I knew every word on the Original Broadway Cast Recordings of musicals I never saw, but felt that I knew the story because I knew the music.

As a young person I performed in musicals but found a home as part of the stage crew, working as the stage manager for most of the shows performed at my high school. I didn’t understand it then but now I can see that stage managing helped me see a different side of how a show is put together. It gave me an opportunity to learn everyone’s part: lines, songs, choreography, staging, and also challenged me to make sure the on-stage sets were placed so that the story had an environment in which it could come to life.

In recent years I have taught courses (at Harvard University and Amherst College) in musical theater analysis, and my students’ enthusiasm for the subject matter has inspired me to excavate how music and storytelling mix together in this particular form. With no sub-or supertitles, or lengthy synopsis in a program like many audiences come to expect in opera, a musical must communicate the entirety of a story to an audience in real time, the first time. If text is unclear or unspecific, or certain elements of the story are not transparent, then the show doesn’t work.

It’s hard to know where this research might go; who might want to read it, or who might benefit from reading it, but anyone who has ever picked at a Sondheim score knows that a musical is made of rich material, components interacting in familiar and unfamiliar ways, inviting us to explore and engage.

Society of Music Theory Annual Conference 2021

Blowing Past Barlines: Character Development in Waitress

Waitress tells the story of Jenna, a pie-baking waitress at a diner who is stuck in an abusive marriage in a small town.  In this lightning talk, I propose that Jenna’s own arc can be traced through the manipulation of phrasing and breath in the character’s vocal lines. Composer and lyricist Sara Bareilles matches Jenna’s insistence on baking her feelings into pies to fix—and avoid—her predicaments with a complementary barreling across section and phrase endings in the melodic writing. The performer defies expectations of closure, break, or breath at certain points in the show, providing a sonic mirror to her on-stage conundrum.  

In particular, Jenna’s initial situation is established by a series of phrase extensions and elisions across formal sections in Act I’s “What Baking Can Do.” As Jenna learns to lean on her friends for support and feels seen and loved in her relationship with Dr. Pomatter, her phrases begin to regulate and even out, shown in “You Matter to Me.” At the 11 o’clock hour, Jenna’s phrasing—once anchoring her to her situation—becomes a sonic marker that triggers her commitment to persist and change her circumstances. Through a series of short vignettes across the show, supported by both score analysis and audio examples from multiple performer interpretations, I draw connections between Jenna’s lived situation and Bareilles’s treatment of the vocal lines; this link highlights audible, musical choices that enhance the character’s development cross the narrative arc of the story.

In Progress

The Rule of Four in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods

“The cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, the slipper as pure as gold.”

The first act of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods revolves around a quest to find four, very specific ingredients that will lift a curse on the house of the baker and his wife. But Sondheim has sown the seeds of “fours” into the music of the show as well. This article traces heard representations of “four” throughout the show and posits that these sonic markers tighten the weave of Into the Woods’s narrative fabric.