The musical is drama: apollonian and dionysian dynamics and liminal ruptures in the contemporary musical theatre.

This research contributes to a growing body of scholarship that, from numerous perspectives, recognises that the Musical Theatre is a complex form. The ‘integrated’ Musical––in which, song and dance contribute seamlessly to the progression of character and plot––dominated the Musical stage from 1940s through to the 60s. Still, the ideals of integration govern the structural foundations of the majority of commercially successful musicals. Nevertheless, recent musical theatre scholarship––acknowledging the disparate aesthetic qualities of speech, song, and dance––questions the notion of integration, favouring the alternative concept of disjunction. However, neither integration nor disjunction adequately contributes to an understanding of what is occurring within the dramatic moment, or to why a character may, or may not, sing. To redress this theoretical inadequacy, this thesis employs a two-fold theoretical approach, applying the concepts of Liminality and the Apollonian and the Dionysian as hermeneutic devices to situate the character within the dramatic action. A close reading of the relationship between the character’s relationship to the book and the score, as well as the choreography, forms the basis of the analytical approach throughout the dissertation. This dissertation offers an in-depth reading of word, music, and movment as conveyors of the dramatic action, acknowledging the interactions between these primary elements as a fundamental source from which the Musical derives its complexity. I employ the liminal models of Social Drama and the Liminoid, devised by Victor Turner, to articulate the different functions of the two primary song types: the book song and the diegetic song. To further explicate a character’s psychological state, I utilise Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception of the objective Apollonian and the subjective Dionysian, as means of more closely reading the interactions of the primary elements in relation to the dramatic action. Finally, I appropriate Turner’s concept of Communitas, which reflects Nietzsche’s notion of the original Unity, to consider various representations of belonging conveyed through the musical score and staging. The central findings of this research also exhibit the potential to be implemented in a practical context contributing to both performer training and the writing/rehearsal process. Significantly, this dissertation acknowledges that the musical is a dramatic form, and that the elements of word, music, and movement, function in response, relation to, a dramatic situation.