The Shift in How Homee is Encountered in the Enacted Ritual of the American Musical

Abstract

As places, locations, landscapes and localities go, no image is more potent than that of home. The history of the enacted rituals played out in the American musical reveals a shift in how we define and how we encounter ‘home’ as the center of our personal, communal and national spheres and the most potent signifier of our identities on those levels. In early American musicals, the central character’s journey is to enter the marital home. Mismatched lovers in these musicals were ultimately reunited with their correct partners and entered the appropriate marital homes, explicitly or implicitly, as the curtain rang down. With the Rodgers and Hammerstein paradigm the central character’s journey shifted to leaving ‘home’ in order to learn that they had to return; in South Pacific Nellie’s return to de Becque’s terrace is inevitable, as is Mrs. Anna’s to the Court of Siam in The King and I and Tommy’s to Brigadoon. The upheavals of the 1960’s/1970’s were reflected in the American musicals of that period. The Jets and Sharks inhabit a completely different world at the end of West Side Story than the one they inhabited at the musical’s start; and, by the end of Fiddler on the Roof Anatevka is merely a point of departure. By the 1980’s the central character’s journey was to discover that their original definition of home failed, and to go out into the world to develop a new construct. In March of the Falsettos , the home that Marvin ultimately fashions with Whizzer, Trina, Jason and Mendel was as unconventional and allencompassing as it got in 1981. The surviving characters in Into The Woods not only have to reconstruct home, but community itself. Rent , Ragtime , Mamma Mia , Hairspray all participate in this ritual enactment of redefining home and community to reflect a more comprehensive vision.