@nojo: Another way of looking at tone, courtesy of (I think) Pauline Kael: Steve Martin pretended to be a bad comedian, and we pretended to be his audience. I don’t understand what that means.

The other basic question that needs to be asked is: why are these people singing? To say, it’s a musical is not enough. What is it the music is doing that can’t be done by speech? What do they sing about?

Your mileage may vary.

@nojo: I sense a confusion.

If it makes you feel any better, I do like Shaw’s prefaces.

But we are supposed to love her. Sarah’s our plucky heroine who overcomes adversity and dreams of her perfect world.

@nojo: I’m not a fan of didactic drama — which puts you in good company, since I’m not a fan of Shaw. So I have to wake my computer before I’ve even downed a cup of coffee and read this? Thank you very much.

I would still say that it is very difficult to build a musical around a character that the audience is not supposed to love. Music demands that. Even if you love to hate you still need to love. Let us look at Candide. These days one can’t see the show without the putrid Hal Prince production being put on top of it. A prime example of the philistinism inherent in Broadway (another example that makes me want to beat people with dead fish is the way the contemporary artist is ridiculed in Sunday in the Park. In exactly the same way that the show mocks the Parisians of Seurat’s day). At its best, the show is a pretty lively account of Voltaire with some brilliantly witty music and lyrics. However, it is structured so that it becomes an account of Candide learning a lesson, about himself and the world. The musical substitutes pastiche for satire because that suits music better. It all comes together, for example in Glitter and Be Gay which, in the hands of Barbara Cook, tore the house down. A musical has got to give the performer opportunities. And those opportunities should arrive in the songs. However, and this is my point such as it is, at the end of the night, after Candide has loved and lost and won a little bit back, everything stops, the orchestra winds itself up and the stage is flooded with gorgeousness in the shape of Make Our Garden Grow a melody that rises with a kind of catch in its throat till at last it goes into a choral a capela which allows one to understand why God made tenors, it suspends itself and then everything comes crashing in as it resolves itself into a grand major chord. The music earns the emotion but the story has got to allow that emotion to be there. Now, granted that is a show of huge scale and musical ambition but it’s one of the few satirical musicals I can think of. It was also a failure. There’s also Urinetown but again, satire is softened into fable.

Which is why I repeat, think cabaret style. Or opera, which has much more freedom.

Has Sarah Palin ever done a press conference post-nomination?

@FlyingChainSaw: I think a number of the characters should be abstracted into anonymous dancers or huge stuffed animals

I think we have to save most of that for Grand Guignol — the moment we finally step into Sarah’s mind. We’ve been presenting a conventional musical up to that moment, so that the contrast jumps at you.

Grand Guignol is itself a major musical number — perhaps also in a musical style that contrasts with everything else. (I keep having visions of Dali interrupting Hitchcock, set to Gotta Dance.) If we do it right, we’ve been laying the groundwork for this moment from the start — hints in the lyrics and such that finally bear fruit.

Think Straw Dogs, if you’re familiar with it. Peckinpah holds back for ninety minutes as Dustin Hoffman does a slow burn, and then Shit Hits Fan.