Maybe This Time; or, Was Gluck Right?

I don't what you all think, but after this week's episode of Glee, it feels like the show's promise is finally coming through like a breath of fresh televised air. I certainly loved the pilot episode last summer, and enjoyed the first two episodes of the fall season. Lingering in the back of my mind, however, were two problems: first, was the show's play of high school stereotypes old and cliché, or a fresh working within-and-against sort of thing? And secondly, what about the music? The performance of "Don't Stop Believing" at the end of the pilot was awesome, but in the first two episodes, the music seemed secondary to the show, and this musicologist doesn't like that.

My first quandary was solved thanks to Jill Dolan's trenchant analysis. (Hey--she's at Princeton now? When did that happen?) And the second quandary has been resolved by this most recent episode. In the scene where Kristin Chenoweth and Lea Michele duel on "Maybe This Time" from Cabaret, I was totally sold. Two spectacular performances, cleverly cut together, presented so as to give us insight into the characters' interior lives, and all the while advancing the plot. Bravo. After suffering through American Idol year after year, it is so wonderful to hear professional musicians do their thing, you know, professionally. Is that too much to ask, American television?

Speaking of American television, thanks to the show's Wikipedia entry, I was directed to a Times interview in which the creator of Glee, Ryan Murphy, said this:

“I wanted to do a sort of postmodern musical,” he said. “Fox was not interested, and neither was I, in doing a show where people burst into song.” People do sing, of course, but there are rules: the singers will have to be onstage rehearsing or performing, or a song will come in the form of a fantasy in a character’s head. They are the type of rules that made “Chicago” such a successful film, he said. But “Glee” also draws on “American Idol.”

“We’ve learned some lessons about why that show works,” he said. “I think the key is to do songs that people know and interpret them in a different and unusual way.”

Interesting, right? You hear this sentiment a lot these days from those who work in latter-day musical theater. I can't cite off the top of my head, but I seem to recall Joss Whedon saying something similar about Once More with Feeling, and Stephen Trask with Hedwig. It's interesting that so many of these guys feel a need to define themselves against golden age Broadway musicals, which after all were kind of killed off three decades ago. In reality, what made this most recent Glee episode so effective is the same thing that made "Once More With Feeling" effective: it obeyed the old-fashioned rules of the musical, in that the music portrays inner emotions and advanced the plot. Just because they found a plot excuse to include singing doesn't actually change the narrative function. In fact, Robyn Stilwell has pointed out that musical numbers on recent television shows often actually imbibe the music with more seriousness and dramatic import, offering as an example those episodes of Scrubs where musical numbers can contain unexpected gravity.

In other words, I think Murphy has it backwards: there's nothing more postmodern than spontaneously bursting into meaningless song! For me, the strength of Glee comes from its old-fashioned gesamtkuntswerk, rather than the creator's attempts at ironic distance.