Dr Ian Sapiro: Public Lecture

There is a general tendency to associate musicals with their composers or composer-lyricist partnerships, but this sort of attribution over-simplifies the relationship between a musical-theatre work and the multiple ‘authors’ responsible for its creation. While it is acknowledged that composers and lyricists are often not responsible for writing scripts, even when focusing on the parts of a show for which they are assumed to have authorship – the songs – such exclusive creative attribution may be deceptive.

Where they survive, archival sources for a show’s musical score often comprise just a single verse and chorus of each song in the composer’s handwriting (‘holographs’), with blank spaces for introductions and codas, and few (if any) indications of singers, lyrics or instrumentation. Copies of these sources (‘manuscripts’) may introduce or omit elements from the composer’s original with no indication of the basis on which such changes were made, and such sources rarely identify the name(s) of the copyists who produced them. Likewise, although incidental music such as dance breaks and scene changes will usually be based on the composer’s material, they were (and, indeed, still are) normally created by an (often unacknowledged) orchestrator or dance arranger, and would never have existed in the composer’s handwriting nor necessarily have been prepared under the composer’s guidance. Accordingly, even where a musical’s songs are concerned, the notion that the composer (or composer-lyricist partnership) might be the sole authority, let alone author, is extremely misleading.

Musicals evolve through a process of continuous development, and changes are an expected outcome of workshops, rehearsals and try-outs (public performances ‘out of town’ before the official Broadway or London opening). Further changes may occur during previews, and a show may continue to develop even after its premiere. In all cases, the changes made may be the result of input from a range of stakeholders, rather than being limited to decisions taken by the composer. These collaborative and iterative practices have significant implications for the reconstruction of musicals as critical editions, since, in contrast to historical concert pieces, musical-theatre works lack a single point of origin/authorship and effectively linear writing process. In this public lecture, I focus on some of the specific challenges faced by critical editors when reconstructing musicals in this evidence-informed way, using my work creating a critical performing edition of the musical Girl Crazy (1930), for the George and Ira Gershwin Critical Performing Edition project, as a case study. My talk will be preceded by a short presentation and performance by a group of BA Liberal Arts students with whom I have been working this year. They have undertaken archival research, exploring hundreds of individual script pages from the Shubert Archive in New York, to explore the development of the show’s dialogue, characters and themes during rehearsals over the summer of 1930.

This lecture draws on Dr Ian Sapiro’s research into the archival resources for musicals undertaken through his 2024 Annegret Fauser and Tim Carter Fellowship at the Library of Congress Music Division, and supported by research leave awarded by the School of Music and the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures at the University of Leeds.

Photograph of Ethel Merman (as Kate Fothergill) and Chorus from Girl Crazy, 1930, Box 28-Binder 18, Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Trust Archive, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C