Fixing The Musical: How Technologies Shaped The Broadway Repertory by Douglas L. Reside (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Fixing The Musical: How Technologies Shaped The Broadway Repertory by Douglas L. Reside
• Bradley Rogers

FIXING THE MUSICAL: HOW TECHNOLOGIES SHAPED THE BROADWAY REPERTORY. By Douglas L. Reside. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; pp. 165.

Douglas L. Reside's Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory explores the technologies—printed, photographic, audiovisual, and digital among them—that have "fixed" the Broadway musical and thus influenced or enabled its circulation and reception. In Reside's terms, "fixing" refers to the process whereby an element of a theatrical property is fixed by another medium, with the fixed element becoming a meaningful part of the musical's ongoing identity or life. For example, he writes that his second chapter "will explore how the technologies used to create promotional imagery for musicals fixed audience expectations of the visual elements of titles in the musical repertory" (35). In studying fixing, then, Reside shows the complex ways that musical theatre—individual titles as well as the genre more generally—is inextricably tied to technologies of all sorts.

Fixing the Musical explores an unbelievably wide range of intriguing topics. When Reside explains the process (and company) behind the iconic Studio Duplicating Service scripts—identifiable by their faux leather covers with titles embossed in gold—he uncovers the surprisingly fascinating story behind a ubiquitous element of Broadway that virtually every scholar will have encountered. He does this in case after case, revealing unexpected insights on topics as wide-ranging as the role of Linotype printing in making it commercially viable for libretti to be printed in short runs; the genesis of the mail-order Fireside Theatre Club; the emergence of souvenir companion books; the processes of producing and distributing early video recordings of stage musicals; the histories of major licensing companies; and the mechanics of Diazo music printing technology—among many others.

While the study is arranged as a series of chapters, each focusing on a different medium, Reside's book persuasively demonstrates a broader set of overarching ideas about the relationships between technology and the musical. A central insight is that as technologies fix more elements of a production, artists in subsequent productions can have a more limited range of choices to make. He details, for example, how licensors have increasingly offered a range of supplementary materials for amateur productions: projection designs, recordings of music for rehearsals, orchestral accompaniments for performances, choreographic guides, and so forth. Reside notes that "[a]s new technologies begin to make other elements of the musical more easily reproducible and available to audiences, more [components] of the original production quickly becom[e] part of the expected text. As more work becomes fixed, the opportunities for interpretation in each new production narrow to performance choices made by the actors" (152)—thereby stifling creativity and innovation, relegating many aspects of musical productions to be merely copies of the fixed elements.

At the same time, though, he reveals how technologies also offer the chance for texts to be "unfixed" and "refixed." In chapter 2, for example, we learn how earlier printing technologies made it laborious to generate a master copy of a script; as a result, licensors would print amateur scripts using the same printing stencils that had been used for the Broadway production—or, later, mimeographed copies of those paper scripts. The advent of digital printing, however, made it "much easier for writers and composers to create a final revision before submitting their materials to the licensing agencies." As a result, amateur scripts were much more likely to present a version of the show different from the one presented on Broadway; further, amateurs also "no longer saw the same physical presentation of the text and score as was used in the original production" (146). And as an example of unfixing in the audiovisual realm, he details how the cut of a widely viewed 1996 concert version of Les Misérables—which eliminated more than fifteen minutes of the show—was ultimately adopted by the stage production on which it was based: "The concert version helped to destabilize the text and accustom audiences to the slightly shorter version of the show" (86).

Reside also discusses how technologies have enabled the...