On Words that Describe Plays with Music in Them

This show began back in 2007 with a ridiculous idea: to write an opera based on Beowulf. It’s not actually a ridiculous idea, seeing as it’s already been done at least three times, but it was a ridiculous idea for us. “Opera” suggested so many things that we lacked. Supertitles. Large string sections. Training in “opera singing.” Et cetera. But we had a fun time using the word, marveling over its elitist weight, and the gravity of it informed the work. Musically, this meant fusing my usual jazz and rock tendencies with more classical harmony and melody, channeling Bach, Schubert, and Mahler (none of whom wrote a significant opera, but still) and contemporary operatists like Glass and Adams, and reveling in the paradoxically distancingyet-more-revealing emotional veil of singing that all the sung-through musicals I love—from Jesus Christ Superstar to Miss Saigon—seem to share.

As the piece developed, two worlds began to take shape, that of our lecturers and that of Beowulf. And one seemed decidedly less musical than the other. Now “opera” typically refers to a piece that is exclusively sung, as opposed to a “musical,” in which there are spoken sections. Of course, this distinction gets messy and inaccurate pretty quickly (this strict definition makes Pink Floyd’s live performances of The Wall more of an opera than Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, which has extensive spoken sections), but as our piece began taking shape and the sung-to-spoken ratio started to even out, “opera” seemed a bit less correct to my OCD ears. We started throwing around “part-opera/part-criticism,” which certainly had a lot of cool punctuation in it, but was not quite right either. There was still that weight that we liked, but the lack of recitative, the mostly four-minute pop song structures, the fact that we aren’t The Who in the seventies… somehow “opera” just didn’t fly, you know?

But then the obvious alternative, “musical,” seemed too… commercial a word. Much as I love me my musical theater (I can sing every lick of The Music Man, My Fair Lady, and Les Miz, easy), there is a campy, easily digestible, high-school-dramanerdy (and hey chill, I was one) connotation to the word that just isn’t as viscerally compelling as “opera.” I don’t think this odd inappropriateness of the word is unique to this work; West Side Story and Sweeney Todd come to mind as other uneasy members of the genre. Plus Banana Bag & Bodice’s generally loose and abstract narrative structure seems at odds with the clear two-act classicism of Broadway (though, again, Company, A Chorus Line, HAIR—there are exceptions to everything). The other commonly cited distinction between “opera” and “musical” is that in an opera the music is the primary driving force, while in a musical the lyrics are (music critic Anthony Tommasini recently wrote a compelling piece on this distinction in the The New York Times)… but again this definition gets messy quickly, and in the case of our work, we strive to put the two elements on equal footing. And the half measure compromise of the term “music theater” to me feels oddly bland and PC at best and self-loathing at worst.

Now truth is, back in the day in Europe there were quite a few words in use. Opéra comique (Carmen), operetta (Die Fledermaus) and Singspiel (Die Zauberflöte) are all terms describing “operas” that employ popular music and feature spoken dialog. We leaned toward Singspiel, German for “singing play,” but of course, we’re not German (and neither is Beowulf), so after a quick bit of quirky translation we came up with “SongPlay.” In the end these words don’t matter much, and deciding that they do matter leads to awful things like José Carreras singing Maria. Sondheim I think said it best: “opera is musical theater that takes place in an opera house in front of an opera audience.”
So.
In the end, we have this play, and there is quite a bit of song in it. It’s a SongPlay.
Okay?