Instructions to the Audience

This chapter establishes the overlapping contexts of the exhaustion of the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical and postmodernism and places Sondheim’s work within them. It begins by offering a definition of postmodernism, focusing on self-referentiality, intertextuality, and performativity. It then provides an aesthetic overview of the American musical with special attention to the musical-comedy era and the Rodgers and Hammerstein era. In the musical comedy, narrative is simultaneously central and irrelevant, a contradictory aesthetic communicated by proto-postmodern characteristics. In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! the songs are justified by the narrative and the characters. The musical comedy’s proto-postmodern characteristics are repressed in favor of realism. This chapter then offers a brief biographical sketch of Sondheim, showing his mentoring by Oscar Hammerstein and examines two of his works from this period: Do I Hear a Waltz? and Evening Primrose.