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

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...

 校订者：

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  修复音乐剧：技术如何塑造百老汇剧目 作者：Douglas L. Reside
•  布拉德利·罗杰斯

道格拉斯·莱西德 （Douglas L. Reside） 的《修复音乐剧：技术如何塑造百老汇剧目》探讨了“修复”百老汇音乐剧的技术——其中包括印刷、摄影、视听和数字——这些技术“固定”了百老汇音乐剧，从而影响或促进了它的流通和接受。在 Reside 的术语中，“固定”是指戏剧属性的元素被另一种媒介固定的过程，固定元素成为音乐剧持续身份或生活的有意义部分。例如，他写道，他的第二章“将探讨用于为音乐剧创建宣传图像的技术如何固定观众对音乐剧目视觉元素的期望”（35）。因此，在研究固定时，Reside 展示了音乐剧——单个标题以及更普遍的流派——与各种技术密不可分的复杂方式。

修复音乐剧 探索了令人难以置信的广泛有趣的话题。当 Reside 解释标志性的 Studio Duplicating Service 剧本背后的过程（和公司）时——通过人造皮革封面和金色压花标题来识别——他揭示了几乎每个学者都会遇到的百老汇无处不在的元素背后令人惊讶的迷人故事。他在一个又一个案例中这样做，揭示了对广泛主题的意想不到的见解，例如油版印刷在使剧本短期印刷具有商业可行性方面的作用;邮购 Fireside Theatre Club 的起源;纪念伴侣书的出现;制作和分发舞台音乐剧早期录像的过程;主要许可公司的历史;以及 Diazo 音乐打印技术的机制等等。

虽然这项研究被安排为一系列章节，每个章节都侧重于不同的媒介，但 Reside 的书令人信服地展示了关于技术与音乐剧之间关系的更广泛的总体思想。一个核心见解是，随着技术修复了作品的更多元素，后续作品中的艺术家可以做出更有限的选择。例如，他详细介绍了许可方如何越来越多地为业余作品提供一系列补充材料：投影设计、排练音乐录音、表演管弦乐队伴奏、编舞指南等。Reside 指出，“新技术开始使音乐剧的其他元素更容易复制和提供给观众，原始作品的更多 [组件] 很快成为预期文本的一部分。随着更多的工作变得固定，每部新作品的诠释机会都缩小到演员的表演选择“（152）——从而扼杀了创造力和创新，使音乐作品的许多方面仅仅成为固定元素的复制品。

但与此同时，他揭示了技术如何为文本提供了“不固定”和“重新固定”的机会。例如，在第 2 章中，我们了解了早期的印刷技术如何使生成剧本的主副本变得费力;因此，许可方将使用与百老汇演出相同的印刷模板来印刷业余剧本，或者后来使用这些纸质剧本的油印副本。然而，数字印刷的出现使“作家和作曲家在将他们的材料提交给许可机构之前更容易创建最终修订版”。因此，业余剧本更有可能呈现与百老汇不同的节目版本;此外，业余爱好者也“不再看到与原始作品中使用的相同的文本和乐谱的物理呈现”（146）。作为在视听领域解开固定的一个例子，他详细介绍了 1996 年广受关注的音乐会版《悲惨世界》的剪辑——该版本删掉了超过 15 分钟的演出——最终如何被它所依据的舞台制作所采用：“音乐会版本有助于破坏文本的稳定性，并使观众习惯于略短的节目版本”（86）。

Reside 还讨论了技术如何实现...