What is and is not musical theatre? - A phenomenological reduction

An initial superficial phenomenological description, as propaedeutic to further phenomenological reduction, would find an entertainment, a participatory cultural phenomenon in which more or less initiated and knowledgeable participant-spectators gather as performers and audiences to perform a largely standard well-worn repertoire of shows which generally last about two to three hours staged in a variety of different sized theatrical venues. The phenomenon spreads further and varies in all aspects of its givenness when the songs are listened to and viewed on recordings and streaming services. And even further when the definition of the phenomenon is broadened to include shows which do not belong in the standard repertoire and are considered more so-called innovative or experimental. But already this description is woefully phenomenologically inadequate in that it contains so many taken-for-granted unexamined terms. It is necessary to perform various types of phenomenological reductions on terms such as entertainment, shows, theatrical venues, participant-spectators, performers, audiences, repertoire, songs, streaming services, innovation, experiment. Each of these terms is open to question, vague and largely taken-for-granted. Each denotes a complex phenomenon with assumed, more or less unexamined, cultural/social/historical/aesthetic/perceptual/embodied dimensions which would require clarification. And then there is the question of how these more general phenomena emerge in the specific context of musical theatre. And then the question of the particular Australianness of the phenomenon in this instance. The would comprise a Husserlian generative phenomenology subsequent to the reductions of the other listed phenomena, and probably many others which would no doubt emerge in the process.

Clearly there are a number of books in this.

From all this, in this instance, for the sake of doing something, anything, to demonstrate something of the sort of process required, I will briefly discuss one small corner of one aspect of one dimension of the task—the question of musical theatre song.

The phenomenology of musical theatre song would begin with an eidetic reduction of the difference between musical theatre song and non-musical theatre song. This would require a preliminary, again propaedeutic transcendental phenomenological reduction of song in general. This would begin, perhaps, with the difference between song and speech, perhaps traverse questions of the affective dimension of speaking, of song as a putative origin of speaking, of singing together, of the embodied nature of such singing together, of the aesthetic experience of specific given tonalities in their cultures.