ABSTRACT
The class of feature films in which the characters ‘put on a show,’ generally referred to as the ‘backstage musical,’ offers a particularly revealing object for the study of film sound. On the one hand, the backstage musical explicitly explores, in fiction, the work and the processes of making and staging music, dance, and story. More covertly, it almost by necessity presents a kind of meditation on the relationships between competing spaces of representation, sound space, and visual space; with its stage within the stage, its fictive mise en scène nested within the larger mise en scène, it almost inevitably posits ‘theses’ about sonic frames and visual frames, visible frames and implied frames. And in purporting to look behind the scenes at how musical performance is staged, it cannot help but reflect, at least a little, on its own performing of sound.
