Overture. Dim the Lights.

Well, all I can say is you're loaded for bear for the week. Don't expect too much posting in the next few days here. Daddy's spent.

In the New York Times Today, Jesse Green's written an interesting article about how and why overtures have disappeared from the Broadway musical.

Audience stamina (and union work rules) can certainly make a four-minute overture seem a waste of precious time, but years ago it was almost required. From the modern musical’s infancy in the 1920’s through the so-called Golden Years in the 1940’s and 1950’s, audiences expected to sample a pu pu platter of great tunes, winningly arranged, as the lights dimmed from three-quarters to half and pink spotlights warmed the curtain. André Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, remembers listening intently to overtures when he attended musicals with his parents in that era — he’s now 56 — and “priding ourselves on spotting what would be the hit song from the show.” It didn’t always take much detective work because, in those days, Broadway songs were often pop hits before the shows began...

But the changing expectations, and capabilities of the audience make for some strange twists. Twists that sometimes make an overture more, not less, necesaary...

The traditional curtain-down, unstaged overture presupposed that music was already something happening, something capable, all by itself, of holding people’s attention. That notion has been sorely tested in recent years. Producers and directors say they doubt the audience’s ability to perceive useful information encoded in orchestral sound. Decoding that information depends on the habit of listening to music for its own inherent expressiveness, without words, pictures or action: a habit that disappeared from mainstream American culture along with the piano in the parlor. “Avenue Q” acknowledges that change: its “overture,” sung while a “Sesame Street”-like animation plays on video screens, is a ditty reminiscent of theme songs from sitcoms like “The Brady Bunch” and “Gilligan’s Island.”

Audiences in what Mr. Hamlisch calls “click world” seem uncomfortable unless all channels are firing at once. But this discomfort may paradoxically make overtures even more necessary. The director Gary Griffin said that, like most new musicals, “The Color Purple” started previews without an overture. At those performances, there was “an uneasy feeling when the curtain went up,” Mr. Griffin noted. “We’d had a focus group about the show, and people seemed to be troubled about how we were going to make this story” — based on a disturbing epistolary novel — “into a musical. But when we played them a sampler version of some of the songs, they all of a sudden relaxed into the idea and were ready to accept it. And I thought maybe this is what we should do in the theater.”

When the “Color Purple” overture was ready after three weeks of previews, the change in the audience was palpable, Mr. Griffin said. They seemed to understand how the music was going to function, and were prepared to listen to it for “details and textures,” not just as a delivery system for words. “It’s subtle,” he added, “but as orchestras dwindle in size, the more you put emphasis on their contribution, the better.”

What does any of this have to do with Television, and TV writing?

Well, what I took away from this article was another way to think about the brief comment I made a couple posts down about the "drama music montage." Ken Levine thinks its a cliche and overused. I know some writers who'd agree with him. The point I made below was that if it's overused, it's also necessary, both for practical reasons (shrinking time for drama and more acts means that reflective moments in the drama have all but disappeared, except for the MTV montage at the end) but also for the sake of audience perception. This "soundtracking" may seem like a cliche to older viewers, who grew up in a different TV mindspace, but to younger viewers, it's just part of the game. If you troll YouTube, you can, in fact, find hundreds of "fan cut" music video trailers using bits of their favorite shows: from Battlestar Galactica to Veronica Mars to Lost to Jim and Pam from The Office. In a sense, people creating their own drama montages.

Like the changing relationship of audience to overture, in television, the audience now responds to the musical drama montage in a certain way that was unheard of a generation ago.

This is to be expected -- and it's hardly revolutionary. When E.R. came out, there were complaints about the whirling steadicam. There are those who still deride Tommy Schlamme-style walk and talks that were pioneered by West Wing; doesn't anyone remember the "shaky camera" complaints that greeted NYPD Blue and Homicide?

As times change, so do audience needs.

In fact, to my mind, the best illustration of this has nothing to do with Broadway or TV. I remember a story about my Grandfather, that my mom used to always tell. After Vatican II, when they switched from the Latin high mass to the shorter, english liturgy, he'd come home all frustrated. His complaint?

"You're standing, you're sitting, you're kneeling, you're shaking hands, you're getting communion. There's no time to pray."