Dyer - The Space of Happiness in the Musical

Musicals are discourses of happiness.

Such feelings of happiness may touch on constants of human experience but they are also culturally and historically specific. The rise and decline of the musical may itself be taken as an indication of changing conceptions of happiness in 'Western culture. Such conceptions, and the actual feeling of them, are not socially innocent. Some modes of feeling may' at a minimum, be a privilege of some social groups, and may even express the values and sense of identity of members of those groups. This text focuses on the motif of expansion in the musical.