“[title of chapter]”

A post-integrated musical incorporates intertextual references and explores the playful interactions of continuity and innovation; its signifiers explode from the event in blissful excess outside chronological time while containing a plot. Such self-referential, site-specific work, characteristic of experimental performance art of the time, became the starting point for, a work often called a postmodern musical. Although the writers discussed their lives in the musical, their stories were sometimes fashioned into someone else’s character during the show’s development with director Michael Berresse. Issues of labor and the work of musical theater resurface in dialogue about the reality of being a performer. The individual words and ideas, musical phrases or genres are not necessarily ambiguous or complicated; the complexity arises from the many references and resonances embedded in the simplest text. In the presentation the cast pay homage to Sondheim by narrating the story of Sweeney Todd to the music and in the style of the opening of Hamilton.