ABSTRACT
This chapter traces how the acoustic phenomenon of reverberation, and more particularly the audio effect known as reverb, is used in three important backstage musicals, made over a seventy-plus-year span. Those are Rouben Mamoulian's Applause, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain, and Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. It looks at how the presence of sound-processing devices such as reverb might reinforce or challenge other decisions regarding stages, frames, and the larger filmic mise en scene. In time, the term 'backstage musical' came to be applied to films such as Applause. Reverberant sound powerfully but obliquely denotes space and dimension. Literally, the acousmata achieves by proxy exactly what Mamoulian labored so hard to achieve with the unwieldy camera movements: a vastly expanded represented world, fluidly rather than statically apprehended. The diegetic import of the reverberant acousmata is inextricably linked to the industrial circumstances of its own fabrication.
