| abstract | - Musicals as an art form have a unique problem. For musical fans, it merely falls under Willing Suspension of Disbelief. For those who dislike musicals, it tends to at least superficially be the reason why. As we all know, music needs to be composed in advance. Rhyming poetry takes time to piece together. People don't just burst into song and dance in the middle of the street to express their feelings. So how do you make sense of a work of fiction where they do?
* The Alternate Universe Hypothesis: The musical is set in an alternate world, or magic has been worked on the ordinary world, in which people really do burst into spontaneous song and dance. If the world has always been this way, singing is simply a normal and commonplace form of human communication, if one that seems a bit odd to those of us living in a less musical world. If the world is not normally this way, expect it to be some sort of an uncontrollable compulsion to sing at emotional moments, sometimes to the extent of Summoning Backup Dancers from seemingly nowhere. Characters may here comment explicitly on when they or other characters are singing as opposed to talking (though where the verb "sing" is just used instead of something like "say" in a song, it does not necessarily imply this). This tends to be the most common, especially in stage musicals.
* The All In Their Heads Hypothesis: There is no singing; the songs are an artistic rendering of the characters' fantasies, with the format of song in a way serving to distinguish between what really happens and what is only in the characters' heads, much like a Shakespearean Soliloquy. Naturally, this means that no characters are aware of what goes on in another character's song: there may be duets, but then they are Distant Counterpoint Duets where the two characters do not know of one another's participation.
* The Diegetic Hypothesis: The characters are performing actual songs for one another as they might in Real Life, the songs having been written and practiced beforehand in a realistic way. It does not count if the song is merely background music for a scene; if the performance is shown in full and given the viewer's full attention, however, it can count as an example even if the work is not what one would traditionally call a musical.
* The Adaptation Hypothesis: Derives from the Literary Agent Hypothesis: the songs are merely a dramatic reconstruction of what really happened. For instance, if two characters converse in song and come to some sort of conclusion, it is assumed that the characters really just had a normal, non-musical conversation that came to the same conclusion, but for the sake of upping the drama (or comedy), it has here been adapted into a song. Technically, all musicals are really examples of the Adaptation Hypothesis: there is a story and the music is added to dramatize it. However, to truly count as a definite Adaptation Hypothesis example, the others must generally be clearly not applicable: it must be a non-diegetic song during which the singing character clearly communicates with other characters in some form but the universe is still not implied to treat spontaneous singing as normal. Of course, musicals rarely consistently adopt one musical world hypothesis for their entirety: most of the time individual songs employ different hypotheses, with some songs even split into sections that seem to use different ones. It is especially common for All In Their Heads songs to be scattered among other songs that are clearly heard by other characters. This makes a degree of sense-after all, in an alternate universe hypothesis musical, an all in their heads song would be the equivalent of an internal monologue in a standard play. One should also remember that most stories in any genre will contain conceits and set-pieces in order to form a more rewarding narrative. After all, why are there so many snappy one-liners and pratfalls in a comedy? Or why are there so many explosions and car chases in an action movie? Answer: because they just wouldn't be comedy or action movies without them. Musicals have songs in them: just go with it. All musicals are technically examples; when adding one, it is therefore necessary to detail which musical world hypothesis applies to which songs. Examples of Musical World Hypotheses include:
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