Piano Guts and Other Mothers: Staging Fantasy in David Greenspan and Stephin Merritt's Musical Adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline.

In Coraline, David Greenspan and Stephin Merritt's musical stage adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novella for children, a uniquely theatrical approach is taken to the notion that "fantasy is any departure from consensus reality" (Hume 21). This article considers how the literary convention of contrasting the real with the fantastic is translated into the context of performance, where the synergy between theatrical signs and the imagination of the audience creates an ephemeral fiction. Fantasy and consensus reality find themselves doubled when considered in relation to the theatre, which already operates as dialectic between mimesis and diegesis. As such, fantasy plays are capable of sustaining multivariate levels of signification. This polysemousness of meaning adds another layer to the ephemeral moment of fantasy being shared. Paired with the unique attributes of the musical form as a way of highlighting disintegration as an artistic choice, the 2009 True Love Productions/Manhattan Class Company production used an ironic and intellectualized aesthetic that engaged in "making strange" the three levels within the production: the real of the theatre world, the real of Coraline's world, and the fantasy realm that she finds herself in.