The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

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  For Daisy, Janet, and Joe,

  who took me with them to the theater

  And for Linda, Josh, and Anna Daisy,

  whom I now get to take with me

  Tuning Up

  or, How I Came to Write This Book

  I’ve never been much of an international sightseer. I’ve never been eager to tramp around ancient ruins or bask in the architecture of the great cathedrals of Europe. I understand these activities have enormous spiritual and aesthetic value for a lot of people, who are fascinated and moved, sometimes to tears, to be in the presence of the ancients. I’m married to a woman who is rarely so content as when she has the chance to wander the corridors of history. But it’s never meant that much to me. When I find myself in one of these places, more often than not I begin to think about Broadway musicals. I consider it a defect in my level of curiosity.

  It’s shameful, really. Musicals have provided me with the kind of nourishment that crumbling walled cities have not. I’ve loved them since my parents and my grandmother Daisy took me to see Mary Martin as Peter Pan just before my sixth birthday. In fact, along with nonmusical plays, they’ve been the source of most of my education and consumed an enormous amount of my thinking and my emotional development, which sometimes makes me feel foolish.

  But I have to thank one particular set of ruins for the fact that this book got written. I was clambering around the Greek island of Delos, Apollo’s home, on a hot August afternoon when it occurred to me that I ought to teach musical theater to college students.

  Why Delos? Why teach? Why that moment? Who ever knows for sure why a thought pops into your head? I could claim that it was because Apollo was the god of music and poetry, and that got me thinking, but I doubt anything that erudite was lamping around my brain. I have a feeling that the ruined columns lying in piles all around me reminded me of the poster for the Nathan Lane production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which probably caused me some internal embarrassment. While I was trying to turn from the mortifying to the high-minded, the idea of imparting knowledge to young people somehow slipped into my brain.

  The fact is, almost everything reminds me of the theater, and certainly ancient ruins do. There are fabulous semipreserved amphitheaters all around Greece and Italy, and even ruins that never were performance spaces seem to me to be inherently dramatic—they make me think of declamatory speech and kissing in the shadows, murder in the dark, and coups d’etat. But also, to be honest, they call up Nathan Lane in a toga and distant memories of Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford, David Burns, and John Carradine singing “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid.” That’s always been a kind of heaven to me, and ruins are about the world of the gods.

  There was another connection as well—a family connection. Shakespeare wrote about Greeks and Romans, and what little I know about them I learned from Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and the others. My wife’s uncle, Harry Levin, for many years head of the Comparative Literature Department at Harvard, used to spend an entire semester picking apart only four of Shakespeare’s plays, holding every line up to the light and questioning why it was written the way it was written, what led to it, and what it led to. He was like a Swiss watchmaker taking apart and reassembling a perfect timepiece. It was an intense fun-house ride for Shakespeare nuts, and it was glorious. But no one had ever done that for Gypsy or Guys and Dolls or The Book of Mormon. Why not? Because Broadway musicals can’t compare to Shakespeare? Says who? If Shakespeare is England’s national theater, aren’t Broadway musicals ours?1

  Being a man of limited imagination but a certain dull cunning, I soon thought of stealing Uncle Harry’s concept lock, stock, and barrel; the only thing that would be different was the repertoire. And why should I be the one to teach it? My reasoning was simple and, I hope, not overly self-inflated. I’d been working as a dramaturgically inclined Broadway producer for two decades, developing new works and reviving old ones, and I’d been the Artistic Director of the Encores! series of concert musicals at New York City Center since 2000. I didn’t, and don’t, claim to have any God-given wisdom about musicals, but I’d been in the trenches for a long time, and worked on dozens.

  * * *

  I structured the course quickly in my head while pretending to admire all that was left of Apollo’s hometown. (Was the lyric of “My Hometown” from What Makes Sammy Run? coursing through my brain at the time? Quite possibly.) It was Harry Levin’s course, but the texts would be Gypsy, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, and South Pacific. Three two-hour sessions for each show. The students would have to read them aloud to understand them. Why those four shows? A showbiz drama, a classic New York comedy, an intellectual romance, and a wartime epic. And each of them close to perfect. Why not?

  New York University’s Tisch School was happy to hear of my interest and assigned me a slot. The course was clean and simple, and it just kind of worked. We closely examined the four classic musicals, page by page, trying to piece out why every line of dialogue was there, what every lyric accomplished, and how music supported whatever the fundamental idea of the show was. The course assumed that every great musical has a single idea, a single stake, and that much of the writer’s job is to discover what it is and then cut away the thicket of things that don’t belong so that the idea can be explored and celebrated in a way that audiences take home with them. The course asked the question: How do all the diverse tools of the trade—music, rhyme, comedy, character, dance, drama, storytelling, even scenery and costumes, lights, and orchestrations—get pointed in the same direction toward the same goal? In a sense, it was an architecture class, exploring how a structure is designed and built that is strong enough to support a single vision and fulfill or confound an audience’s expectations, as required in the circumstance.

  The course proved popular, and it wasn’t long before I added a second one, which examined what Broadway folks call a “song plot.” Not to be confused with the plot of the show, a song plot is like a graph on which the songs in a musical story can be laid out. It’s a surprisingly consistent diagram: an opening number, an “I Want” song for the main character or characters, a “conditional” love song (“If I Loved You,” not “I Love You”), a production number, and so forth right through the finale.

  The not-so-secret agenda of these courses was to point out that this kind of craftsmanship, gradually abandoned beginning in the late 1970s, has led to a much more chaotic life for the Broadway musical. It may be incredibly hip to leave basic storytelling techniques behind and light out for the Territory, as Huck Finn did on his raft with neither a map nor a rule book. But an awful lot of shows get hopelessly lost that way and disappear into the woods, never to be heard from again. And most of the works that have experienced real lasting success in the years since the Golden Age of Broadway are, when the surface is scratched, deeply traditi
onal and craftsmanlike. I’m talking about Sweeney Todd, The Producers, Hairspray, Wicked, and The Book of Mormon, which, contemporary though it may be, is really just an orthodox mash-up of The King and I, Guys and Dolls, and The Music Man with a twenty-first-century voice and subject.

  The students wanted to talk about those shows as much as the classics; this was their Broadway. And so Mormon was added to the syllabus. We examined I Want songs from Wicked and how a deadly serious six-character musical like Next to Normal copes with the need for some noisy comic relief. Everything was fair game.

  I’m grateful for the opportunity to teach at Tisch and to interact with a student body that is as curious, energized, and passionate as any group of young people I’ve ever encountered. It’s great fun for me, and for a few years I assumed that was that.

  But after a while, I started to get invited to give talks outside the classroom, and that’s when people started asking me when I was going to write a book about all of this. In some ways, looking at Broadway shows mapped out in the way I had mapped them seemed like a secret language that was fun to let other people in on. Frankly, I had my doubts about this book proposition, because the classes were really for young would-be professionals, not just musical theater fans. But the outside talks were for fans, and they seemed to be the ones urging me on. Part of the process, then, has been to take what began as an academic course and broaden it into a wider realm—the story of how musicals got made in their heyday, the much vaunted but never quite defined Golden Age, and how they get made today. Some of the songs and shows are ancient history to my students, and perhaps to the younger generation of readers as well. But I don’t apologize for that. Ancient history can have its inspiring effects, as I learned, by accident, on Delos.

  * * *

  On the other hand, recent history can be educational in a different way, especially if you’ve been a part of it. When the producer Margo Lion asked me to take a look at the John Waters movie Hairspray, for instance, I told her I thought it was a perfectly silly idea for a musical—it felt almost like a home movie. But Lion saw in it the bones of a classic musical theater story waiting to be exposed, and she was completely correct. The show succeeds with general audiences while the original film remains only a cult classic, because the show has real architecture in addition to a real subject: it opens the door and lets everyone out of the closet. But it would never have worked without the first-rate craftsmanship of storytelling that took five writers and a world-class director to achieve.

  I was the dramaturg, a German word that, in this case, translates as “noodge.” One of the most heated arguments I lost (thank God) was with Hairspray’s director, Jack O’Brien, about the penultimate moment in the show. The scene is set in the local Eventorium, where the entire company is gathered for the Miss Teenage Hairspray contest of some year in the early ’60s. Only two people are missing: the heroine, Tracy Turnblad, and her mother, the “ample American” Edna, played in drag by gravel-voiced Harvey Fierstein in a fat suit. But there is a surprise coming. Onstage is a gigantic can of hairspray, and someone is hiding in it. Who? It had to be Tracy, I argued: she’s the heroine of the piece, she’s engineered the entire event so that it will work out to a happy ending, she’s the one who is going to arrive to save the day. She has to be in the can so she can arrive in the most spectacular way.

  “Nonsense,” said O’Brien. “Edna is in the can.”

  “Why?” I asked petulantly. “It makes no sense.”

  “Because,” he said, “when the audience sees Harvey Fierstein explode out of that can in a huge red dress, they’re all going to come, from sheer joy. And they won’t care about anything else.”

  He was right, of course. Show business and dramaturgy—the happiest war ever waged. I still maintain that the end of Hairspray makes very little logical sense, and I’m still right. But what does it get me? Musical theater is that exact thing: the intersection of craftsmanship and the irrationally thrilling. When you know who the characters are and what they want, when you root hard for them all night, when you’ve been properly cared for and fussed over by artists who know how, you are set up to have the greatest creators reach right past your intellectual faculties at the last minute and press down on that joy buzzer that lurks in the back part of your brain. When they do, your spirit levitates, just like Peter Pan heading out the window to Neverland. I’ve seen it happen, and that’s why I wrote this book.

  A Note About the Shows Discussed—and a Few Other Matters

  The title of this book was originally “The Secret Life of the Broadway Musical,” but I changed it when I realized I was going to write only about American shows. During various periods of Broadway’s history, the street has been dominated by musicals from England, but I’ve chosen not to deal with any of them. This may reflect a personal prejudice, but I hope it has more to do with the British musical itself, which, when not imitating the American musical, has always been created around its own set of traditions and a history of entertainment—Gilbert and Sullivan, the music hall, the Christmas Pantomime, the Dickensian yarn—that are distant cousins of our own. British musicals, though they’ve sometimes been the economic engine of Broadway, don’t actually help tell the story I wanted to tell, so I’ve left them out. No disrespect intended.

  I’ve not spent a lot of time in these pages talking about dance in any formal way—I don’t feel qualified to do so. Dance has been an integral part of Broadway musicals since the beginning. The Black Crook, arguably the very first musical, allegedly came into being in 1866 because a Parisian dance troupe was stranded when the New York theater it was supposed to appear in burned down, and the company was rescued by being shoehorned into a musical melodrama. But even so, I don’t have a great deal to say on the subject of how dance has evolved in the modern musical. Dream ballets existed from the 1930s on, became standard fare in the ’40s with Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins doing most of the innovating, and then lived on to be ridiculed by some of today’s musicals. Big production numbers have usually featured dance breaks, and dance has always been a useful, sometimes blissful tool for romantic expression. As the director-choreographer Warren Carlyle said about musicals, “When you can no longer speak, you sing; when you can no longer sing, you dance.” I don’t think I have anything further to add.

  I’ve also returned often in these pages to a handful of mostly classic shows, at the expense of discussing many others. Gypsy, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, Guys and Dolls, Little Shop of Horrors, Hairspray, The Book of Mormon, and a few others predominate, and in some cases, their entire plots seem to emerge. The reasons for this are numerous, but the best one is simply that these are the shows that taught me the most, that I spend the most time teaching. Perhaps they’re not perfect, and none of them is my absolute favorite (that would be Follies), but for the purposes of this book, they were the most useful to me. And that seemed reason enough. As a consequence, a number of successful and well-constructed shows—Kiss Me, Kate and La Cage aux Folles come to mind—are only occasionally mentioned. Rodgers and Hammerstein get a lot of space, but not one show in particular. There’s a lot about Stephen Sondheim and not enough, perhaps, about his wonderful contemporaries, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, John Kander and Fred Ebb, Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, Jerry Herman, Bob Merrill, and the like. And there are other important musicals—Funny Girl, Brigadoon, and Annie Get Your Gun, to name just three—that have escaped notice altogether. A number of important creators whose work I admire—William Finn comes immediately to mind—are similarly not to be found. This book isn’t intended to be a survey or a complete history of Broadway musicals, and it is not even slightly democratic; it has no intention of paying tribute to all worthy competitors. Nor is it any kind of instruction manual. It’s a personal way of talking about the art and craft of making musicals, very much from one man’s point of view. I’ve tried to use what has seemed most telling to me, and I’ve tended to wander off in all directions from time to time, just as I’m mak
ing the case that a well-structured musical should never do so. There are stories that I felt were worth telling, bits and pieces of trivia that I’ve accumulated, and somewhat off-topic observations that seemed worth a paragraph here and there. I considered cutting each one, but most have remained, for better or worse. The book is, in some senses, a ramble.

  One other point is worth making. Nothing in these pages is meant to imply that the artists creating musicals knowingly follow a well-worn formula. Quite the opposite is true. While musicals tend to follow patterns, the writers and directors who create them are generally rediscovering how to make each show completely fresh and original every time out. It’s only in hindsight that the patterns emerge. Not only that: there are big hit shows in which few of the patterns I describe actually appear. Take a look at Chicago or 1776 if you doubt it. Not every show has an I Want song. Or a conditional love song, or a main event, or even an 11 o’clock number. But most do, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and that’s what makes writing about them fun.

  Still, any reader of this book who wants to point triumphantly to some show that doesn’t seem to be built on the classic chassis I’m writing about will get no argument from me, just a tip of the hat. If I still wore a hat.

  1. Overture

  Is the American musical an animal or a machine? That’s a peculiar question, but think about it for a moment. A machine is made from standardized, manufactured parts, assembled according to a particular logic; when switched on, it does a task, or perhaps a series of them. An animal is, in some ways, not so very different. We human animals are also standardized to a great extent. Two eyes, two lips, a nose, as Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote, and we perform a certain set of actions, some of them repetitively. These include the mundane (brushing our teeth) and the profound (falling in love). We’re like machines, but we’re not machines; we’re individuals with our own hearts, our own brains, our own ways of looking at the world informed by experience, temperament, taste, and desire. We’re better than machines.