The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

  Then we travel to Doc’s neighborhood drugstore, where we meet young Tony, who is patiently painting a sign for Doc. He’s an artist of a sort—or at least a young man with artistic impulses—and his latest move has been to resign from his gang, the Jets. Why? “Something’s Coming,” he sings. He doesn’t know what, but it’s out there—something better. This is a hard kind of I Want song to write, because Tony doesn’t actually know what he wants—he just knows that it’s going to be superior to what he has, more valuable, more human, more poetic, some kind of trajectory away from hopelessness and toward a meaningful life. He has an inchoate desire, yet Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyric make it feel specific and hugely important. Musically, the song pulses with possibility and trails off into dreams. Tony has a different rhythm than his erstwhile cohorts—more introspective, more complicated. The lyric matches this tone, as Tony sings of miracles that are right around the corner—or “cannonballing down through the sky.” Tony believes in it, because he has to have it. And among the rabble that surrounds him onstage, with all their desires to crush each other, we know that this is the man we’re supposed to watch. He’s of more moment—he’s better than his surroundings, though what’s valuable about him is also what’s vulnerable. He’s the reason there’s going to be a story: his escape—if any—will be difficult and by no means certain. But it will be worth watching the attempt.

  Valuable and vulnerable also describes Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton, who, almost half a century after Tony stepped away from his gang, also defined himself as an individual outside of his surroundings. But Hamilton is no Tony—he’s the immigrant, the Shark, so to speak; he’s arrogant, self-assured, and charismatic, which also makes him a natural target in the emerging world of American politics. Hamilton’s I Want rap (it’s not a conventional song) is called “My Shot,” and it’s a distant but recognizable descendant of “Something’s Coming.” Hamilton is trying to join a gang, not escape from one, but it’s a gang of aspirants, revolutionaries with a new idea about a new country. They’re going to fight a war to get it, and Hamilton is eager to fight a war. But unlike the rest of them, he lacks breeding, finesse, a common background. He’s an outsider, and he’s the one worth watching. Of course, each time he declares

  Hey, yo, I’m just like my country

  I’m young, scrappy and hungry

  And I’m not throwing away my shot …

  we wince a bit, because in the end, what Hamilton does is throw away his shot, first figuratively, then literally, while Aaron Burr takes deadly aim and wipes out one of the great characters and intellects of early American history. “My Shot” happens in a context that we barely recognize as American musical theater—the actors are dressed in costumes that might have been preserved from a production of 1776, but from the neck up they look like a motley gang of street-corner revolutionaries in the Bronx in 2015. And they sound like that too. Yet Hamilton presents an opening number that sets the style, the tone (unique as it is), and the point of view of the show perfectly (complete with the information that the hero will be dead at the final blackout) and then proceeds to “My Shot,” secure that its insurgent style will only be helped by adhering to the classic niceties of getting a show off the ground.

  * * *

  If Tony is a descendant of Carousel’s Billy Bigelow—an earlier man with poetry locked away inside him and violence in his future—and Hamilton is his offspring many generations down the line, Seymour Krelborn, the meta-schlep at the center of Little Shop of Horrors, stands between them as the nephew or uncle they would probably both want to forget. West Side, Little Shop, and Hamilton all deal with a dangerous underbelly of the American landscape, in three wildly divergent tones. In Little Shop, Seymour lives in a cartoon version of West Side Story’s mean streets. Like the denizens of West Side Story, the characters in Little Shop occupy the slums—skid row, to be specific. And for the most part, they’re acclimated to it. Racial disharmony and general dissatisfaction make up the daily diet, just as they do in Hamilton. In the show’s weirdly cheerful-sounding opening number (irony and camp are hallmarks of the whole event), they describe their surroundings—the grime, the bums, the minimum-wage jobs, the overwhelming sense of hopelessness—until a spotlight picks up young Seymour, a clerk in an all but bankrupt flower shop. He sings of his orphanhood, his dependence on the misanthropic, intolerant owner of the shop, and his existential nightmare:

  Poor!

  All my life I’ve always been poor.

  I keep asking God what I’m for

  And he tells me, “Gee, I’m not sure,

  Sweep that floor, kid!”

  The tone is as far from “Something’s Coming” as one could get, but the problem is the same. Seymour doesn’t have Tony’s gift of poetry—in fact, he seems short on gifts altogether. But he’s lovably direct, as a cartoon character should be. After making sure that we understand his circumstances, he turns directly to us, stops whining, and starts venting his passionate desire:

  Someone show me a way to get outta here

  ’Cause I constantly pray I’ll get outta here

  Please won’t somebody say I’ll get outta here?

  Someone gimme my shot, or I’ll rot here!

  The tone is knowingly dopey, but the passion and the desire could not be clearer—or more real. It’s the rock-and-roll version of “Something’s Coming” minus the big dreams, and Seymour is begging, not promising. Little does he know what’s about to come cannonballing down through the sky. And, of course, when his shot comes, he doesn’t throw it away—with catastrophic consequences. Howard Ashman, who wrote the lyric for the composer Alan Menken’s music, was a young man at the time—but one with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of musical comedy mechanics. He combined the opening number and I Want into one song, but his interlude for Seymour appropriately trumps the rest of the number and sets up the character and the arc of the show: Seymour’s journey out of skid row and what he’ll pay to escape.

  The source material, Roger Corman’s grade-Z horror film Little Shop of Horrors, is a mad rewrite of the Faust legend, in which Seymour sells his soul to the devil (in this case a giant man-eating Venus flytrap from outer space) to achieve his escape from the living hell of skid row. The original was a low-budget bit of cheesy nonsense, but that’s part of what made it so ripe for musical adaptation: it had a unique bargain-basement tone, its own voice, and a cast-iron set of bones: Faust. Ashman and Menken used the fact that the film dated from the early ’60s to inform the score, which became a series of early rock-and-roll pastiches. The show opened off Broadway in 1982 and set the world on fire in a small way.

  Seymour’s beloved, Audrey, also has a sensational I Want, and in some senses it’s also a lift—in this case from Eliza Doolittle, who seems a remote musical theater cousin. Audrey, as poor, chilly, and hungry as Eliza, is under the thumb of a sadistic dentist whom she’s dating, while Seymour loves her from afar—or at least from across the flower shop. Ashman and Menken update “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” by changing almost everything about it—the tone, the locale, the era—but leaving the desire the same. It’s the early ’60s in America, so Audrey expresses her pathetic I Want in a cockeyed paean to the lower-middle-class American dream in a song called “Somewhere That’s Green.” Eliza craves a room somewhere far away from the cold night air. So does Audrey—in Levittown:

  A matchbox of our own

  A fence of real chain link,

  A grill out on the patio

  Disposal in the sink

  A washer and a dryer and an ironing machine

  In a tract house that we share

  Somewhere that’s green.

  She’s swallowed what she’s read in magazines and seen on TV. She’s Eliza in ’60s cartoon drag, and like Eliza, she’s turned to an unlikely hero—Seymour. There’s not much chance he’ll ever provide any of this. And then the plant intervenes, and off we go.

  Other than Stephen Sondheim, Ashman was
probably the greatest potential link between the Golden Age and the New Age, but where Sondheim’s career took him to an expansion of the serious musical plays of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Ashman’s impulses emulated the lighter, musical comedy men who provided merriment and disposable entertainment in the R&H era. He was a pop culture type. If Sondheim seems to be a descendant of Carousel, Ashman comes from the line of Kiss Me, Kate and The Pajama Game. After the off-Broadway triumph of Little Shop and a failed attempt to convert the film Smile into a musical (composed by Marvin Hamlisch), Ashman and Menken decamped for Hollywood and Disney Studios. Once there, they performed the great service of resurrecting the animated features unit, by writing the film that brought greatness back to G-rated Disney cartoons—The Little Mermaid.

  Disney had not turned out a distinguished full-length animated feature in decades, and hadn’t done a fairy tale in thirty years. Ashman and Menken applied the principles of the classic musical theater piece—complete with a typical I Want called “Part of Your World,” the requisite comic production number (“Under the Sea”), a romantic ballad (“Kiss the Girl”), and the rest. The film was a classic ’50s Broadway show reconceived in ’80s animation. They next turned to Beauty and the Beast, which also followed a classic model, and was also a smash. But in the midst of transmuting Broadway’s Golden Age to Disney animation, Howard Ashman died—one of the thousands of artists lost to the AIDS epidemic. He was forty.

  Disney completed the film he was working on at the time of his death, the charming Aladdin. And Alan Menken remained the studio’s most successful composer, writing several fine scores with other collaborators. But the Ashman-Menken touch really existed for only two and a half movies. With the exception of The Lion King, about which more later, and Frozen, currently on its way to Broadway, the studio hasn’t reached those artistic heights in animation again.

  * * *

  A direct line can be drawn between Little Shop in 1982 and Hairspray, which opened almost exactly twenty years later, in 2002. They share a tone and a point of view, they’re both based on camp cult movies, and they both have a lot more on their minds than their loopy styles would suggest. They also use their opening numbers in almost identical ways, and like a number of classic shows, they use their I Want (which is incorporated into the opening number) to do something diabolically subversive. Unlike the simpler if no less passionate desires that inform shows like A Chorus Line and Gypsy, the desire that drives these shows seems sufficient at the time but leads to a surprise. There is a deeper, greater desire hidden behind the first one, which allows the show’s real subject to expand exponentially at the halfway mark without interrupting the antic spirit that grabs the audience in the first place. If you consider the initial desire as a hill to be climbed, the experience of these shows is like discovering that there’s a hill behind the hill—and a more interesting hike in store than you might have imagined.

  Tracy Turnblad, the heroine of Hairspray, has a simple desire, but one that’s difficult for her to achieve: she wants to dance on the local Baltimore equivalent of American Bandstand, the ubiquitous TV show that featured “regular” teenagers dancing to the latest hit-parade rock-and-roll records in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Tracy has a problem, though: she’s fat. The term “regular,” in that day (and this), didn’t include the latitude of having a fat girl on TV, especially not on a dance show. So Tracy has to fight for what she wants, and even though it seems like a trivial desire in one sense, in another, it’s a fight for equality, for acceptance, for recognition that we may be created equal, but we may not look that way.

  In Hairspray’s I Want moment, Tracy pleads for a chance to dance and makes it clear that her identity is defined—for her—by the fact that in those moments when she’s moving to the beat, she’s “a movie star.” Of course, no one will let her onto The Corny Collins Show, Hairspray’s version of American Bandstand. Yet, halfway through the show’s first act, she accomplishes her desire—she wins a place on the TV show. And Hairspray should be over right then. This is where the “hill behind the hill” starts to function. For in joining the cast of The Corny Collins Show, Tracy discovers that she’s not the only one with a history of oppression. Once a month, the show features “Negro Day,” when the black kids get to dance. But never with white kids, and only on that one day. Struck by the idea that this injustice has no appropriate place in American life, Tracy is transformed from a girl with a problem to a crusader for everyone’s problems, and her need to dance is replaced by her much greater need to integrate television—and the world.

  There’s something thrilling about seeing a cloistered young person’s consciousness raised in a way that redefines her life and her mission, and, even within the somewhat goofy confines of a show like Hairspray or Little Shop, it’s moving—it turns a protagonist into a hero. It’s what Camelot was trying to do, in fact. Seymour makes his bargain with the plant and then has to figure out what to do when the bill comes due. Tracy has to risk losing her parents, her new boyfriend, and maybe even her liberty to fulfill the dream she didn’t even know she had when the curtain first went up.

  The granddaddy of this structural form (in musicals) may be My Fair Lady itself. Shaw’s irresistible combatants, Eliza and Henry Higgins, make a bargain with, apparently, no strings attached: he will teach her proper English, she will do her best to learn it, and if she succeeds, Higgins will win a bet. That’s it. What neither can see is that this feat, if achieved, will inevitably transform them, and leave them on a ledge. Once Higgins has reinvented Eliza as a new person, what is he to do with her? Once she has entered his world on her own terms, how is she to return to the one she escaped? The original I Wants are suddenly forgotten and irrelevant. The problem is much bigger than anyone imagined. The second hill is spectacularly more interesting than the first, but the first was interesting enough to start us eagerly climbing.

  * * *

  The same thing happens in The Producers, in which the down-and-out Broadway producer Max Bialystock and his little mouse of an accountant, Leo Bloom, each sing a confident I Want song that defines the first hill: Max wants, needs, and must have a hit show—his reputation is in ruins. Leo wants simply to be a producer—of anything. His life as an unhappy cog in a CPA’s office is killing his soul. What neither of them knows is that their monumental scheme—to produce the biggest flop in Broadway history and run off with the unspent money—will bring them what they are truly seeking: a friendship, the companionship of another human being. It’s something neither has ever known. The original film of The Producers, like both Little Shop and Hairspray, was a cult favorite—a scattershot bit of craziness with a voice (Mel Brooks’s borscht belt caterwaul, in this case) but very little structure and a chaotic third act that rides off the rails. The musical, on the other hand, was a huge popular success, in part because, while the film’s voice was retained, its structure was retooled to chronicle Max and Leo’s dawning realization that they need and love each other.

  A more typical romance is introduced, as Max lusts for, but Leo falls in love with, the ridiculously overendowed Swedish bombshell they hire as a secretary. But the enduring relationship is between the two men, and the result is infinitely more satisfying than the film because it tells a human story all the way to the end. The first hill is about something concrete; the second is about something humane. And that trajectory makes sense. Even people who seem to care only about Broadway understand that human contact is more rewarding than a hit show. Or some of them do.

  * * *

  It’s no coincidence that one of the collaborators on the book of both The Producers and Hairspray was Thomas Meehan, who had written the book for Annie back in the ’70s and had an innate sense of musical theater storytelling. His view was that no matter how well disguised, musicals are usually far-flung rewrites of classic tales, one way or the other. After looking at an early draft of Hairspray to see if he’d be interested in joining the team, he said, “It’s Cinderella. She wants to go to the bal
l but no one will invite her. And her family tries to stop her. She gets there anyway, meets the prince, but runs away from him. In the end, he catches her, and the worlds of the common people and royalty are joined together. It’s worked before, God knows.”

  Of course, he was completely right, and though he was not responsible for a lot of the jokes in Hairspray, or the thematic idea of equality for all, he distilled the structure and drew a map.

  Annie, it should be noted, is faultlessly built and also owes its structural impulses to a sturdy source, Little Lord Fauntleroy, from which it is lifted, at least in part. This isn’t to take anything away from Tom Meehan—it’s a most admirable theft, in fact, reconstituting a very Victorian tale into a uniquely American one. In an earlier era it would probably have been greeted with uncomplicated joy by critics and audiences alike. But it opened almost two years after A Chorus Line had redrawn the playing field, and insiders, especially, were reluctant to offer a full embrace, even while audiences were falling all over themselves.

  “You may love Annie,” one theater wag commented, “but you’ll hate yourself in the morning.”

  The smart set couldn’t stop it, however. Time has been good to the show, because structurally and emotionally it delivers. It’s not just the famous little redhead and her scruffy dog, Sandy, that have kept the show in constant circulation. It’s the power of myth and the skill of the telling.

  Annie also features one of the most perfect I Want songs ever written—little orphan Annie’s plea to her unknown parents, “Maybe.” Who, in almost any audience, can resist a little mop-headed girl in a filthy orphanage in the depths of the Depression fantasizing about a real home life (somewhere that’s green) with real parents?

  Bet you he reads

  Bet you she sews