The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

  Maybe she’s made me a closet of clothes

  Maybe they’re strict

  As straight as a line …

  Don’t really care as long as they’re mine!

  So maybe now this prayer’s

  The last one of its kind …

  Won’t you please come get your Baby …

  Maybe

  The song manages to capture not only her indomitable desire but also her ambivalence about whether she’s ever going to be able to achieve it. She’s strong and vulnerable at the same time (that’s what that last “maybe” is doing there). So, of course, we start rooting hard—on page three. “Tomorrow” may be Annie’s immortal standard, but “Maybe” is its secret weapon. Charles Strouse’s music and Martin Charnin’s lyric both make a virtue of unsophisticated simplicity, appropriate to a little girl with no real education. The song makes no great claims as a work of art—it’s only trying to be a foundation for the story. That it succeeds so completely is what elevates it to the realm of art, in spite of itself.

  As the plot plays out, it takes the combined efforts of the richest man in the world and the president of the United States to help her solve her problem, but Annie remains determined, and she leads them, not the other way around. She’s a model of the active hero, or in this case heroinette. Surely it is among the greatest American myths that in our country, even the busiest and the most powerful will stop what they’re doing and help a poor orphan find her parents. In today’s world, it’s a lot more fairy tale than myth, alas, but it’s one we’re all too happy to be told, even now.

  * * *

  The theater critic Martin Gottfried once wrote, “Any show the audience likes is a good show.”

  This may seem an obvious tautology to everyday theatergoers, but it’s heresy to a lot of critics and theater professionals. The theater page of The New York Times has waged many a campaign against shows it couldn’t shut down. Having rendered a negative verdict, most critics find it unpleasant to see their opinions cheerfully disregarded by paying customers. It’s a condemnation, they feel, of the taste of the theatergoing public, which should pay at least as much attention to the critic as to the play itself. There’s nothing new about this—when Robert Benchley was covering Broadway for Life magazine back in the ’20s, he ran a weekly blurb for the infuriatingly long-running comedy Abie’s Irish Rose that read, “People laugh at this every night, which is why democracy can never work.” Benchley was poking fun at himself, but generally critics really don’t like audiences to disagree with them. It’s embittering. Yet sometimes, and ever more frequently, it happens.

  Before the Internet, demand pricing, social networks, and the many other sophisticated marketing plans that are now deployed to sell tickets to Broadway shows, the best sales tool producers had was a fistful of rave reviews. Generally, if the notices were bad, the show closed. But that’s no longer true. Audiences aren’t local anymore—at least not after the first couple of months of a run; most of them enter the theater never having seen the Times review or any of the others. They don’t care what they’re supposed to think, and this can be seen only as a good thing for both business and democracy, Benchley be damned. From a loftier perch, one might argue that discernment in most aesthetic matters is on the wane in the twenty-first century, but Broadway surely doesn’t care about that—it’s a business. And, as Tim Zagat said about eating out, “Most customers like most restaurants better than most critics do.” The same is obviously true of the theater.

  The year I started teaching at NYU, Wicked had just opened to largely negative and dismissive reviews, and my students didn’t care for it any more than the critics did. But as time went by and the show established itself, first as a hit, then as a smash hit, then as an international phenomenon, each successive class’s opinion rose accordingly. By now, twelve years into the run, the show has become a bona fide masterwork—and much admired by NYU students. And it’s exactly the same show the critics and that first class slammed around back in 2003. I don’t think it’s because Wicked was ahead of its time.

  Wicked, in any formal analysis, has structural issues. It struggles with the problem of compacting a long, sprawling novel into a form—musical theater—that is often at its best when it is tidy. Long novels are hard to adapt for the musical stage. The successful ones are rare, beginning with Show Boat back in 1927 and including Oliver, the megahit Les Misérables, and, in their day, Camelot and Man of La Mancha. More common are the novelistic adaptations that have been crushed under their own weight, from Saratoga to Here’s Where I Belong to Shōgun. Succeed or fail, all these shows do their best to contain multitudes and travel through too much time. They tend to be long (the original production of Les Miz clocked in at well over three hours, as did Show Boat) and yet feel somehow incomplete and sketched in in certain places—as if a lot has been left out or quickly approximated, because it has. Big novels tend to tell their stories in incremental ways through dozens of characters and hundreds of incidents, and don’t yield up their bounty easily in a form that typically depends on a few big, broad-stroke plot developments. Wicked is no exception. It opened out of town to bad reviews and was continually retooled on its way to New York, where the critics again dismissed it as murky and discursive, dark and overplotted. Yet over time, all of that has become legitimately irrelevant. Why?

  It’s easy to see why critical opinion was so cranky. In its prologue, the show tries to get off the ground beginning with a flashback from the Wicked Witch Elphaba’s death to the day when she is conceived, and thence to the day when she arrives in prep school. The show isn’t ten minutes old yet, and we’ve already been in three different decades and three different locations; we hardly have any idea why. Or where. Or when. The design is abstract enough to keep us guessing, and not necessarily in a good way. The story is told by the good witch, Glinda, but by the time we hit the midpoint of the act we’ve also had to keep track of a goat who is being hounded out of his teaching profession by anti-animal fascists, Elphaba’s handicapped sister and her growing crush, a blooming friendship between Elphaba and Glinda, an increasing rivalry between them over an apparently worthless rich boy named Fiyero, and the motives of the headmistress of the school they attend, who is tutoring Elphaba in sorcery. And yet, despite all this plot material (endemic to big-novel adaptations) and Wicked’s occasional forays into explaining the sources of The Wizard of Oz (it is, after all, a prequel), audiences remain enchanted much of the time and happy to be tolerant of the rest. Part of the reason, I believe, is that it has an I Want moment that is so big and powerful, and a want that is so universal and recognizable, that audiences are willing, even eager, to struggle with a lot. And any show the audience likes is a good show.

  What might it be, this universal desire, this thing that we’ll latch on to fiercely because we all feel it? It is expressed by a green-skinned girl with some kind of undefined telekinetic powers. She’s not much like us on the surface. But the surface is a metaphor. She’s exactly like us on the inside—desperately afraid of the spectacle she’s making of herself, convinced that she will be friendless and powerless for her whole life, bewildered by the casual cruelty of her peers, and always alone. She is, in some instinctively understandable way, the sum of all the insecurities felt by young people, perhaps especially when they first arrive at school, and perhaps especially girls. When the headmistress, noticing her apparent natural gift for sorcery, offers to take Elphaba under her wing and introduce her to the great Wizard of Oz, the dam breaks. Elphaba sings “The Wizard and I,” about what glories might await her if the most powerful figure in Oz were to notice her. The song builds in intensity and performance opportunity well beyond the normal I Want, practically to the point of an “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” which brings down the first-act curtain of Gypsy. The actress playing Elphaba (the role was originated by Idina Menzel, who won the Tony for it) can’t help but pull out all the stops vocally and leave nothing unexpressed. It’s a chance not simply to explain bu
t also to dazzle. Elphaba’s dream of being a person who matters, whose gifts are recognized, who has a place in the world, overwhelms everything around it. It’s long, and loud, and, as my former boss Rocco Landesman once said in another context, “You can’t get out of its way.” Giving this much space and theatricality to an I Want song may seem unwise, because Elphaba appears to be shooting the works vocally at an awfully early point in the evening. But the first-act curtain will ice the cake by having her wailing an even bigger song while flying on a broomstick above the crowd. Wicked takes no chances, luckily for its audiences. And the composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz is a past master at creating big power ballads that stay just on the right side of the barrier between theater and pop songs, which gives the songs a broad appeal to audiences and affords critics the opportunity to turn up their noses.

  As befits Wicked’s overall style, “The Wizard and I” is discursive. It allows Elphaba to imagine the next stages of her life in some detail, including the ways she’ll unshackle herself from all the pain that she’s suffered as the ultimate outsider; shed her ugly-duckling exterior; and become a woman of substance. And millions of theatergoers want to make that journey.

  * * *

  Admittedly, we are now much more used to putting up with the cacophony of incidents that are featured in Wicked than we were back in the days of My Fair Lady. Our brains are much better at putting half-sorted events on hold and coming back to them later. We process information differently than our parents did. And our children are vastly ahead of us in this progression. What older audience members and many critics found wanting in Wicked’s structure, its storytelling, and its driving but sometimes melody-challenged score were not a problem for younger theatergoers. But Wicked has two other assets worth noting. It’s a spectacular, and the special effects, the flying, and the quirky but grandly imaginative design scheme all serve to take the audience on a trip it won’t soon forget. And it has a subject that is worth the trouble. Elphaba’s lonely journey begins as a struggle for respect, set against a darkening world in which Oz is threatened by fascism. Her friend and ultimate rival Glinda is the ultimate in-crowd girl, blond, pretty, entitled, and thoughtless. The ways they struggle to come to terms with what the world has given them and what they must take from it by force may not be as clearly articulated as they could be, but simply wrestling with them at all is enough to engage us. It’s no coincidence that the show’s book was written by Winnie Holzman, creator of the iconic TV series My So-Called Life, in which a teenage Claire Danes struggled to figure out the world. Wicked has a grip on the most confusing parts of the passage from girl to woman, and it feels no need to deploy its points with the kind of great clarity that is admired by grown-ups. In some sense, confusion is its best friend. It’s like a Camelot, but for teens and those of us who vividly remember the pain of adolescence. Like Camelot, it deals with big questions about what is civilizing and what it means to become a citizen of the world, but it looks at these questions through the lens of youth just beginning to grow up. And when Elphaba ultimately succumbs to wickedness, we’re to understand that it was her inevitable fate, given the cruel vicissitudes of the world and the particular set of cards she was dealt at birth. It’s the struggle that counts, says Wicked. “No One Mourns the Wicked” is the show’s opening number, but by the end that’s exactly what we do—mourn for Elphaba and the valiant battle she ultimately loses. It doesn’t hurt that audiences enter with a fixed point of view about the Wicked Witch of the West and are then forced to question every assumption they’ve carried with them since their first encounter with the movie of The Wizard of Oz. That idea gets them in the door. But they stay because, in this spectacular, confounding, and sometimes wandering show, the I Want grabs them at the start and won’t let them go.

  4. If I Loved You

  Conditional Love Songs

  Back in the 1970s, when I was a struggling screenwriter (a struggle no more successful than Elphaba’s, by the way, and a lot less interesting), a collaborator and I got hired to write a werewolf movie. It was to be directed (though it never got made) by the great cinematographer Michael Chapman, and, like most werewolf movies, it featured a love story at the center. When we turned in our first draft, Chapman came at us with a barrage of notes, one of which was about the first meeting between the young woman and the older man who would, in the course of the story, fall in love.

  “This is awful,” he said, though he may have used a stronger word. “If you want to understand how to write the first encounter between two future mates, there’s a book that will tell you everything you need to know.”

  This was intriguing. These scenes are damned hard to write. What was this secret book, the key that would unlock one of the mysteries of screenwriting?

  “It’s called The Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe,” he said. We were, unsurprisingly, deflated. A dryly written ornithological monograph was hardly what we had hoped for. But it was only eighty pages long, so we read it. It told us everything we needed to know.

  The great crested grebe is a lake bird, and all I really remember about the book today is that it detailed, painstakingly, the odd ritual of courtship that the male and female go through, which is baffling to the human eye but hard not to watch if you are lucky enough to get the chance—ungainly birds approaching each other on water, flapping their wings aggressively, retreating from each other, pecking at each other’s necks, retreating again, shaking their bodies in something that looks a little like a dance and a little like a fit, and then, for no discernible reason, building a nest together.

  No one knows why they do it that way, but as a metaphor, it’s a study in fear and desire, and humans do it just like the grebe—awkwardly, with a lot of insecure, wasted motion, overaggression followed by apology, sufficient preening, and sufficient modesty. Bravery and cowardice, hope and hurt feelings play out a tug-of-war, with a big dose of uncertainty about the outcome. It’s the inevitable upshot of seeing someone we want; it will change two lives forever. And it’s almost always compelling to watch. As the Stage Manager in Our Town says, right before he serves strawberry ice-cream sodas to the teenagers Emily and George, “I’m awfully interested in how big things like that begin.”

  In a musical, after the protagonist has told us of his or her hopes and dreams and the accompanying determination to achieve them, in the I Want moment, there’s usually an encounter with a love interest. And there’s usually a song, which is called, generically, a “conditional” love song. It’s called that because of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “If I Loved You,” which is embedded in what people in the business refer to as the “bench scene”—Act 1, Scene 2, of Carousel. It’s arguably the most perfect scene ever written in a musical, in part because it beautifully imitates, unwittingly I’m sure, the courtship habits of the great crested grebe.

  Carousel goes in and out of favor as its sexual politics are continually put on trial by audiences and critics—it’s about a man who loves his wife and strikes her, and a wife who doesn’t want to and won’t leave. But the magnitude of its achievement tends to overwhelm the objections. Based on the play Liliom by Ferenc Molnár, it treats the fatality of love, as two quietly desperate people choose the freedom of romantic passion over the prison of everyday drudgery, and pay an awful price. Julie Jordan, its heroine, is a naïve millworker, destined to live out her life at the weaving loom in a bleak and gloomy factory, surviving on a menial’s wages. Billy Bigelow is a young tough making his scant living as a carousel barker at a traveling carnival. Neither has much of a future, unless they take it into their own hands.

  As previously noted, Carousel begins with a dance prelude (Scene 1) that reveals both the straitened circumstances and the petty pleasures of a life defined by rural poverty and routine. There’s nothing romantic, or even hopeful, about Julie’s existence. The carnival is the best she can expect, and it’s a tawdry thing. “Carousel Waltz” is a beautiful piece of music, and the ballet that accompanies it can be dazzling
ly good theater—but the world it depicts is a sad one, bereft of real hope. The magnificence of the wooden horses on Billy’s carousel promises something noble, romantic, and grand, but it seems impossibly far off from the daily life of this hidebound Maine fishing village.

  After the waltz, Julie and her friend Carrie are discovered running from the woman who owns the carousel through a corner of the local park, which contains nothing but a bench. The scene begins in action and peril, and the stakes just keep going up. To be fair, considerable credit is due to Molnár, whose play, ironically, is said to have been translated into English by Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers’s first lyric-writing partner. (Hart was an employee of Benjamin Glazer, who got credit for the translation, according to Hart’s biographer Gary Marmorstein.)

  Hammerstein shortened the scene by almost half, and while the structure remains the same, the intensity is expertly ratcheted up. From the very first line, there is an argument going on, and the scene is a series of engaging, quickly shifting, and escalating disputes, which result in two lives being changed forever. It begins with the carousel’s owner, Mrs. Mullen, hurling accusations at Julie about her behavior on the carousel. Julie, whom we don’t really know much about, has been “taking liberties” with Mrs. Mullen’s barker, according to Mrs. Mullen. This Julie hotly denies, in a manner that suggests she’s not easily cowed. Soon Billy arrives, and it develops that Mrs. Mullen may only be suffering from a bad case of jealousy. But she may not be entirely wrong, either. Julie has seen something she wants, and she’s not about to back away—from Mrs. Mullen or anything else that might stand in her way. She doesn’t completely understand her own behavior, but something is driving her. She fights off the accusations, and she fights off Mrs. Mullen, and while we’re not sure what it is that she’s after, we do know, in that classic musical theater sense, that she’s the one to watch. She’s “quieter and deeper than a well,” her friend Carrie sings, but not at the moment. In some way she’s unknowable, and unrevealing, but there’s something inside her struggling to get out. She’s the one who is battling the hand she’s been dealt, not wisely, perhaps, but with an unquenchable thirst and the determination that goes with it.