The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

Spring Awakening is based on Frank Wedekind’s scandalous (at the time) turn-of-the-century play about teenage rebellion, which exposed the sexual exploits of young people at a time when no one spoke aloud about such things. In the musical, adult authority figures serve to destroy budding lives in a repressive society. The show is set in the late nineteenth century, but the style is entirely twenty-first century: handheld microphones, ambiguous clothing, and a score that is as often real rock as it is “theater music.” After the requisite opening and preliminary numbers, the just-postadolescent ensemble gathers to bemoan “the bitch of living,” in a song by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater that would not be out of place in any rock concert venue but was a bit of a shock on Broadway (though not the biggest shock in this particular score). The details are about what you’d expect of a song called “The Bitch of Living” sung by angry, horny teens, but the value of the number is in its placement, a sour number in the sweet spot that is nonetheless an energy high. While other seriously intended musicals have sometimes used the spot to accomplish multiple goals, Spring Awakening is content to use it as a kind of antimasque to “Jubilation T. Cornpone,” by which I mean no disrespect. The noise is enough, if it’s a good enough noise.

  One of the best of all such noises is Jerry Herman’s “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” from Hello, Dolly! The show doesn’t exactly fit the classic template, at least not without a stretch. Dolly Gallagher Levi, a busybody matchmaker from Yonkers, has explained in an opening number that her purpose in life is to bring people together in romance. And in dialogue she’s told us that her immediate purpose is to find a husband for herself. Then we meet the obvious candidate, the misanthropic Horace Vandergelder, skinflint merchant. So the ultimate goal of the story is more or less set up, but there’s no real I Want song for Dolly (Vandergelder expresses his desire in “It Takes a Woman”), and no conditional love song. Still, we’re at about the same place in the story as if there had been. And the adventure to follow is about to begin when Dolly, with her assistant Ermengarde and Horace’s two provincial clerks, set off from Yonkers for a day in the faraway big city—that would be Manhattan.

  The number that takes them there starts modestly enough, though the fact that it’s a kind of banjo-driven strut should tip us off that this piece of music might have room to expand. The lyric is simple and concise; it describes the ambition of everyone involved to live before it’s too late, and in this sense it is a kind of an I Want song. It is rather a small song if you just play through it once, extolling the virtues of dressing up, going out, and seeking romance and glamour in the big city. But the creators of Dolly!, led by the director-choreographer Gower Champion, had big plans. The number is a kind of rite of passage, and the noise is not simply aural but also visual. We go from the modest Yonkers train station to the train and get the tour of the lower Hudson Valley in an ever-elaborating display of costumes and sets (a moving train! a passing cityscape!) as Dolly and her little brood of adventurers set out on a hunt for the adventure that might bring them lifelong happiness. The provincial becomes urban; the drudgery of everyday living is suddenly injected with infinite promise and beauty. Drear turns to joy, right in front of our eyes. What makes these five minutes or so of theater so exhilarating? It’s not just the song or just the costume changes or the escalating excitement of the moving scenery or just the increasing noise made by the increasingly large number of singers. It’s not even simply that the whole megillah is massively impressive in its totality. It’s all of that, plus, in a leading role, what Jerome Robbins called “the rate of release of ideas.” Champion understood that as soon as the audience has understood a visual idea and taken pleasure from it, another idea has to be presented. As soon as the sound of a trio has been enjoyed, the quartet has to enter, then the octet, then the entire company.

  Timing is everything. If an idea overstays its welcome, the audience gets bored. If a new idea intrudes before the last one has been fully digested, the audience will be denied the proper introduction of a new pleasure and become confused or frustrated. But in “Put On Your Sunday Clothes,” the rate of release is perfect, resulting in a catapulting delight. Like a great lover, the number has an instinct for escalating the audience’s pleasure at the right moment. In the original production of Dolly!, that audience, having little or no idea of how many tricks Champion and company had up their sleeves, was left breathless—the number set off the joy buzzer and the crowd erupted. At its conclusion, Dolly!’s merry band of explorers had escaped the provinces and arrived in the most beautiful place in the world; life teemed with limitless possibilities. This, the audience told itself, is why there are musicals.

  * * *

  At almost exactly the same moment, Robbins was working on another version of the rate of release, but with a far different ambition. Dolly! opened in January 1964. Fiddler on the Roof premiered a mere eight months later, and the two of them dominated the street for most of the next decade. Fiddler has a heavier heart than Dolly!, but it is still a musical, and still plays, more or less, by the rules. Its leading couple has been married for decades, so there is no conditional love song, but after Tevye the milkman leads the classic and exemplary opening number, we meet his three marriageable daughters, who have their I Want song (“Matchmaker, Matchmaker”). Then Tevye, beleaguered by his life as an impoverished milkman, delivers his I Want moment with “If I Were a Rich Man” (which is not about wanting literal wealth, but wealth as a metaphor for an elevated, meaningful life). The plot has now arrived: Tevye’s oldest daughter, Tzeitel, is in love with Motel, the poor tailor, but Tevye’s wife has entertained a proposal of marriage from Lazar Wolf, the wealthy butcher. The marriage will solve myriad difficulties but, of course, be a tragedy for Tzeitel and Motel.

  Nonetheless, Tevye goes off to the local tavern, where he and Lazar Wolf consummate a deal. Immediately, a spontaneous celebration erupts: the noise.

  It’s important to understand that Fiddler’s entire world is shadowed by the presence of Russian gentiles lurking in a little Jewish village. Before the theatergoer’s evening is over, the village will have been eradicated by order of the czar, but at this point, early in the show, the threat feels more theoretical than real. Here is where Robbins, with the songwriters Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, uses the noise to raise the stakes. No one in the little village of Anatevka has any Sunday clothes to put on (in Anatevka they’d be Saturday clothes, of course), yet the number, “To Life,” appears to have a similar purpose to the one in Hello, Dolly!: to celebrate life’s possibilities. It’s a rare moment when a small group of Jewish peasants can genuinely enjoy a tiny blast of optimism. The number begins with Tevye and Lazar Wolf, and soon adds a singing ensemble chanting a Hebraic melody. Then they are dancing, and the number is building excitement.

  And then it stops. It stops because hidden in a corner of this little shtetl tavern is a group of Russian soldiers who have been minding their own business but who want to join in the fun. The music shifts, and where there was a klezmer-style clarinet there is suddenly a mandolin instead. We’re no longer in that up-tempo minor-key wail so familiar to bar mitzvah attendees the world over; we’re very much in the land of Russian folk music and the balalaika. And although the Russians seem to bear no ill intent to anyone in the room, there is a vague sense of danger that has completely replaced the joy that was unconfined only a moment earlier. The Jews retreat. The Russians advance. Their style of dance is different, too—a little too aggressive and a little too fueled by vodka. Suddenly we’re aware that something very bad might happen.

  But nothing does. Eventually, the Jews join the Russians. The Russians, having asserted their right to be dominant parties even as guests in a Jewish tavern, relent, and everyone dances together—sort of. “To Life” builds to a frantic, drunken climax, and for one more day, peace has been maintained. But the world has been shaken, too.

  As “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” is classic Gower Champion, “To Life” is classic Jerome Robbins—the two men are almo
st living emblems of the masks of comedy and tragedy. The former fabricates an entirely original world of pure joy from the most reliable of musical comedy materials. The latter sees the dark edges and lengthening shadows of a cultural clash that is fraught with danger—also using classic musical comedy materials. Yet both understand that by telling their story at exactly the right pace, by concealing and then revealing the story elements, by reeling the audience in, neither dawdling nor racing, by having enough ammunition and using it wisely, they cause an actual experience to engulf the building. The show’s heartbeat accelerates, and that energy tumbles across the footlights and into the house. Pixilated by color, light, and melody, or threatened with danger and potential violence, the audience still experiences the thrill of witnessing a genuine theatrical event happening in real time, and its spirit is lifted. Not all showstoppers are happy. Not all of them mean much of anything. Some are inane, while others portend deep human tragedy to follow. Or great hope. Or aspiration. What they have in common is this: the ones in this spot all make a lot of noise.

  6. Bushwhacking 1: Second Couples

  The moment comes in every life, alas, when it is time to be kicked out of the nest. For a musical theater story, that moment usually arrives right after the noise. Recess is over. And back in the classroom, something strange has happened. All the prior work has set the show on a unique course. Opening numbers tend to follow one of two paths. I Want songs are easy to describe, as are conditional love songs, and even the noise. But by the time all of that has happened, a particular and unique show has taken shape, and the time has come for it to wander off and find its own place in the world. The show leaves the prescribed trail and begins to bushwhack its way through the unknown thicket of its own making. This is a good thing. The formula begins to break down. This is often where the machines are separated from the animals.

  In fact, most shows can be broken down into three acts (but are performed in two), with the first two acts crammed together in what we now call Act 1. The first half of Act 1 is the expositional piece: Where are we? What’s the world of the show like? Who’s the protagonist? What’s her problem and how does she plan to solve it? What’s she up against? What’s the era, the attitude, the point of view? Once these things have been established (which often takes less than half the running time of Act 1), the journey begins in earnest, with complications, unexpected twists, and secondary characters who cause trouble or turn the story in different directions. This is really a second act. Intermission doesn’t come until the basic quest has been sufficiently messed with so that it seems no simple or satisfactory outcome is possible.

  The moment of demarcation may or may not be obvious, but it’s fun to go looking for it. The first act of Sweeney Todd, for instance, ends when Anthony sings the first version of “Johanna.” Sweeney has met and teamed up with Mrs. Lovett. He’s told the story of how he got shanghaied to Australia on a false charge by a corrupt judge who wanted to steal his young, beautiful wife. Mrs. Lovett has explained that the wife took poison but the evil judge still has Sweeney’s daughter, Johanna, imprisoned. We’ve learned that the judge has erotic designs on the by now almost adult daughter, and then Anthony, the sailor who rescued Sweeney at sea, sees the daughter in the judge’s window and falls instantly in love with her. This inextricably links together all the principal characters and sets up a natural tension. Can Sweeney rescue the daughter and destroy the judge? Or will the sailor steal her away before Sweeney has time to act? Or will the judge destroy them both and keep the daughter for his own nefarious purposes? Can Mrs. Lovett lay her hands on Sweeney, on whom she seems to have developed a secret crush, or will she lose out to Sweeney’s obsession with the judge and the daughter? The story is tightly wound up and ready to be sprung. Anthony sings “Johanna,” which concludes with crashing, passionate chords that sound almost like “curtain down” music, and the next thing we see is a complete stranger with an Italian accent setting up shop as a barber in a nearby street. The action has shifted. The second part of Act 1 has begun. The first monkey wrench is about to be thrown.

  How these second parts of Act 1 develop is a lot harder to characterize than how the first parts do. The beginnings of shows have such specific requirements that they tend to explain themselves. Once the story has wandered off, who knows what complications will ensue?

  As a result, laying out a song plot for the late middle of Act 1 isn’t simple, because good shows are happily unpredictable. But it usually involves some of the following: a number for the villain, if there is one; a number for the star, if there is one; and some time spent with the major subplot, whatever it might be. In the Golden Age, and often even now, it usually involves a second romantic couple.

  The second couple is an age-old device, of course. Shakespeare used it a lot (think Much Ado About Nothing), and operettas in the 1920s usually had them—a soubrette and a comedian—principally to provide laughs, since the leading couple had to sing like birds, and actors who could do that tended to be stiff and humorless. By the time Hammerstein got to Oklahoma! the idea was virtually obligatory—hence Ado Annie and Will Parker (Oklahoma!), Carrie Pipperidge and Mr. Snow (Carousel), Liat and Lieutenant Cable (South Pacific), and Tuptim and Lun Tha (The King and I). The structure remained unchanged as Hammerstein laid out his librettos, but the intention evolved quickly into something more sophisticated and challenging than it had ever been.

  Ado Annie and Will Parker are really in the shadow of operetta, there to provide comedy and up-tempo fun. But in Carousel, Carrie and Mr. Snow have a deeper purpose, which is to hold up a reverse mirror to the main romance, to make manifest the values that the main couple has rejected: a conventional marriage, hard work and prosperity, a legacy of success, and a proper and rising place in society. The two characters also demonstrate, of course, the flip side of that equation: sexual and conversational boredom, narrow-mindedness, and the stultifying life that a proper and rising place in society brings. Julie and Billy, driven recklessly by erotic love and a need to escape their own dead-end lives, wouldn’t make the same choice even if it were available to them, but they are forced to confront it right in front of them—and so is the audience. The second couple is comic, and maybe even endearing, but their values are hopelessly middle class, dull, and exclusionary. Both couples are doomed to a destined outcome, in a sense, but only one—the conventional one—can survive as a couple. That’s part of Carousel’s power—the greater the passion, the greater the danger.

  In Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls, the couples are split evenly—it’s hard to tell which one comes first. Based principally on two Damon Runyon short stories, each a full-blown romance, the musical version does keep to the operetta model in one sense: Sky Masterson and Sarah Brown are the romantic ones with the legit voices, while Nathan Detroit and Miss Adelaide are the comics. But Abe Burrows, who wrote the book and was just beginning to emerge from the radio sketch comedy world, used a structure common to radio and, later, to classic TV sitcom writing. He began the show with all four characters, then methodically switched focus, bouncing between the two couples—and the two plots—scene by scene. First couple A, then couple B, then couple A, then couple B, reuniting them at the end. If you call Sky and Sarah’s plot the Mission plot and Nathan and Adelaide’s plot the Crap Game plot, the show lays out neatly, as shown in the chart opposite.

  Note the way the plotting begins to throw characters from the two different plots together in Act 2 but still maintains a focus on bouncing from plot to plot. Lest we grow tired of seeing Nathan always paired with Adelaide, and Sky with Sarah, in Act 2 we get a scene with Nathan and Sky, and another with Adelaide and Sarah. It keeps us off balance just enough.

  In Loesser’s next show, The Most Happy Fella, for which he wrote the book himself, he took the operetta convention both forward and backward, employing it while lampooning it. In the process, he created what is probably the only successful musical with two different scores.

  Happy Fella is almost an ope
ra. Tony, the middle-aged Napa Valley grape farmer, and Rosabella, his mail-order bride, have big gorgeous arias to thrill audiences with; even Joe, the ranch hand who impregnates Rosabella, needs to have a booming baritone, which means Loesser didn’t ask that he also have wit. By contrast, the “comic” couple, Cleo and Herman, needs to sing loud, but in a musical comedy manner. (Auditioning Susan Johnson, who eventually got the part of Cleo, Loesser told her, “Sing like someone’s chasing you.”) Loesser wrote for the characters in their own style, ignoring the idea of overall unity. Accordingly, Cleo and Herman’s songs might have come from an entirely different musical than those written for Tony, Rosabella, and Joe. Stylistically, The Most Happy Fella is a mash-up of Puccini and The Pajama Game, except that in both styles, Loesser always sounds like himself, melodically and harmonically as well as lyrically. This score-within-a-score technique was met with skepticism by some critics of the day (and still comes up when the show is revived), but Loesser was essentially amplifying a pattern established by Victor Herbert, Sigmund Romberg, and Rudolf Friml back in the day. They, too, wrote in two distinct styles for their two distinct couples, but the contrast was a delicate one. Loesser was nothing if not brash, and he took the idea all the way. In any case, the American operetta composers had been forgotten by the time Happy Fella opened in 1956 and no one thought to reference them. What was perceived at the time as an experiment was, in some ways, nothing more than a brilliantly skillful tip of the hat, executed with characteristic boldness in a way that would never have occurred to Herbert, Romberg, or Friml.

  The second couple in Happy Fella actually had distinguished material, which such couples almost never did in the operetta era. “Lover, Come Back to Me” has long survived its source, 1927’s The New Moon, while “Try Her Out at Dances,” which was written for the comic lead in the same show, has happily vanished into the mists of time. By contrast, the best second-couple songs in Happy Fella, “Ooh, My Feet,” “Big ‘D,’” and “Standing on the Corner,” are still a part of our consciousness if we’re fans of the genre.