The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

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  As for Sweeney Todd itself, Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, working from Christopher Bond’s version of the nineteenth-century melodrama, took a more jaundiced look at the operetta tradition. The psychology of the characters is distinguished not by nuance (it’s a melodrama, after all) but by the way they sing. Sondheim and Wheeler make sure that the second couple’s state of mind—innocent, naïve, and hopeful—stands in stark contrast to the main couple’s cynicism, rage, and madness. Dark is balanced by light, and both Johanna and the sailor have mid-act solos—“Green Finch and Linnet Bird” for her and “Johanna” for him—that give definition to their characters and their dilemma. They also share a giddy duet, “Kiss Me,” that furthers the plot and clues us in to the possible limits of their intelligence, particularly hers. The songs are about as far as they could be from the kind that were written for second couples in the heyday of the convention, but one could argue that Johanna’s addle-headed observations do owe something to the kinds of soubrette roles that were typical of comedy in the operetta era.

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  What distinguishes these second-couple songs that populate the middle third of the first act? People tend to refer to them as “Ado Annie songs,” and, to be sure, Annie and Will Parker have a couple of standard comedy numbers, “I Cain’t Say No” and “Kansas City,” early on in Oklahoma! Both are examples of what passed for comic erotica in 1943, or 1943’s impression of 1906, and they’ve stood the test of time, at least as period pieces. Will’s is about encountering indoor plumbing for the first time and going to a burlesque show in Kansas City, considered the big time if you lived in the Oklahoma Territory; Annie’s is about a very mild and charming case of nymphomania.

  But by the time of The King and I, R&H were well beyond focusing on the “comic” couple as necessarily comic. The progression is interesting and speaks to Hammerstein’s conviction that there is no point in a subplot unless it illuminates the plot.1 In Carousel (1945), Mr. Snow and Carrie are both comic and somewhat alarming, and slightly more integrated into the central story than are Ado Annie and Will Parker. Mr. Snow seems like an ambitious buffoon in the beginning (his big dream is of a fleet of herring boats), but as American business has proved countless times, buffoonery is no bar to wealth and power. And in the end, the prosperous Snow family displays a level of class consciousness and intolerance that turns them into implicit villains. In South Pacific (1949), Liat and Lieutenant Cable are in some ways more like Billy and Julie than like a typical second couple—eager for escape from two different repressive worlds and doomed by their dreams and their erotic awakening.

  They are something new: the tragic second couple. R&H went a step further in The King and I (1951), introducing a second couple whose love is forbidden by the hidebound regime of the King. The slave girl Tuptim sings “My Lord and Master,” about her servitude, and she and her secret lover, Lun Tha, have a romantic duet, “We Kiss in a Shadow,” that makes explicit how risky their love affair is, both during the middle of the act. In some respects R&H, by this moment, had turned the traditional subplot tone upside down, though they continued to use the device for the same purpose: to expose, through the second couple, the depth and shape of the problem being experienced by the first. Anna and the King are locked in a conflict over modernity. Tuptim and Lun Tha are threatened by the potentially fatal consequences of Anna losing the battle, their love forbidden by the ancient political caste systems over which the King continues to rule.2

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  Liat and Lieutenant Cable, and Lun Tha and Tuptim, represented a new kind of idea for second couples, and decades later the idea resurfaced in an entirely different context in, of all places, Hairspray.

  By this point, the convention had worn out its welcome as a structural tool of modern musicals and was only occasionally on display. Hairspray embraced it with a vengeance and turned it back into comedy, but with a common theme.

  Tracy Turnblad, Hairspray’s heroine, has a best friend, Penny, who is as pathologically shy as Tracy is bold. When Tracy reveals her plan to audition for The Corny Collins Show, Penny proudly says, “And I have to go watch you audition!” Penny has an awful, repressive mother and lives by trying to be invisible, until the moment when she meets Seaweed, a black student whose mom runs an R&B record store on the wrong side of town and hosts “Negro Day” once a month on The Corny Collins Show.

  “Hey gal,” Seaweed says, “I’ve seen you at the vending machines gettin’ your Juicy Fruit.”

  “I’m up to two packs a day,” she replies shyly, but feels something new stirring within.

  “All that chewing must make your jaw pretty strong,” Seaweed replies—a unique pickup line that, nonetheless, has the desired effect on the clueless Penny.

  Seaweed and Penny are an interracial second couple like Lieutenant Cable and Liat, and they serve the same old function of amplifying and explicating the main couple’s problem: how to confront bigotry in America (it’s a big one). It’s really the same problem Anna and the King were dealing with internationally—confronting progress in a world moving erratically forward—but in a different guise. Penny and Seaweed, like Tuptim and Lun Tha, and Liat and Lieutenant Cable before them, put a human face on the problem. This means Tracy is fighting for her best friend, not just for a cause, and that helps keep the show, which is, after all, a campy comedy, from getting didactic. Tracy doesn’t have to make big statements about integration and liberty (though she makes a few hilarious ones), she just has to fight for Penny’s right to be kissed by the man she loves, forbidden though that may be in the Baltimore of the early ’60s.

  Forbidden love, especially when the taboo is racial or religious, feels like a very American subject, but it serves a classic second-couple purpose in Cabaret, which is set in Berlin between the world wars. Written by Joe Masteroff (book) and John Kander and Fred Ebb (music and lyrics), it was the first of the producer-director Hal Prince’s departures from the classic Golden Age style he had spent a decade producing. In 1964, Jerome Robbins announced his retirement from Broadway right after directing the Prince-produced Fiddler on the Roof. A year later, Prince produced Kander and Ebb’s first musical, Flora the Red Menace, directed by George Abbott, who had given Prince his start and was now pushing eighty. Much as he revered Abbott, Prince knew that with Flora, he’d made a mistake. He wanted to push the musical into new territory; efficiently deploying the hoary conventions of the ’50s, Abbott was the wrong man. And Robbins was back at City Ballet. Prince would have to do the job himself. Cabaret was something of an in-betweener, a transitional piece neither completely free from old conventions nor a slave to them. But one of its conventional paradigms that worked particularly well was the second couple.

  They were played by Lotte Lenya and Jack Gilford—she a German émigré and the widow and chief interpreter of Kurt Weill, he an American vaudevillian. Both in the story and in real life, she was gentile, he Jewish. And they were older, not the young innocents to whom the roles were traditionally assigned. In a musical that chronicled the rise of Nazi Germany, their romance was destined to be brief and tragic. The main couple, an expat American writer named Clifford Bradshaw and an amoral carouser named Sally Bowles, promised excitement, but not warmth or tenderness. She was in it for kicks; he was a cool, sexually ambivalent outside observer. (In the subsequent film and later productions, Cliff’s bisexuality was made explicit, but that would have been too big a reach in 1966.) To point up the hard edge of Cliff and Sally’s doomed affair, the show offered an opposing portrait in the subplot: the warm, deeply human courtship of Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz.

  Kander and Ebb, who had written some terrific and underappreciated songs for Flora, came into their own with Cabaret, providing a consistently first-rate score that alternated traditional “book songs” relating to the plot with cabaret numbers that explored the themes of louche Berlin falling inexorably under the spell of fascism. It was a dazzling display for the young songwriters. The songs th
at are best remembered are the cabaret numbers, particularly the title song and “Willkommen,” an opening number in the mold of “Comedy Tonight” and “Tradition.” But their songs for the second couple chart a perfect arc. Lenya’s Fräulein Schneider endears us with a Weillesque “So What?” early in the first act, and then, in the classic midway spot in the act, there is a wonderful conditional love song about, of all things, a pineapple.

  “It Couldn’t Please Me More” is a charm duet, which both Lenya and Gilford used to create a three-way love affair—she with him, he with her, and the audience with both of them. Herr Schultz, the Jewish fruit dealer, brings Fräulein Schneider a pineapple as a gift, and they sing about it ruefully, shyly, complete with Hawaiian guitar accompaniment, although the pineapple’s provenance isn’t so glamorous:

  SHE

  Ahh-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah, I can hear Hawaiian breezes blow

  Ahh-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah …

  HE

  It’s from California

  SHE

  Even so …

  How am I to thank you?

  HE

  Kindly let it pass.

  SHE

  Would you like a slice?

  HE

  That might be nice,

  But frankly, it would give me gas.

  Fräulein Schneider is “overwhelmed.” But not as overwhelmed as she will be a scene or two later when Herr Schultz proposes marriage. In a simple but telling duet, they contemplate a modest but rosy future, and Ebb, the lyricist, turns into folk poetry the everyday speech of two working-class people who thought their lives were essentially done.

  How the world can change

  It can change like that—

  Due to one little word:

  “Married.”

  See a palace rise

  From a two-room flat

  Due to one little word:

  “Married.”

  Somehow we know that it can’t happen, and that it won’t happen, which makes the modesty of their courtship heartbreaking in its directness and simplicity, and a perfect foil for the tart and alienated central relationship between Cliff and Sally.

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  Second-couple songs rarely get the kind of attention they are entitled to—of necessity, they exert less of a pull than the songs written for the main plot. We don’t want them to upset the story architecture by seizing the stage too forcibly. They tend to do their work subversively, drawing our attention just long enough to add a layer of meaning to what the leading players are going through, while simultaneously providing some relief from it. Originally a comic device, they have evolved over the decades to play every conceivable supporting role—young, old, comic, tragic, and thematic. As time progresses, the adventurers, from Hammerstein to Loesser to Sondheim, Prince, and Kander and Ebb, keep asking them to do more, and to do it differently, but the basic architecture of the musical show is designed to contain multitudes.

  7. Bushwhacking 2: Villains

  Not every show has a villain, of course, but there must be adversarial forces if there is to be a contest worth watching. And not every villain has to sing. The murderous Warlord in The Book of Mormon is a perfect example. The authors, who had comedy galore everywhere else, may have considered giving a comedy solo to the vicious general with the unprintable (but I’ll print it anyway) name of Butt-Fucking Naked, but letting villains sing funny tends to domesticate them. And this villain really needed to be scary, which is why, instead of singing, he shoots an innocent bystander in the face right in front of our eyes. Trey Parker and Matt Stone had command of how to tell their story, even though they were musical theater newcomers.

  During a rehearsal, one of the veteran actors in the company talked about how two guys who had never tried it before were getting it so right with such seeming ease.

  “The thing about these guys,” he explained, “is that they’ve been telling a twenty-three-minute story a week for about twenty years on TV. You get good at it after a while. You have no idea what it’s like for an actor to work with writers who just know how to tell a story—it’s bred into them, and they have an answer for every question. We never doubt them; we have no reason to.”

  That said, in shows that aren’t crazy comedies, it is possible to have the villain sing and actually gain stature in the process.

  “A story is only as gripping as its villain,” goes an old Hollywood saw, which is ironic, considering the blandness and predictability of so many Hollywood villains—at least the ones who are on-screen, as opposed to those who are running the studio. Generally speaking, villains are most compelling when, however terrible they are, we’re forced to understand their point of view. If they seem like simple paper tigers, the audience is likely to lose interest.

  Here again, Oklahoma! and Sweeney Todd are instructive. In the former, Jud, the sex-starved farmhand who wants desperately to get his hands on the heroine, has all the hallmarks of a generic baddie—he’s unwashed, he lusts after pornography as well as actual women, and he isn’t above trafficking in murder weapons. He’s unquestionably a figure of the times (we’re not so tough on porn enthusiasts these days, unless they’re politicians), but even in this early version of the modern musical Hammerstein felt compelled to make sure we heard Jud’s side of the story. In a song called “Lonely Room,” Jud, alone in the outdoor shed he’s forced to call home, ruminates frighteningly on his lot in life. There’s no question we find him dangerous in this moment, but he is also somehow humanized.

  “The floor creaks, the door squeaks,” he complains.

  There’s a field-mouse a-nibblin’ on a broom,

  And I set by myself

  Like a cobweb on a shelf

  By myself in a lonely room.

  We’re immediately captured by him in a way we didn’t think we could be. There’s poetry and self-loathing in the man in equal measure, and the power of his loneliness seems to have driven him mad. He’s not just a baddie, he’s ill, maybe more than ill, as Rodgers’s creepy music makes clear. And the danger that’s in him becomes immediately more powerful, more alarming than it has been, because we’re tainted by it. We have to recognize him. He has dreams, just like the other characters in the piece, and just like us.

  But when there’s a moon in my winder

  And it slants down a beam ’crost my bed,

  Then the shadder of a tree

  Starts a-dancin’ on the wall

  And a dream starts a-dancin’ in my head …

  And the girl that I want

  Ain’t afraid of my arms,

  And her own soft arms keep me warm.

  And her long, yeller hair

  Falls acrost my face,

  Jist like the rain in a storm!

  What can you say about a man who expresses himself like this? “Her long, yeller hair falls acrost my face, jist like the rain in a storm!” he says, and we simply can’t ignore that. He’s a man for whom tenderness will never come, but he can imagine it easily and with a colorful gift for imagery. He’s going to go off the deep end, if he hasn’t already, and he’s going to have to die. But the moral quandary that he presents is one of the reasons Oklahoma! is what it is—the golden door through which the musical play had to one day finally pass.

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  In Sweeney Todd (which also uses the phrase “yellow hair” to great effect), Judge Turpin stands in for Jud Fry. Unlike Jud, he’s politically powerful—the most powerful character in the piece, in fact. But he, too, is overcome by lust and alarming sexual tastes. And Stephen Sondheim, with characteristic boldness, wrote him a villain’s number (one of the three different songs in the show called “Johanna”) in which he spies on his young ward, masturbates, and whips himself with a cat-o’-nine-tails. The number was cut from the original production, allegedly because the show was running long, but it’s hard not to suspect an element of faintheartedness entered the argument. One can only imagine what commercial producers thought of the song—certainly it was the first time the American musical had ever
featured an old man flagellating himself to orgasm on a Broadway stage. Is this what Cole Porter meant by “Anything Goes”? Perhaps, but he didn’t say so explicitly.

  In the years since that original production, the number has been restored and we’ve all gotten a little more accustomed to a wide-angle view of human sexual activity. But looked at without the filter of conventional censoriousness, “Johanna” is revealing and alarming in many of the same ways as “Lonely Room.” It presents a character out of control, lost to his own fantasies, and crippled by an ambivalence that won’t allow him to do the right thing, even as doubt engulfs him. He cries:

  God, deliver me!

  Release me!

  Forgive me!

  Restrain me!

  Pervade me!

  But obsession, as with Jud, is the boss. And the outcome can only be fatal.

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  Villain numbers don’t have to be scary, of course, and a far greater number of them were designed to be funny. In musical theater, the comedy villain dates back beyond the days of George M. Cohan, who wrote “Then I’d Be Satisfied with Life” at the turn of the century, a list song in which a fraudster ticks off the simple pleasures (“All I need is fifty million dollars…”) that would make him a happy man. But the appearance of comic villains has been more of an option than a staple of Broadway musicals, and most often the jokes in their songs, with some lucky exceptions, aren’t that funny. What the songs do provide is a performance opportunity based on character—a chance for a good comic to have the stage all to herself or himself and display a unique gift and the craft that goes with it. The tradition probably evolved from vaudeville, and even in modern times it often feels like a throwback to earlier times. That’s certainly the case with one of the most successful of them all, Miss Hannigan’s “Little Girls,” from Annie.