The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

  “Adelaide’s Lament” grows out of a unique comic situation: Adelaide’s fourteen-year engagement to Nathan Detroit has left her with a stress-anxiety condition—a common cold that never goes away. This creates an opportunity for Loesser; he dreamed up a moment in which a working-class girl tries to decipher the complexities of a psychiatric tome about the physical manifestations of an unfulfilled romantic life. It was a perfect fit for Blaine, who specialized in playing the guileless-but-not-clueless blondes who were a fixture of ’50s comedy. Here she struggles mightily. She can barely pronounce the words, but she gets the meaning: “In other words,” she says, after quoting the psycho-lingo of the text,

  You can spray her wherever you figure the

  Streptococci lurk

  You can give her a shot for whatever she’s got

  But it just won’t work

  If she’s tired of gettin’ the fisheye

  From the hotel clerk,

  A person can develop a cold.

  The comedy grows from the contrast of a chorus girl grappling with a pedantic text. But it’s more than comic—it’s heartwarming because her struggle is so sincere and her triumph in understanding it is so well earned. To top it off, it even has good punch lines. In three minutes, we understand her completely, and we want her to win. We want Nathan to stop being such a boob and marry her, for God’s sake. The “Lament” is, of course, an I Want song in disguise. It also stacks the jokes in order of quality, so that they keep topping each other. This is a key to the success of a comedy number. If the jokes get more familiar and less funny as the number goes along, it’s doomed to disappoint. But in “Adelaide’s Lament,” Loesser is a master builder. Not only do the jokes get funnier, but also the desperation gets more real and more acute. Miss Adelaide begins the number as an eager but intimidated titmouse, gains confidence (and volume) as she realizes that she can understand this psychology book perfectly well and that it’s all about her, and ends it with a clarion call—almost worthy of Merman herself—that brings down the house. The number is so completely crafted that the second-act reprise comes as a total surprise and, characteristically, contains the coup de grace of defeated expectations, which also happens to be the funniest image:

  So much virus inside

  That her microscope slide

  Looks like a day at the zoo!

  Just from wanting her memories in writing

  And a story her folks can be told

  A person can … develop a cold.

  Miss Adelaide is the soul of Guys and Dolls, and while her solo is tailored to the performer’s assets and the character’s interests, it’s also an indispensable asset to the show itself—a rare warm moment in a big, brassy musical.

  Sometimes these songs are written for specific performers, but just as often the performer is cast for his or her ability to climb the hill of the number. Barbara Cook was a relatively minor figure on Broadway when she was cast as Cunegonde in Candide. “Glitter and Be Gay” was already written, and Cook got the part because the composer, Leonard Bernstein, believed she could make hay with it—it’s a dazzling soprano aria about a formerly pure and virtuous heroine caving in to the pleasures of the flesh and the jewels that can decorate it. It’s comic and difficult and entertainingly tricky, written to stop the show, which Cook did nightly. It’s a classic mid-act star solo. Bernstein had already written another, tailored to Rosalind Russell’s comic gifts and limited range in Wonderful Town. Playing the tough but romantically challenged Ruth Sherwood, Russell chronicled her mistakes and missteps in courtship on her way to potential old maidhood in “One Hundred Easy Ways.” Funny and perplexed without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, it’s a cousin to “Adelaide’s Lament,” though made of somewhat lesser metal. The lyric, by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, isn’t as clever, nor is the struggle within the song as touching, but still, it gives a real established star a chance to go at it. Unlike Vivian Blaine, Russell was bona fide Hollywood royalty, and all she needed was a number that was good enough, that allowed her to do what her fans wanted her to do. And she got one—not a masterpiece but, like “Little Girls” in Annie, a big performance opportunity. Russell made it work for her, and in a later revival, Donna Murphy found gold in it too.

  * * *

  Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison—he a star, she a star in the making—each got one in My Fair Lady, and here the challenge was what you might call stacking each of their performance tracks correctly. Although Lerner and Loewe—and the director Moss Hart—found various ways of opening up Shaw’s Pygmalion with glamorous settings and the occasional chorus number, the basic story remains intimate and largely involves two characters. They both sing a lot (to the degree that Harrison sings at all), and it was important to save the best, or at least the most emotionally full-hearted, for last. Andrews’s numbers are carefully balanced one on top of another. “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” is a simple I Want, lovely but without fireworks. Her mid-act solo, “Just You Wait,” is an angry comic tirade, in which she imagines her tormentor, Higgins, with his head on a platter and facing a firing squad. It establishes her fierce temper and her wit, with a dose of sadomasochism thrown in to keep things interesting. “I Could Have Danced All Night”—the closest thing the show has to a conditional love song—is pure Edwardian romance with a little sex in it. “Show Me,” in Act 2, is an angry expression of desire for real physical love, and “Without You,” her final number, is a defiant, strong, yet sad declaration of independence. Eliza has gone from snuffling flower girl looking for a warm stove to completely self-possessed Mayfair lady (hence the show’s little-appreciated title pun) in a little over two hours, and we’ve watched the transformation in song, each song a step in a carefully constructed ladder.

  Higgins, meanwhile, has his own ladder, beginning with “Why Can’t the English?,” a defiant comic I Want that shows him to be as passionate as he is intolerant. “I’m an Ordinary Man,” his mid-act solo, demonstrates the challenge for anyone trying to worm her way into his emotional life—he’s self-contained and unbreakable. And his galling pride in his own intolerance and upper-class self-satisfaction is really funny. “A Hymn to Him,” in Act 2, shows him protesting too much on the same subjects, his temper at having lost Eliza getting the better of him, which signals to us, if not to him, that a dam might just break after all. And in “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” the dam breaks—well, it cracks. The man who was a self-contained prig discovers that he’s human after all, that his heart, his brain, his nerves, and his sense of need are all connected and, perhaps, the connection is not to be avoided. By Higgins’s straitened means of expression, he’s saying, “I’ve fallen in love. Imagine that.”

  For both Eliza and Higgins, the mid-act solo is actually the least important step in the ladder, though there’s certainly not much wrong with either song. They do less work than the songs that precede them and are less emotionally redolent than the ones that follow them. But they provide variety, coming after the noise (“With a Little Bit of Luck”) and before the multivoiced teaching sequence (“The Rain in Spain”). And they give the stars one more chance to be stars and share a private moment with the audience.

  Jay Binder, for many years the dean of Broadway casting directors, defined stars this way: “A star comes out onstage and every member of the audience feels that the star has a secret which is shared only with them. The star is looking directly at them, saying, ‘You and I know something no one else in the room knows.’ That’s what’s mesmerizing, and they do it to fifteen hundred people at the same time.”

  What the secret is, is anyone’s guess and doesn’t matter. And how the star manages to make every member of the audience believe that she’s communing directly with him or her is a complete mystery. But you know it when it happens. A number in the middle of Act 1 reminds us of the secret, and that we share it.

  One of the things that make it easier to share this one-on-one-ness is the physical life of the moment: there is no one onstage except the
star. She’s all ours. And the song needn’t be spectacular or full of fireworks, like “Glitter and Be Gay” or the comparable “Rosabella,” another operatic aria, performed by Robert Weede in The Most Happy Fella. Sometimes the star lets us in on the secret. Sometimes the secret is what the mid-act number is all about.

  “Dividing Day,” from The Light in the Piazza, is just such a moment—a heartbreaking discovery that the character makes and allows us to discover with her. It was performed in the original production by Victoria Clark, who isn’t a star in the conventional sense any more than was Vivian Blaine, the original Miss Adelaide. But in that mid-act slot she, like Blaine, became one—at least for a moment. Her song appears to be the polar opposite of “Adelaide’s Lament”—tragic, not comic; resigned, not defiant—but in some ways it’s the same. Both are examinations of love and its consequences for women whose men—after many years—are nowhere to be found. The song is a hushed inner monologue about the death of love. The discovery is as unexpected for the character as it is for the audience. Margaret, a middle-aged woman on a trip to Italy with her daughter, has just intuited something about her husband. It’s not an infidelity, or an addiction, or any other kind of public or private malfeasance. It’s something he may not even recognize. But distance has created the lens through which Margaret can see with a different view of her own life, and suddenly there it is, right in front of her.

  Dashing as the day we met

  Only there is something I don’t recognize

  Though I cannot name it yet

  I know it

  Beautiful is what you are

  Only somehow wearing a frightening disguise

  I can see the winter in your eyes now

  Telling me

  “Thank you

  We’re done here

  Not much to say

  We are together

  But I have had dividing day”

  She puzzles over where and when it happened, how she could have missed it, and how it could have occurred, but comes up empty. All she has is the strength to name it, in Adam Guettel’s memorable phrase.

  So when … when was this day

  Was it on the church step

  Suddenly you’re out of love

  Does it go creeping slowly

  When was your dividing day?

  I can see the winter in your eyes now

  Telling me:

  “Margaret

  We did it

  You curtsied, I bowed

  We are together

  But no more love

  No more love allowed”

  She continues to speculate, and continues to come up empty.

  When was

  When was

  When was dividing day?

  By naming it, like an annual day of mourning, Margaret gives it stature and lets us know that it is to be respected, catastrophic as it is. And, of course, it is shared and commemorated by a lot of people over the course of a lifetime, which makes it worthy of a name, and of a song. The lyric doesn’t snap and pop with the classic lyricist’s sense of rhythm—it’s almost prose, but that’s part of what gives it power—it seems naked of conventional artifice. And it tells. It has the ability to stop the breath of any audience, and the authenticity of its emotion is one of the reasons we go to the theater—to see the skin of human life peeled back and the nervous system and heart revealed. On the one hand, we’re almost ashamed to be eavesdropping on such a private discovery. On the other, she is holding up the mirror in the most artful yet direct way. That’s what makes it a star moment, as well as an important piece of theater. Like Miss Adelaide, Ruth Sherwood, and even Cunegonde and Eliza Doolittle, Margaret has paused the play itself to tell us something that she now understands for the first time. And she’s told us at just the right time.

  But, looked at mechanically, it’s a mid-act solo for the star, neither more nor less.

  10. Tevye’s Dream

  Tent Poles

  In a good show, an hour into the first act we’re deep into the story and living life along with the characters. The protagonists, the antagonist, the subplot couple, and any other supporting players have crashed into each other in combustible ways, and things are complicated. From the opening number to the I Want to the conditional love song to the presentation of the ensemble (long known in the business as “merry villagers”) to all the obstacles standing in the way of a happy outcome, the authors have led us on quite a long and circuitous ride. The hero is still far from achieving his or her goal—probably further than at the beginning. And, frankly, we’re starting to get a little weary. Our energy begins to flag. We realize we may need a drink and a bathroom pretty soon, but there’s still another ten minutes of story—one or two scenes—before intermission. Almost every show solves this problem in the same way—with a high-energy number that gets everyone’s blood pumping hard enough to get us to the first-act curtain.

  Tent poles keep the roof from caving in on the audience. They may or may not be relevant to the story—the best ones in the most unified shows usually are, of course. But, as with the noise, it’s not a requirement that they be anything but energizing. This is another one of those places where musicals are allowed—even required—to defy the logic of storytelling and operate on the other part of the brain—the part that responds to color and light, rhythm and pace.

  The “Havana” sequence in Guys and Dolls is a classic example, and like so much about that almost perfectly structured show, it seems in some ways random. The number that precedes it, the title song, is a brilliant little vaudeville turn sung by two minor characters, commenting on the war between the sexes, but it neither furthers the plot nor reveals character. It’s like Brecht touring the borscht belt. You could actually cut it, and you might never know it had been there. Of course, it’s a great song, it is the title song (one suspects it was written before the show’s book), it’s a perfect encapsulation of the theme, and it covers a somewhat vague time lapse, which gives Sky Masterson the opportunity to get the reluctant Sarah Brown down to Cuba.

  Once we see them strolling the boulevards of Old Havana, however, it seems the jig is up for Nathan Detroit—his bet is lost. He won’t get the $1,000 he needs to buy off Joey Biltmore and hold his floating crap game in the garage, and his very life may be in danger from a particularly trigger-happy crapshooter who is looking for action and won’t take no for an answer. We feel sorry for Nathan but happy for Sky—and at the moment, Nathan’s story is on hold. Sky is in Havana with a buttoned-up “mission doll” whose behavior is true to form—she’s got a sightseeing book and is dragging him from one ancient ruin to another, much to his consternation. This is not how Sky usually spends time in Havana. Finally, he draws her into a bar and gets her to drink a couple of dulce de leches, and suddenly, she loosens up.

  Then, not surprisingly, a band starts playing and people start dancing (this is Cuba, after all). Like the title song, this might seem arbitrary, but the plot is complicated, the characters have all gotten themselves in one kind of trouble or another, and frankly it’s a welcome relief to have some up-tempo Latinish music. The ensemble, suddenly all Cuban (the costume department’s problem), starts to rumba across the floor; Sky and Sarah join in. Sarah gets picked off by a particularly attractive and supple dancer and then finds herself the object of a jealous battle between two dancers we’ve never met before. Mayhem ensues. Punches are thrown. Sarah is delighted. The music turns wilder, Sarah begins to get into the fight, the alcohol in her bloodstream fueling her newfound sense of freedom, and the next thing we know, we’re in the midst of a full-fledged high-energy brawl. Sky comes to the rescue, and at the number’s conclusion (to thunderous applause), he is throwing Sarah over his shoulder and hauling her out of the bar and back onto the street. He quickly discovers that she doesn’t want him to put her down on the ground. She’s deliriously happy, not to mention just plain delirious. What happens next onstage will be saved for the next chapter, but what has happened already has occurred mainl
y on the other side of the footlights. The audience is renewed, refreshed, and ready for one or two more of whatever the show is serving.

  That’s the way it works. But it’s not always like “Havana,” which has music and dance but no words. As with opening numbers, there are a handful of variations. “Havana,” without a word spoken or sung, has brought a reluctant couple together physically and emotionally, with consequences still to come that neither of them anticipates. It has actually furthered the plot. But that was hardly required.

  In the same spot in Hello, Dolly!, we are on the point of having the whole story ruined if the skinflint merchant Horace Vandergelder discovers that his clerks, who are supposed to be at home working, have escaped to the big city and are hiding in the very hat shop he and Dolly Levi have stopped into. He’s about to open the cabinet in which the two clerks have secreted themselves when Dolly, desperate to protect them, bursts into an anthem about American virtues, called “Motherhood March.” It’s not a masterpiece of songwriting, and not even a very logical thing to do under the circumstances, though it does distract Horace from the discovery he was about to make. But the main thing it does is pick up the tempo, get fifteen hundred pairs of toes tapping, put a smile on fifteen hundred faces, and stave off whatever indications of ennui were beginning to overtake the generally happy audience. “Motherhood” is a classic tent pole in the category of “meeting the minimum basic requirements.” The song that precedes it, “Ribbons Down My Back,” is a beautiful and rueful ballad. The song that follows is called “Dancing,” and while it develops into a lovely waltz number, a waltz is, by definition, not high wattage, unless it’s a jazz waltz like “The Last Midnight.” “Motherhood” covers for both numbers, though it’s the weakest of the three. It has a job to do and it does it.