The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

  “My time of day is the dark time,” he sings. “A couple of deals before dawn.”

  The first line is matter-of-fact enough, but the second achieves a certain unexpected beauty. And then, in a seductively chromatic melody that is far from the rest of the musical vocabulary in Guys and Dolls, Loesser turns Sky into a poet:

  When the street belongs to the cop

  And the janitor with the mop

  And the grocery clerks are all gone.

  When the smell of the rain-washed pavement

  Comes up clean, and fresh, and cold

  And the streetlamp light

  Fills the gutter with gold,

  That’s my time of day …

  Sky has just undergone the exact same transformation for himself, Sarah, and the audience that she did. In effect, he’s telling her—and us—“You thought I was a hard-hearted gambler who saw only the cards and the dice and the wins and losses? That’s what I thought too. But I’m not—I’m a poet. You’re a beautiful sensualist, and I’m a man who appreciates beauty and sensuality in a way you could never have suspected.”

  They are two characters bared, and in the course of two musical numbers, we believe absolutely that they must have each other, that the possibilities are limitless.

  Only the musical theater can do this in this way. The music seduces. And the lyrics compact big revelations into tiny packages. What would take pages in a play or chapters in a novel happens in magic time. And so, without a further word spoken, they begin to sing the show’s most famous ballad, “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” because each of them has credibly demonstrated that it’s true. They haven’t been in love before, but now they are. Nothing they’ve experienced has prepared them, and yet (it’s so often the way) they’re prepared.

  But this is wine

  That’s all too strange and strong

  I’m full of foolish song

  And out my song must pour.

  So please forgive

  This helpless haze I’m in

  I’ve really never been in love before.

  At this moment, everything should be in perfect harmony for couple number one, and indeed it is—except that Sky is leading Sarah back to the mission. And of course Sky has won his bet and Nathan has lost, which means that Nathan has no place to hold the crap game. By winning the bet, Sky has caused Sarah to abandon the mission for Havana. And, consequently, that’s where Nathan is holding the game. The two would-be lovers turn a corner and find themselves in the middle of a police raid—and a Gordian knot of a plot tie-up. What is Sarah to do but to assume that Sky took her to Cuba to empty out the mission so that Nathan could have his game there? She’s betrayed. In an instant, all is ruined. Nathan and his gamblers are chased from the mission by the cops, Sarah has—she thinks—been emotionally swindled by the first man she ever opened herself up to, Sky has lost the only woman he ever loved, and the roof has come crashing down—along with the curtain.

  This is how a first act is supposed to end, though few do it as economically or as elegantly. One suspects, again, the hand of George S. Kaufman, the director and Broadway comedy’s greatest dramaturg, and indeed his daughter Anne takes credit for the act’s last line.

  “What kind of a doll are you?” Sky asks, shocked and distraught that Sarah would blame him for the catastrophic circumstances.

  “They had the question, but not the answer,” asserts Anne Kaufman Schneider, who was a young woman at the time. “I just blurted out, ‘I’m a mission doll!’ And it’s been that way ever since.”

  * * *

  Guys and Dolls was not a star vehicle, which at least relieved its creators of finding a first-act curtain that would feature a big solo for the star. Gypsy doesn’t have that luxury, yet among the classic musicals, it probably has the other most perfectly constructed first-act curtain.

  Structurally, Gypsy is all about a power exchange that takes place over more than a decade. The power shifts from Madame Rose, the maniacally focused mother who insists that her daughter Baby June will be a star, to Louise, her second, apparently even less talented daughter, whose natural reticence and fearfulness make her an easy target for her mother’s hostility. Madame Rose begins with all the power, Louise with none. The reversal does not even seem to have started by the end of Act 1, but the moment must come when the two of them are placed front and center, when we understand that the struggle is ultimately going to be not about the rise to stardom but about a daughter’s well-earned revenge. For that to happen, both of them have to arrive at rock bottom, with nothing left to lose.

  The story, remember, goes like this: Madame Rose wants Baby June to be a star. Louise wants a route of escape from the torture of pretending to still be a second-banana little girl in vaudeville when she’s really a young woman reduced to playing the front end of a cow. For years she’s harbored a secret crush on one of the boy dancers in the act, Tulsa. In the penultimate scene of the act, she catches him rehearsing an act different from the one he’s performing in Madame Rose’s troupe, and she senses that he, too, wants to escape. In a heartbreaking number called “All I Need Is the Girl,” Tulsa teaches Louise the girl’s part of the dance duet he’s invented as his way out, and she’s allowed to fantasize that they really are together in another time and place. The audience is also encouraged to think that this may be Louise’s route of escape. She’s not much of a dancer, but Tulsa encourages her and clearly cares for her in some way or other, and he’s flattered by her attention. We can see her beginning to pin all her hopes on the scraps of evidence that are presented. He’s always understood her better than the others have—he bought her books for her birthday a long time ago, and she hasn’t forgotten. She points out their similarities. He takes her hand. He teaches her the dance, they blend; they seem, awkwardly, to actually be a duo. Maybe things will work.

  The song itself is notable for staying neutral: it’s a traditional showbiz lyric for a dance duet, though very well written. But the meaning of the scene is entirely in the action that the song allows to happen—Tulsa’s increasing showmanship and Louise’s complete seduction into the fantasy. Nothing in the lyric tells us this. But by the number’s conclusion, Louise is actually energized for the first time in the show, and the audience is pinning a lot of hope on her possible rescue. Thank Jerome Robbins, once again, for understanding how dance can expose the human heart and tell a story all by itself.

  But the next scene—the curtain scene—develops with a cunning virtually unique in the musical theater, and this time it is Arthur Laurents, the book writer, who has planted a time bomb, though no one has seen him do it.

  We’re at a railroad depot in Omaha (the vaudeville cards stage left and right bear only the ominous word TERMINAL). Madame Rose and Herbie, her lover and the act’s business manager, are anxiously awaiting the arrival of June and Louise, and they’re in the middle of an argument with two of the boys who have come to announce they’re quitting the act along with the rest of the male contingent. The scene starts midcrisis, always a good idea in a musical, or anywhere else. The boys complain that they’re too old. Employment is too spotty. They have to move on. Their explanation is logical enough, but Rose is suspicious. Something’s not right. Then Louise rushes on with a note from June. Rose is reluctant to look at it, but Louise forces the issue:

  “Momma, read it!” she says, raising her voice to her mother for the first time in the show.

  One of the boys in the act summarizes its content: June has run off with Tulsa and gotten married. They’re going to be a duo.

  “It’s a keen act. Ain’t it, Louise?” one of the boys asks the heartbroken Louise.

  “I didn’t see it,” says Louise, who is as close to dead inside as a person can be at that moment. Of course, she never has seen it, though she’s danced it—once. And what she may mean is what theatergoers are also saying in that moment: “I didn’t see it coming.”

  The consequences of this simple plot development touch virtually every aspect of Gy
psy, but the important thing is this: Madame Rose’s dream and Louise’s dream have both crash-landed at exactly the same moment for exactly the same reason. There is no more Baby June, and no more Tulsa either. No stardom, no romance, no triumph for Rose, no escape for Louise. All prospects of happiness and fulfillment are gone for both of them. Each is at a moment that is, well, terminal. And it happens in an instant.

  This is how an act traditionally ends: in a crisis that seems completely beyond redemption. It’s why we come back for Act 2. In the case of Gypsy, however, the authors and the star have one final trick up their collective sleeve.

  Herbie, who has wanted nothing more from the very beginning than to get out of show business and settle down, now sees his escape route. He puts on his best happy face and promises all of them a different life, a better life. A home life. For a moment, Rose seems to be considering the matter seriously, and Louise, who has always been deeply suspicious of Herbie’s motives (he’s sleeping with her mother, after all), suddenly throws herself into his arms at the suggestion. Allegiances are shifting with lightning speed.

  “Yes! Momma, say yes!” she implores. She’s actually talking to her mother like a person with a voice—and, as it turns out, it’s the last time she’s going to do any imploring, but, of course, we don’t know that yet.

  Rose ruminates, in one of Laurents’s canniest speeches, that leads Herbie, Louise, and the audience to the conclusion that, miracle of miracles, maybe she’s ready to wrap it up. Maybe she’s done. Maybe she’s come to her senses.

  “This time, I’m apologizing,” she says to Louise. “To you. I pushed you aside for her. I made everything only for her.”

  Louise protests, trying to protect her mother’s feelings while almost basking in the joy of hearing her mother acknowledge the bitter truth she’s lived with all her life.

  We may expect any number of things to happen next—reconciliation, a marriage proposal from Herbie, a confession from Louise that all she’s ever wanted was a few words of motherly love; we can speculate all we want. But what actually happens is, for those who have never encountered Gypsy before, not on our list of speculations.

  “The boys walk because they think the act’s finished,” Madame Rose says. “They think they’re nothing without her. Well she’s nothing without me!”

  We tolerate this—a little self-promotion seems reasonable under the circumstances, and we know Madame Rose is suffering a terrible defeat. So far the script is playing out in compelling but expected ways. But then it arrives: Madame Rose turns to Louise, her untalented, pathologically shy, gawky daughter, and says, “I’m her mother and I made her. And I can make you now! And I will, my baby, I swear I will! I’m going to make you a star!”

  And to the horror of both Herbie and Louise, she begins to sing. The orchestra holds an ominous, pulsing chord created as a bed for Ethel Merman’s trumpeting brag.

  I had a dream

  A dream about you, Baby!

  It’s gonna come true, Baby!

  They think that we’re through, but, Baby …

  This is what the great screenwriting maven Robert McKee dubbed a gap. It’s the gap that opens up between the expectations of the characters—the myriad potential things that might happen next—and what actually does happen next, which is none of them. Gaps are tremendous engines of drama. They throw the characters and the audience into energized emotional chaos by pulling out the rug: What can possibly happen now?!

  The important thing about them is that they aren’t on the menu of imagined outcomes. If you brought your same-sex partner home to your parents without ever having told them you were gay and announced that you were getting married, there is an array of potentially reasonable dramatic responses: your mother embraces you but your father cannot, or vice versa. You are banished from the house. You are welcomed by your more-progressive-than-you-thought parents. But if upon your announcing the impending nuptials, your father were to say, “Thank God! You’re out! Now I can come out!”—well, that’s a gap. When they’re believable, they make for great theater.

  In the case of Gypsy, the gap also creates an opportunity for the great Merman to take the stage, which, being Merman, she had to do at the end of the act. The song is “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” and it quickly became an anthem of optimism and an American standard, superior to but not different in kind from “Hey, Look Me Over!” However, in the context of the show that gave it birth, it drips with irony, the blinkered manic declarations of self-delusion from a woman who has taken leave of her senses. As Madame Rose sings, Herbie and Louise cling to each other for safety, desperately afraid of where all this could possibly end. And then the curtain falls.

  * * *

  As late as the mid-1970s, John Raitt, who was almost sixty at the time, continued to tour in Carousel, playing in tents, civic centers, and even occasionally at county fairgrounds. He was happy to re-create the part that made him a star three decades earlier. Raitt loved to sing, and he loved for people to listen to him sing. He made one significant change in the play, however, with or without the permission of Richard Rodgers, who was still very much alive: he insisted that the first act end on the last note of Billy Bigelow’s “Soliloquy,” thus bringing down the house and the curtain at the same time. His idea may have been prescient, if self-interested. It’s a rare musical in the twenty-first century that allows a first-act curtain to fall on anything but a showstopper.

  That, however, is not the way Carousel was built. Carousel is among the first musicals to end its first act—at least as it was written—in anticipation of a crisis rather than after one has occurred. (To be fair, Oklahoma! hints at something similar, but it’s done with a ballet and is not nearly as specific.)

  Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow have married, fated to do so by the iron hand of passion that gripped them on the park bench outside the carnival, but almost immediately, the marriage has run aground. Billy doesn’t fit in with the tight-knit, provincial village of fishermen into which he’s been introduced, and he spends his nights carousing with his friend Jigger Craigin, an ex-con with a nose for trouble. Julie has been as tolerant as she can be, and remains deeply in love, but she confesses to her friend Carrie that Billy, in his frustration, has hit her. For Carrie, who is married to the upright and ambitious Mr. Snow, Julie’s marriage makes no sense. But Julie understands that in Billy’s arms, she has something that Carrie can never have. Even in her misery, she’s ablaze. She’s scared of Billy, but she’s in love with him. He’s in love with her too, but he longs for the vagabond life of calliope music, cheap beer, and travel. There’s an untutored poet inside him that’s gradually being strangled by the tightening straps of rigid small-town life.

  That small-town life, as the act begins to wind up, consists of preparations for a clambake on a nearby island, a clambake Billy has so far refused to attend. It’s an annual ritual of the village, and Billy finds it both threatening and beneath him. He’d rather find a good saloon on the mainland.

  Jigger, meanwhile, has concocted a plot for him and Billy to rob the mill owner, Mr. Bascombe, who will be bringing a few thousand dollars to a ship (that he also happens to own) that night. The plan is to take the money from Mr. Bascombe as he delivers it to the ship’s vault.

  Bascombe plays a significant part in the bench scene, offering Julie another chance at the mill if she’ll just leave Billy behind (she declines). It’s a prime example of the kind of architecture that keeps musicals shapely and all of a piece. Logically speaking, it’s not especially likely that the owner of the mill would also be the owner of the ship that Jigger has sailed in on, but it’s possible. It’s even less likely that he would be out at midnight carrying a satchel of money. This coincidence is covered in a single line that slips by the audience almost unnoticed, however. Why bother to make Bascombe the intended victim in this robbery instead of some new character? It’s important that the man who is going to be at risk is someone we know and already have feelings about—preferably negati
ve ones. It gives us a rooting interest and makes us feel how the community is all interconnected. Bascombe is the town’s richest man, an oppressor of local labor, a small-minded, tightfisted entrepreneur whose placid, churchgoing exterior hides a tyrant’s soul. He’s the man Mr. Snow is on his way to becoming. Surely Rodgers and Hammerstein could have created an additional character to carry the money—a chief accountant or bookkeeper or even a messenger—but this is better. This creates dramatic symmetry and pulls the story together.

  Characters such as Bascombe are like the iron tie rods that run through the ridge beams of the shotgun houses in New Orleans. The houses were relatively cheaply constructed and given to settling and slippage over the years, so builders introduced an iron rod that ran crosswise, bolted at each side. Every few years, or when necessary, a homeowner can pull his own home together by tightening the bolts—pulling the house in on itself, turning the screws, so to speak. Thus the house stays waterproof, insulated, and strong enough to stand. The rods are rarely noticed but always functioning, creating tensile strength in the building. Bascombe is like a human tie rod, keeping Carousel shipshape.

  This is one of the reasons that picaresque stories are hard to do as musicals. In shows like Candide and Big River, we keep leaving the secondary characters behind, never to be seen again. This, like the passive hero, tends to limit a musical’s prospects. Audiences seem much more comfortable and nourished in a community that stays in the same place and where the people can be relied upon to take an ongoing part in the story. From The Music Man to Fiddler to Sweeney Todd, musicals thrive by taking audiences to a time and place and making them feel that—for a couple of hours, at least—they live there, too. Carousel gives us a community intact, disrupted by Billy, the force from outside whose very presence seems to ensure that there will be drama—just like Harold Hill or Sweeney or any other outsider entering a closed world.