The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

Not to mention of course hating dear old mom and dad

  What makes “La Vie Bohème” an appropriate curtain moment, in addition to its energy and drive, is the sense of doom driving the heartbeat of it. Like every self-proclaimed creative outpost, the world of Rent portends plenty of heartbreak, illness, failure, and death, which somehow always seems to call for a celebration. “La Vie Bohème” is that celebration, made all the more poignant (as was noted continually in the months and years following the show’s transfer to Broadway) by its creator’s sudden demise in the midst of the process. We don’t know how Act 2 will play out, but we’re left with the sense that the entire structure of the community we’ve come to know and care about is on a precipice and not about to stop moving forward. Whether it will go completely over a cliff remains to be seen as the lights snap off onstage and come up on the audience—and that’s plenty.

  12. Intermission

  When I was first taken to the theater, in 1955, intermission refreshments were limited to a watery form of orange drink served in a waxed cardboard carton. I have never understood why this should have been so. The theater owners, not above figuring out new and different ways to pick up a little extra something from a captive audience, could certainly have done better—heaven knows the movies were already selling a variety of products at inflated prices. But the Broadway theater, as it so often has, stubbornly resisted. The audience, made up almost entirely of New Yorkers who were inured to this pathetic reality, made do with orange drink and, slightly later, a similarly packaged (and similarly watered-down) version of lemonade. In an early—thus far unrepeated—act of petty crime, I stole one of these drinks from the refrigerator that stood across from the men’s room door in the basement of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre during a matinee of A Thousand Clowns in 1961.

  Jason Robards made me do it. In A Thousand Clowns he played Murray Burns, the writer of an awful kiddie TV show called Chuckles the Chipmunk. Murray has just quit his job and is spending his unemployed days making fun of the conventional workforce; shouting at the world from his window; seducing an adorable social worker who has come to threaten him with the removal to a foster home of Nick, the nephew he is raising; and generally imparting his unconventional values to the boy, who was exactly my age. Murray’s message seemed to be that the world was wrong and he was right, and if he felt like doing something, he just did it, without apology.

  I took the bait. I had seen the refrigerator before taking my seat at the beginning of the play, and I was seated on an aisle in the rear of the theater—perfectly positioned to be the first one down the stairs when the first-act curtain fell.

  It was a revolutionary act: I thought the theater should be doing better with concessions, and charging less, and that its failure to do either entitled me to express my dissatisfaction in an act of sticky-fingered protest. And I was thirsty. Capitalism was a bad thing anyhow, though not as bad as the orange drink, which, I admit, tasted a little better when you had boosted it with lightning stealth.

  I now work as senior vice president at Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, and a trip down to the basement-level restroom is always tinged with a little nostalgia for that free carton of orange drink. This, apparently, is what persistence in a career amounts to.

  The career would not have happened at all without the gambler’s instinct of my first New York boss, Rocco Landesman.

  In 1987, I was working as the dramaturg at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and had begun to understand what it meant to tell a story onstage. In hindsight, it’s amazing that, as a daily theater critic in the early and mid-’80s, I had written about the subject with such authority from a perspective of almost complete ignorance. Thanks to the patience of the Taper’s artistic director, Gordon Davidson—one of the legends of the not-for-profit arts movement—I eventually came to understand that theater is not the written word, it’s the word made flesh. Sometimes a light cue can make you cry. Sometimes an actor turning toward or away from another actor can tell more of the story than all the words a playwright could think up. Onstage, the emotional ride is a moving target made up of countless words and deeds, of lights and scenery and costume color choices (they tell you where to look, and a lot about who’s wearing them), pacing, cuing, and the sheer virtuosity of an actor clearing the emotional hurdles that a great role presents. I had to learn as much as I could, making as few mistakes as possible. And I had to come to accept that in the theater, the script is only the blueprint on which the theater makers depend. It was a little daunting. But at the end of it all, I still believed that, absent a credible blueprint, you almost couldn’t build a house that would stand.

  One other thing I began to learn at the Taper: how to relate to artists, particularly writers. Previously, I thought it perfectly acceptable to be cutting, sarcastic, even downright mean. In print. Critics rarely confront their targets face-to-face. Dramaturgs do. Sitting across from the great, underappreciated playwright Lanford Wilson in an L.A. bar, I got my first real lesson in dramaturgy. He taught it with a characteristic mix of gentleness and anger, masking hurt with pride and wit. And he did it, as he so often did back in the ’80s, with a drink in his hand.

  He was working on rewrites for his play Burn This, which was in previews at the Mark Taper. I was expounding, pretentiously, no doubt, on some line of dialogue in his play, and he was staring at me with a look that I later came to recognize as veiled incredulity. Finally I must have overstepped my bounds. He drained all but the last swallow of a margarita and then reared back and aimed the glass at my head.

  He didn’t throw it. He just held it in place like a man who was considering his options. Then he said, rather gently, “When speaking to a playwright whose work you care about, find a word other than ‘cliché.’” Then he drained the last swallow and put the glass down on the table and we moved on.

  Point taken.

  * * *

  One morning I read in The New York Times that Rocco Landesman was assuming the presidency of Jujamcyn Theaters, a company that owned five Broadway theaters. I knew who he was—a sort of legendary iconoclast who had sold his racehorses to produce the musical Big River, which, back in my days at the Herald Examiner, I had torn to pieces in a not very nice way during its tryout in La Jolla. Rocco was, and is, a Roger Miller fanatic, and his favorite American novel is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He married one to the other and created a Broadway hit despite my dissenting opinion. (The way he did it is a story in itself. As Roger Miller later said, “Rocco Landesman made me an offer I couldn’t understand.”)

  Rocco had gotten a Ph.D. in dramaturgy and criticism at Yale Drama School and run a small hedge fund. Despite his first name, he is Jewish, and from St. Louis, and has nothing to do with the Mafia. He claimed to keep $10,000 in his pocket at all times in case something interesting came up. He seemed an odd choice for this corporate position.

  I went out to lunch with a friend at the Taper, and when I returned to the office I found a phone message in my in-box from Rocco Landesman.

  “He’s offering you a job,” this friend of mine said to me as I stared uncomprehendingly at the message. That seemed unlikely, but it turned out to be true.

  “I just took this job, running this company,” he said on the phone. “We have five theaters and the only way we’re ever going to fill them is to produce our own shows. Come to New York and produce shows.”

  Why me? I wanted to know.

  “Well,” he said, “you panned the hell out of Big River and a lot of what you said was pretty smart. I used your review to beat up the creatives and help fix the show. I think you’re good at this.”

  Rocco, it turned out, is a hunch player when it comes to people, and a master of seduction. Being around him is like being in the center of a small lightning storm. He is creative, decisive, open to any idea that walks in the room, and an excellent judge of what is ingenious and what is foolish. He likes taking risks more than almost anything else, but he is canny in deciding
which ones to take, especially in the theater. He is loyal, sometimes to a fault, and he is generous. He believes no meeting needs to be more than half an hour and keeps a parking meter in his office. As far as I know, he never had a meeting at Jujamcyn without keeping one eye on the stock ticker. But having even 70 percent of his attention is plenty. It was impossible not to come to New York and work for this man.

  We sealed the deal over breakfast at the Carnegie Deli. This was in the summer of 1987, when there were still phone booths and no cell phones. As we walked out of the Carnegie, I headed for one of a pair of booths.

  “I’d better call my wife,” I said, slipping into one.

  “I have to call my bookie,” he said, slipping into the other.

  * * *

  Rocco, it turned out, made a habit of hiring people who panned him. A few years after I got to Jujamcyn, Paul Libin, the producing director of the legendary Circle in the Square Theatre, wrote a scathing letter to the Times attacking Rocco for some things he had written in an Arts and Leisure essay about Lincoln Center. Rocco’s response was simple and decisive: he hired him. And so the modern-day incarnation of Jujamcyn was born—three guys from the not-for-profit world (Yale, the Taper, and the Circle) plunging into the shark tank of Broadway.

  Back in 1987, Broadway had run into a deep ditch. Many theaters were empty, some of them for months, even years, at a time. The only shows that were making an impact were the British megamusicals. Times Square was a seedy, vaguely dangerous, and certainly unwelcoming neighborhood dotted with strip joints and porno theaters and littered with crack vials and used condoms. I loved it, actually, but it was hard to know whether the moment had come to write its obituary or dig in and work to revive its glory. We did neither. We started to do modestly the one thing we were able to do: produce shows.

  * * *

  When the Walt Disney Company bought and refurbished the New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-second Street, even the most optimistic business interests could not have foreseen the resulting boom. All Forty-second Street followed suit. Peepland disappeared and McDonald’s took over. Soon the blocks immediately to the north began to brighten. A Gap store appeared, and then a Swatch store. Within a few short years, Times Square had been utterly transformed. The M&M Store and the Hershey Store battled for dominance across the street from each other on two corners that had once featured entirely different kinds of candy purveyors. True, it was in some respects more like a midwestern mall than the unique showplace it had been in its heyday, or the tenderloin it had followed, but it was clean and well lit, commercial and safe. And the tourists began to come. Thanks to the relatively new (for the theater) field of market research, Broadway business folks learned that, for tourists, a Broadway show was the most highly prized destination and that they didn’t know which one they wanted to see. This astonishing bit of news encouraged the industry to market itself as a brand of its own: not Phantom or Beauty and the Beast, but simply BROADWAY. Everyone could get a piece. Like the physical landscape, the show business landscape was renewed. And like the physical landscape, it became more generic and less eccentric, less unusual, less New York. Suddenly, we were genuinely in a national and international business, for better and worse. For shows like The Lion King, it spelled infinite life. For others like The Producers, which Jujamcyn hosted at the St. James Theatre, it meant that once the New Yorkers had roared at its urban, Jewish wit, its days were numbered.

  Rocco’s days at Jujamcyn were numbered too, it turned out. When Barack Obama was elected president, Rocco decided that he needed to become the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts so he could shake things up in a larger arena, and he is a very determined man. He worked tirelessly to get the job and said goodbye, selling the company to Jordan Roth, a young producer with a wide-ranging interest in the theater business as a whole, not just in individual productions.

  For a moment, it felt odd working for a man who was a little more than half my age, but not for long. Jordan had vision born of another generation, which he managed to make refreshing rather than intimidating. He also did two things for which I’ll be forever grateful, both of them completely unexpected. The first was to gently but firmly separate me from a growing reluctance to embrace the next generation of theater makers and their sense of what a Broadway musical could be. My natural artistic tendencies are conservative, and subconsciously I was beginning to wonder whether the era of shows I grew up with was the only one I could take real pleasure in. It was Jordan’s passionate enthusiasm for productions like Fela!, Spring Awakening, and American Idiot that made me look again. If the Jujamcyn of the late ’80s and ’90s had pushed the envelope with Jelly’s Last Jam, M. Butterfly, The Producers, and Angels in America, why should we assume that that was as far as it could be pushed? We were young again—well, Jordan was—and I could rejoin the cavalry, which I happily did.

  Jordan’s other prime interest when he took the reins at Jujamcyn was the industry’s public image. We were a famously rude business. We were kind of delighted by our cranky box office personnel, our loud and vaguely exasperated ushers, our indifferent ticket takers. They were part of our New York profile—like the wise-ass Lindy’s waiters or the know-it-all cabdrivers regularly parodied in the movies of the ’40s. They were part of New York’s gruff, unfeeling big-city lovability—back then. And our audiences were also a crowd of gruff, impermeable New Yorkers—back then. Jordan, coming of age much later than the rest of us, understood just how much things had changed. He had watched carefully how the hotel industry and particularly the restaurant business—largely inspired by the restaurateur Danny Meyer—had revolutionized the way they treated their staff and customers, and determined that Broadway needed to get with the program. The audience was now a national and international one. They were under no obligation to be charmed by this uniquely surly part of the New York Experience. He instituted a top-down and bottom-up rethinking of how Jujamcyn would train and monitor its employees, with a commitment to making the entire experience a happier one for ourselves, theatergoers, and theater makers. It was a grand adventure. The industry as a whole was initially skeptical, which delighted us all even more. There’s hardly a happier feeling than waiting for others to catch up. Eventually, they came along, which was fun to watch from our imagined perch. All of this created a strong sense that Broadway was moving dynamically, and why in the world would anyone want to miss that? My passions were rekindled, and I’ll always be grateful.

  Of course, with the new, improved Broadway, the concessions available at intermission—already long since upgraded from crappy orange drink and lemonade—expanded markedly once again, though the prices, to be fair, do remain shocking.

  Still, you can now buy a Courvoisier in a cup with a lid, and you can bring it back to your seat and enjoy it during Act 2, surrounded, as you will be, not merely by New Yorkers, but by theatergoers from all over the world. It’s often a wise purchase, may I say—as the lights begin to dim and the entr’acte begins.

  13. Clambake

  Curtain Up: Act 2

  Cole Porter reportedly said that for his new show, 1929’s Fifty Million Frenchmen, he was putting the two best songs in the first fifteen minutes. Why? Because he was so irritated with his society friends coming to see his work “fashionably late” that he wanted to make sure they’d miss them and be damn sorry they did.

  “You Do Something to Me” and “You’ve Got That Thing” became standards, apparently without the endorsement of Porter’s friends (though the rest of Fifty Million Frenchmen has rarely been heard from since). But does anyone come to theater “fashionably late” anymore? Does anyone “linger in the lobby” before Act 2, as the title of a 1925 Gershwin song from Lady, Be Good! suggests they might?

  The habit dates from another time, when the theater had a different audience, and when understanding the plot and characters of a musical show was hardly the point. Broadway was, for many society types, just another night on the town, and the play was often somewhat incident
al to the overall experience, which might include a cocktail party and dinner before, or cocktails before and dinner after, with dancing, and a midnight floor show. And a visit to a speakeasy that might last until dawn. Those days are long over, and yet one aspect of writing for the theater has barely changed since the flapper era. As if we were still lingering in the lobby, most second acts begin with something virtually expendable: the song that has nothing to do with anything. Also, in case you are there to hear it, it’s usually light and entertaining.

  The reasons for the light and entertaining part of the tradition are easy to justify. First acts tend to end with a crisis and are often a downer. The two lovers have discovered they have betrayed or been betrayed, and will never have another word to say to each other. Or the protesters outside a local TV station have been beaten with truncheons and arrested. Or the hero is broke and needy, and has decided to commit a robbery that we know will ruin his life. It’s all very grim and unpleasant, at least by musical theater standards. So the authors feel an obligation to welcome you back in for Act 2 in a way that suggests the worst is, perhaps, over—“Welcome back, dear audience,” they seem to be saying. “We’re really here to entertain you after all. We’re glad you stayed, and we hope you are too.” Theater makers today tend to refer to this moment as “one for nothing”—a gift to the audience, and, in some cases, to the songwriters as well.

  Hence “Take Back Your Mink” at the beginning of Act 2 of Guys and Dolls, “Big Dollhouse” from Hairspray, and “This Was a Real Nice Clambake” from Carousel, among others.

  A lot of good songs have occupied this spot, though it’s unlikely they were placed there for spite, as Porter may have done with the opening numbers in Fifty Million Frenchmen. Instead, the slot seems to have given songwriters a certain kind of freedom, a recess from the demands of storytelling and character exploration. There’s a high pleasure quotient in many of these numbers, as if the writers, like the audience, had been refreshed by intermission (no orange drink for them, one can assume). As a particularly classic example, give a listen to “Together, Wherever We Go” from Gypsy. It’s the only tension-free moment in the entire show, even though the characters bicker as they sing. (It’s not really the first number in the act; that’s a variation on the tired vaudeville routine that appears throughout the show. But it feels like the first number.)