by Jack Viertel
Frank Loesser seems to have had particular fun with “Take Back Your Mink,” which is a disposable nightclub number from Guys and Dolls. After Sky Masterson’s Cuban adventure with Sarah Brown has ended in disaster at the end of Act 1, the Act 2 curtain rises on Miss Adelaide and the Hot Box girls doing a mild strip to a song that is all about handing back shiny gifts to a sugar daddy who actually expected to trade them for sex. The removal of the items constitutes the strip. The likelihood that the outraged Hot Box girls have never before encountered such a proposition from a sugar daddy is absolutely nil, which makes their expression of shock and horror a good joke, if somewhat politically incorrect by today’s standards. The Hot Box girls, in fact, seem to know enough about fur coats and how they should be treated to conclude the number with the lyric
So take back your mink
Those old worn-out pelts
And tell them to hollanderize it
For somebody else.
As the decades have rushed by, this lyric, along with others in Loesser’s flavorful postwar argot, has become progressively more mysterious to audiences. What does it mean to hollanderize a mink? Eventually the line was changed to “and go shorten the sleeves for somebody else,” which doesn’t sit on the music quite as elegantly and is certainly less colorful. But at the time Guys and Dolls was produced in 1949, audiences understood the lyric perfectly well, as they did the references to casting a “sheep’s eye” at a girl you were mooning over, or owning suits with “two pair of pants,” not to mention the Yiddish “So nu?” which forms the basis of an entire number.
As to the two pair of pants, men’s stores well into the ’60s often sold suits to middle-class white-collar workers with a jacket and two pair of pants, reasoning that the jacket would be hung in an office closet each day while the bookkeeper or assembly line supervisor sat at his desk. The slacks would need cleaning more often than the jacket—hence the spare pair. In the 1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, Groucho interrogates Chico at a war crimes trial by asking him, “Isn’t it true you tried to sell Freedonia’s secret war code and plans?”
“Sure,” Chico replies, “I sold a code and two pair of plans,” a joke that leaves today’s audiences similarly at a loss.
Loesser was no punster, but he was particularly adept at using colloquialism to create a particular—in this case Runyonesque—landscape; only Johnny Mercer could compete with him on that front. Sky Masterson, twitting Sarah Brown’s ultraconventional idea of an ideal man, sings, “And you’ll know at a glance by the two pair of pants.”
But what, a modern audience is entitled to ask, was hollanderizing? When Guys and Dolls was revived in 1992 with Nathan Lane playing Nathan Detroit, The New York Times ran an article about Loesser’s use of colloquial expressions, which engendered a somewhat startling response in the letters column:
To the Editor:
A. Hollander & Sons, based in Newark and named for my great-grandfather Adolph, were the world’s largest fur dressers and dyers, listed on the New York Stock Exchange … The Hollanders specialized in making cheap furs look expensive, especially mink-dyed muskrat. But was that Hollanderizing? Well, no.
Hollanderizing was a cleaning process for many types of furs. It involved sawdust and other agents to remove the grime that fur accumulated during a winter of wear. For many women, it was a spring ritual to take their coats to a furrier, who would send them to be Hollanderized.
Although Hollanderizing has gone the way of the Studebaker, it is nice to be a slightly mysterious footnote to Broadway history. This is gratifying to the present family members, notably my aunt Leslie Hollander of Asbury Park, N.J., who has a long memory.
—JANE HOLLANDER Long Branch, N.J., July 8, 1992
So Miss Adelaide and the other Hot Box girls knew their way around a mink, and knew their way around generally, as did Mr. Loesser. Yet the number itself is hardly germane to the story of Guys and Dolls. It’s a throwaway, easily ignored, but written with a virtuoso’s keen observation and enjoyment of detail.
The same might be said for Carousel’s “This Was a Real Nice Clambake,” which features the novelty of the entire chorus of performers singing it while lying on their backs, virtually overcome by an overdose of steamers and lobsters. It’s a number about the pleasures of being sated, and Rodgers and Hammerstein knew that audiences might miss it, or miss part of it, without missing anything much. But it serves as an antidote to the dramatic end of Act 1, and the stasis in the number is setting a trap: what follows is all action. There’s to be an attempted seduction, which today might be considered a rape, a foiled robbery, and a suicide coming up. Beginning the act with the lulling three-quarter tempo of “Clambake” makes audiences feel secure and sated themselves, happy to be there, which ensures that they will be startled out of their lethargy in exactly the right way by the plot.
Among the classic shows, this pattern was all but ubiquitous. Finian’s Rainbow’s Act 2 opens with a satirical revue number called “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich”; Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, like Guys and Dolls, features a nightclub turn, as does On the Town. Kiss Me, Kate lets us enjoy three dancer-singers working out on “Too Darn Hot” for no particular reason. The Music Man gives us a rehearsal for the town’s Ice Cream Sociable called, of all things, “Shipoopi,” while The Pajama Game takes us to a party at the Union Hall featuring entertainment: “Steam Heat.” The lesser-known Paint Your Wagon, a musical about the California Gold Rush, features a number called “Hand Me Down That Can of Beans,” which sounds like it’s going to be a reworking of “This Was a Real Nice Clambake,” but with a less appetizing menu.
Porgy and Bess, which was as boldly experimental as any musical theater event had ever been when it opened in 1935, was presented in three acts and steered clear of the tradition, a sign, perhaps, that it wanted to be taken more seriously than the shows surrounding it at the time. But when it was revised for Broadway in 2012, it was telescoped into two acts, and Act 2 opened with “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” a classic fun-if-you-happen-to-catch-it number. Porgy, it seems, was being brought to heel for a less adventurous audience.
In modern times, with the audience all back in its seats and paying attention, theater makers began to insert plot or thematic information into these numbers without really changing the tone of the numbers themselves, and in some cases actually using the tone for ironic comment. Still wanting to seduce audiences into a sense of well-being, they began to try to eat their cake and have it too.
Hello, Dolly!’s second act opens with “Elegance,” sung by four subsidiary characters out on the town, and it certainly sounds like a typical opener—very soft shoe and dripping charm. But it contains at least a hint of future conflict—the two girls think the two boys are millionaires, and the boys are playing up this lie in every way they can, while the audience enjoys the fact that this will no doubt cause more and more trouble as the evening wears on. So there’s a hint of plot, but nothing too specific or crucial. (The number, credited to Jerry Herman, was actually ghosted by Bob Merrill when no one could figure out how the act should open.)
Company opens its second act with two numbers telescoped into one—“Side by Side by Side.” The number begins as a charming soft-shoe takeoff on “Side by Side” and then morphs into a real barn burner, including a tap break, that goes on for so long that the cast pretends to be more and more out of breath as it progresses, and completely exhausted by its conclusion. By turns charming and intentionally overlively, it is dripping with irony. First “Side by Side by Side” adds one more “by side” to the number it is tipping its hat to, thereby showing us a couple and a third wheel, the show’s uncommitted protagonist, Bobby. Then, in the second section, which could be a whole new song called “What Would We Do Without You?,” the tap break shows us all the couples taking turns, with Bobby doing his part and then handing the break off to an empty follow spot and dead silence. In the course of the two halves of the number, we see him as both one too many and one too few,
the natural number in a show about marriage being two, not three, not one. And yet, despite this remarkable display of theatrical thematic storytelling—we know he’s going to have to become part of a pair or be forever alone—the number sounds like two charming, brainless second-act openers back to back: an embarrassment of riches.
If Company’s second-act opener made all its points in action rather than words, Sondheim’s magnum opus, Sweeney Todd, took the opposite approach, while still honoring the tradition and pushing it forward.
“God, That’s Good!” gets Sweeney’s second act off to a roaring start with an ensemble-driven number about how tasty Miss Lovett’s meat pies are, never mind what they’re made of. But as the number progresses, more and more plot gets inserted into it, and it develops into a complex musical scene, in which Sweeney’s custom-made barber chair arrives and is installed and tested out, using a stack of books to simulate the path his victims will soon be taking from the second-floor barbershop to the revenue-generating bake house in the basement, and thence to the tables where the customers will extol their flavor. The tempo and tone of the number keep refreshing themselves, while these story intervals keep interrupting. Yet when all is said and done, the number reverts to a great big cheerful celebration again, the irony having deepened: we’ve come to observe exactly how Sweeney’s victims end up as ingredients in the pies the general public is enjoying with such relish. It’s a bright-as-paint advertisement for the joys of cannibalism.
But many modern shows, less ambitious ones perhaps, have declined to challenge the tradition, with no real harm done. Annie begins its second act with actual story material—the hunt for the poor orphan’s parents is being taken to a new level by broadcasting it to the entire country over the radio. That’s how we come to meet Bert Healy, a character we’ll never hear from again, who, after presenting the plea, launches into “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile,” a classic example of the genre. The scene shifts from the radio station to the orphanage, where all the orphans do their own version of the number for no particular reason except to bring down the house, which a claque of little girls can certainly do. Mission accomplished.
“The Big Dollhouse” in Hairspray also follows the rules, though Hairspray is in most respects a shaggier, more informal show than Annie. But it does tend to observe the niceties when it can, and “The Big Dollhouse” gives us two minutes of lively women-behind-bars camp, as the protesters who have challenged the segregationist policies of The Corny Collins Show bemoan their fate, moments before they are all released from prison. We didn’t really need to hear from them. The number is there purely for entertainment purposes and was summarily clipped out of the film version of the musical. Almost no one noticed.
Whereas Hairspray showed a surprising amount of respect and affection for classic forms, the bold Sunday in the Park with George rarely did. Yet in some ways it also chose to follow the rules at the top of the second act, though with a more complicated intent.
Sunday faced a particularly interesting problem: its second act begins a century after its first act ends. To link the two, Sondheim wrote a sophisticated comedy number called “It’s Hot up Here.” The curtain rises on Seurat’s now-famous painting, inhabited by real actors, posed as if frozen in time, just as they were when the curtain came down on Act 1. But as they sing about the frustrations of being stuck in a painting instead of being able to continue their real lives, audiences begin to realize that it is not the people who are singing, it’s the painting—and it has been hanging someplace for a very long time. This connects us back to Act 1 and also leads us into the ensuing scene, set in Chicago’s Art Institute, where the actual painting hangs, comfortably locating us in modern times. Yet despite this highly original transition, the number itself follows tradition in one important way—there’s not a single piece of information in it that we really need to hear to understand the story.
Of course, we do want to understand the story, and we may also have some fear that, having taken off a quarter hour to use the bathroom and check e-mail and messages, we may be momentarily disoriented and at a loss—more than audiences would have been half a century ago, when the distractions were fewer and less likely to be as intrusive as the information system everyone now has in his or her pocket or purse. Hence it’s no surprise that Hamilton, which breaks so many rules and observes so many others, opens its second act with a sly, though possibly unintentional, tip of the hat to the tradition. Its second-act opener is called “What’d I Miss?”
14. Suddenly Seymour
The Candy Dish
If the materials that open second acts are among the easiest to predict and describe, what happens next is significantly more imponderable. By the time a story has come this far, if it’s worth anything at all, it has developed its own path and has no choice but to follow it. Still, there are a few reliable paradigms that carry audiences through to the big confrontations, climaxes, and celebrations still to come.
The term “second-act trouble,” which every theater professional knows, usually refers to something that begins to happen right around this spot. Creators trying out their new show discover that once they’ve welcomed the audience back, they don’t have a secure way of leading them home. Part of the problem is pragmatic; if you think of a musical score as a candy dish filled with a variety of delights, you can imagine the disappointment of discovering that too many of the candies in the dish are weak variations of each other, as opposed to new and surprising inventions. By the time we get to the second song in Act 2, a fair number of treats have been sampled. And the invention can begin to flag. How many kinds of musical numbers are there? How many kinds of dance numbers? Aside from getting through the remains of the story, are there any styles of presentation or any emotional explorations that we haven’t already dealt with? What’s left besides the big battle at the end?
Sometimes second-act trouble is really first-act trouble—too much of the vocabulary has already been on display before intermission, or something that might be useful right about now has not been set up, and the audience gets confused. Or too many subplots have been unpacked in Act 1, and they are cumbersome and time-consuming to pack back up again. But today’s shows, which have many technological advantages over the classic era of Broadway, lack one candy that used to reliably be present: a visit with the star.
In revues like The Ziegfeld Follies, there used to be a spot in the playbill that simply said “A Few Minutes with Beatrice Lillie” or “A Few Minutes with Bert Lahr.” The notation encouraged the audience to imagine that the star they had come to see was going to simply improvise, or chat, or in some other way supply an intimate experience that would be unique. In truth, these “few minutes” events were largely scripted—an early version of a stand-up routine—but whether they were or weren’t, they gave the crowd what it came for: a seemingly once-in-a-lifetime audience with theater royalty. The star could string together old bits of monologue, sing songs, or tell jokes, and no one would interrupt. There was no one onstage but the star.
As shows progressed from the pre-Oklahoma! era to the postwar period, these moments became integrated into the story and were no longer spontaneous or irrelevant, but in some sense they still functioned in the same way: they provided an opportunity for the audience to celebrate the star. And audiences were hungry for the opportunity. Whether it was Ezio Pinza singing “This Nearly Was Mine” in South Pacific or Zero Mostel relaxing from the anxiety of life in Anatevka long enough to share the comic duet “Do You Love Me?” with his costar Maria Karnilova, or Angela Lansbury doing the same thing with Bea Arthur in “Bosom Buddies” in Mame, these were a powerful element in why audiences came to the theater: they loved to spend time with the star, especially if the star let her hair down or opened her heart. And the moment usually came in the second slot in Act 2.
Barbara Cook, though not a superstar even at the height of her career as a leading lady, had such a moment singing “Ice Cream” in this spot in She Loves Me. A
ll alone onstage, she got a chance to show off her spectacular Broadway soprano, go through the character’s inner monologue as she discovers that she’s fallen in love, and hit a great high note at the end. In the largely forgotten musical It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman, the title character, played by a complete nonstar named Bob Holiday, all alone onstage, had a big comic solo called “The Strongest Man in the World.” Looking at the show today, you would think the part had been played by somebody important. And Mandy Patinkin, who was a star on the rise, took the slot in Sunday in the Park with George to display his Danny Kaye–like ability with the satirical tongue-twister “Putting It Together”—all alone onstage except for some cardboard cutouts of the people he was supposed to be dealing with. All these moments are designed to be especially delicious, and the more modern ones advance the plot, or at least the subject.
Sometimes, the show itself celebrated the star in this slot. Most famously, in “Hello, Dolly!,” virtually everyone in the cast joined in to let the customers know that Carol Channing was the greatest, most adorable, most eccentric, and most important person who had ever walked down a staircase. The producer-director Hal Prince, according to William Goldman’s The Season, turned down the opportunity to direct Hello, Dolly! in part because he couldn’t figure out what the number was doing in the show. Dolly Levi, after all, wasn’t someone who was likely to be celebrated by the entire staff of the Harmonia Gardens restaurant—she was a small-time shanty-Irish matchmaker from Yonkers. But Prince was thinking of the character. Jerry Herman, Gower Champion (who did direct and choreograph), and David Merrick (who produced) were focused on the star. And they gave the audience the (admittedly irrational) thrill of a lifetime in one of the greatest numbers ever wrapped around a title song. Who cared whether Dolly Levi was famous or obscure, rich or poor, welcome or unwelcome in a fashionable New York eatery? Carol Channing was famous, rich, and welcome on the stage of the St. James Theatre. The damn thing worked so well that Herman repeated it in Mame two years later, though he moved it to the end of Act 1. And again in Mack and Mabel (apparently against his better judgment) with “When Mabel Comes in the Room,” which occupied the opening slot in Act 2. Why make the customers work when you can provide their ecstasy for them? They’re sure to join in.