The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

  But these Jerry Herman shows were inadvertently making a larger point. What if the show had to celebrate the star because the star wasn’t actually that big a star? Carol Channing was a damned big star, but was she Beatrice Lillie? Lillie was an international celebrity in the ’20s and ’30s. Elizabeth Taylor was the audience’s idea of a star in 1964. The Beatles were stars. Carol Channing was a star only live on Broadway. Angela Lansbury? Same thing. And Bernadette Peters’s Mabel Normand in Mack and Mabel could hardly compete with Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles in the film of Cabaret. There had been a time when Broadway stars were bona fide superstars, celebrated with big pictorial profiles in magazines like Life and Look. But Broadway stars were dimming in the face of Hollywood’s increasingly larger share of the market. (The magazines were going out of business, too.) TV had given us Lucy and Desi, and Archie Bunker was yet to come. And rock stars, beginning with Elvis, were the biggest stars of all. No Broadway performer could compete. Broadway royalty ruled a shrinking fiefdom, and producers were taking notice.

  Coincidentally, a practical problem cropped up at exactly the same moment. Back in Bea Lillie’s day, a star played a show for a season, the show was a success, and everyone moved on. But by the mid-’60s (and it’s only gotten worse), shows were having a hard time recouping their costs in a single season, and stars weren’t willing to stick around forever. The economics of Broadway made it harder and harder for a producer to depend upon a star to create a hit. Shows had to find ways to survive the departure of their original stars. Fiddler did it ingeniously, by letting Mostel go quickly, replacing him with a series of credible Tevyes, and making the show the star. Dolly! did it with a series of stunt replacements; by the time it had run its almost seven-year course on Broadway, the role had been played by everyone from Mary Martin and Ethel Merman to Betty Grable and Phyllis Diller, with a hugely successful interval in which Pearl Bailey and an entirely African American cast came in and retooled the whole enterprise. But all this ingenious casting and producing couldn’t completely conceal the problem: Broadway stars were becoming a thing of the past in musicals, and musicals needed to be able to survive their departure, after a season, in order to be financially sustainable. The lesson was learned again when The Producers became instantaneously legendary in part because of the teaming of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. The two left the show, business faltered, and they were invited back, for astronomical salaries, to pump up the grosses. Then they left again. The show was a substantial hit, but its run was a bit of a disappointment, given that it had opened in a blaze of glory.

  The English superproducer Cameron Mackintosh solved the problem. He introduced a new kind of musical with a mechanical star. Beginning with Cats, in 1982 (1981 in London), Mackintosh produced a series of musicals—Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon—in which the spectacle of the production—a chandelier that crashed down from above, a helicopter that actually lifted off and flew away—utilized modern technology and theater craft to become the heart of the attraction. True, some of these shows had stars, or semistars, but the stars were never the point. The soft-core operatic scores and the special effects were the draw, and they easily survived the departure of the leading players. The productions were actually reminiscent in some ways of the operettas that had preceded the arrival of the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter back in the ’20s. It was almost as if the ghosts of Sigmund Romberg, Rudolf Friml, and the young Oscar Hammerstein had returned with their exotic, overripe tales of derring-do romance and their ballad-heavy “light classical” (now mixed with light rock) sound. The techniques for delivering battle, fire, and flood had changed, but the objectives had not—to put on a live spectacle that would deliver machine-driven thrills eight times a week no matter who was doing the singing and acting. It was a stroke of genius, and it has survived for decades now in megahits like The Lion King and megaflops like Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Foolproof it is not, but when it works, there are fortunes to be made and thrills to be discovered without an identifiable human star anywhere in sight.

  * * *

  Star turns, of course, were never the only option for this slot, and today, with fewer and fewer real stars, they have become impractical. Finding a new flavor that the show hasn’t already exploited, however, remains a prime motivation. Audiences would stick with things if they believed that the theater makers still had new tricks up their sleeve. No show proves this more definitively than Gypsy—a show that actually did have a real star in Ethel Merman. But by the time Act 2, Scene 2, came along, we’d had a lot of Merman: “Some People,” “Small World,” “You’ll Never Get Away from Me,” “Mr. Goldstone,” and “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” The creators knew they had only one more shot with that particular cannon, and they needed to save it for the end. Enter three new characters—over-the-hill strippers who are going to take over for a bit. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, it turns out the creators have been saving something for a rainy day.

  The by-now-overgrown troupe of child vaudevillians has been booked by mistake into a burlesque house instead of a vaudeville house, which explains the presence of Tessie Tura, Mazeppa, and Electra, three broads who’ve seen better days. They encounter Louise, with whom Tessie has been forced to share a dressing room, and decide to give her a lesson in show business because she seems so naïve. In the process, the three of them demonstrate their strip technique in a riotous trio called “You Gotta Get a Gimmick,” which, in any good production, stops the show in its tracks. The reasons are various—it’s funny, it’s telling, the lyrics are witty and vernacular, and it’s tuneful. But one of the major reasons it works so well is simply this: it’s completely new. New characters, new tone (raunchy), new subject (audience manipulation). It’s incredibly refreshing.

  And it turns the show around. Madame Rose, Merman’s character, is nowhere to be found. Louise, who has just begun to assert herself, listens quietly, but she’s an eager student. These women are actually giving her all the fuel she’s going to need to efficiently take over—take over her mother, take over the show, and take control of her own life. Before the number, she’s a child-woman. After it, she’s all but prepped to become a sex goddess. And all she does is listen. This is one of those tricks that musical theater can play because it has unplugged a few of the most rational channels in the brains of theatergoers. They make the leap with ease. Music, lyrics, and movement create a story bridge.

  Sometimes it’s a new emotion from a familiar character that makes its appearance here. The question is, What hasn’t the character shown us yet? What will be fresh? In Hairspray, Act 2 was cruising along, but something was missing as the show played its debut engagement at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle. Someone remembered a mostly forgotten moment in Guys and Dolls called “Adelaide’s Second Lament,” in which the tough nightclub cutie sits in a chair and reprises her big comedy number from Act 1, but in a completely different, heartbroken tone. No longer frustrated, angry, and assertive, Miss Adelaide has come face-to-face with the likelihood that Nathan will never marry her, and she is just plain resigned and sad. Although the reprise finishes with a really good joke, the body of it is quiet and reflective, and not at all what you’d expect from this brassy character. And it gives the lighter-than-air show a moment of gravitas.

  In spite of everything Hairspray’s heroine, Tracy Turnblad, had done up to this moment in Act 2, it became clear that the one thing she had never admitted was vulnerability. Audiences rooted for her because she was audacious, inventive, and unwilling to acknowledge that her heft made her an outcast. She was going to win no matter what. But even the toughest characters are entitled to show us their melancholy and insecurity for a minute—and the truth is, we want to see it. Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman fashioned a short reprise of the show’s opening number, “Good Morning Baltimore,” that revealed Tracy’s longing and her fear that perhaps she was not invincible after all. And the audience stopped admiring her and fell in love wit
h her. In a show that embraces the style of a cartoon, it was a welcome surprise, and it turned a corner, just like “Adelaide’s Second Lament.”

  Sometimes characters need a push to show us what they haven’t been willing to show us. That’s when it comes in handy to have a character lurking in the background who can force the issue in the nicest possible way. Every protagonist, particularly the toughest, can use a few minutes with Yoda to force them to look inward.

  This makes for a nice change of pace not only for the character but also for the audience. No one expected a tender ballad like “More I Cannot Wish You” to turn up in Guys and Dolls, but that’s the reason Sarah Brown has a grandfather—so he can give her a little grandfatherly advice in the form of a lilting Irish waltz. In the knockabout and noisy cartoon musical Li’l Abner, Marryin’ Sam is called upon to comfort Daisy Mae about her advancing age and declining marriageability (she’s just turned seventeen) and does so in a charming soft-shoe duet called “Past My Prime.” Yoda comes in all shapes and sizes. There’s the salty rehearsal pianist Jeanette Burmeister in The Full Monty, who doesn’t even show up until late in Act 1, and Henry Higgins’s mother, who’s also a late arrival and doesn’t sing. All these characters have the honor of unlocking something in the protagonist, usually in a tone we haven’t heard before. Hairspray has Motormouth Maybelle, who is the show’s guiding moral force and who succeeds largely for the reason that all Yoda-like characters do: she combines wisdom with a need to speak truth to power, or at least to characters who are more important in the story than she is.

  Hairspray, as previously noted, owes more than a little to Little Shop of Horrors, that off-Broadway cartoon with a brain. Both shows are stylistically two-dimensional but deeply invested in their subjects: diversity in Hairspray, the cost of moral compromise in Little Shop. And if Hairspray begins to show its true colors with the brief “Baltimore” reprise, Little Shop takes this opportunity early in the second act to go all the way, with a song called “Suddenly Seymour,” which is both a joke and not at all a joke. The title makes it sound like a joke. Seymour is a perfect schlub with a perfect schlub’s name. The idea of a woman—any woman—feeling the intense passion for a schlub that’s implied by the song’s title is inherently funny, but why? As Motel the tailor says in Fiddler, “Even a poor tailor is entitled to a little happiness.” By “a little happiness,” he means a love that will last forever. And that’s what “Suddenly Seymour” turns out to be about. Two lost souls on skid row pour their hearts out to each other, and though they do it in the show’s unique vernacular (complete with a backup girl group), they beg to be taken seriously. Audrey, responding to Seymour’s sudden discovery that he wants to take care of her, sings:

  Nobody ever treated me kindly

  Daddy left early, Mama was poor

  I’d meet a man and I’d follow him blindly

  He’d snap his fingers, me I’d say, “Sure.”

  Suddenly, Seymour is standing beside me

  He don’t give me orders, he don’t condescend

  Suddenly, Seymour is here to provide me

  Sweet understanding, Seymour’s my friend.

  If Seymour doesn’t condescend, why should we? We’ve been watching a living comic book for most of the evening, and we’ve been focusing on Seymour’s relationship with a murderous, blood-sucking Venus flytrap that has come to conquer the world. The scenery and costumes are wittily tacky, and the characters often speak in cartoon bubbles. When the real human element enters, it turns the show around, and that, finally, is what the early part of a good second act is often about: confounding expectations and raising them.

  Little Shop does it by revealing raw feelings in their full-throated glory. It exposes passion where we never suspected we’d find any. In an odd way, My Fair Lady does the same thing, though the two shows could hardly be more unrelated on the surface. But structurally, they face the same problem—each has run out of room to explore its original plot idea. In Little Shop, we’ve seen Seymour’s discovery of the amazing plant turn the fortunes of Mushnik’s flower shop around. All that’s left is for Seymour to pay the horrifying bill for his Faustian bargain. In My Fair Lady, the entire first act is about whether Henry Higgins can win his bet to pass the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle off as a highborn lady by teaching her to speak proper English. (Let’s note in passing that both shows do have flowers in common, but that’s about it.)

  At the beginning of Act 2, we learn that Higgins has prevailed. The bet is won. Eliza has triumphed, and for all intents and purposes, the story is at an end. And it might actually stop right there, if not for the following exchange:

  HIGGINS

  I suppose it was only natural for you to be anxious, but it’s all over now. There’s nothing more to worry about.

  ELIZA

  There’s nothing more for you to worry about. Oh, God, I wish I was dead.

  HIGGINS

  Why in Heaven’s name, why? Listen to me, Eliza, all this irritation is purely subjective.

  ELIZA

  I don’t understand. I’m too ignorant.

  HIGGINS

  It’s only imagination. No one’s hurting you. Nothing’s wrong. You go to bed like a good girl and sleep it off. Have a little cry and say your prayers; that will make you comfortable.

  ELIZA

  I heard your prayers: “Thank God it’s over!”

  HIGGINS

  Well, don’t you thank God it’s over? Now you can do what you like.

  ELIZA

  What am I fit for? What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do? What’s to become of me?

  Eliza has just galvanized the entire second act with five succinct questions. She’s found the hill behind the hill and put her tormentor on notice. As in the Pygmalion myth, he’s invented a new woman, and now he’s responsible for her, which he can’t accept. It never occurred to him that she was a human being, not simply the subject of an experiment. She gives him hell on his own silver platter. And then she runs away. And he misses her. The story is far from over.

  Credit George Bernard Shaw for the structural smoothness with which this happens, but in its way, it’s not so different from the disparate qualities of “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” or the “Good Morning Baltimore” reprise or “Suddenly Seymour.” It fulfills the larger purpose of changing the game. And now the audience is hungry again.

  15. All er Nothin’

  Beginning to Pack

  If the audience is hungry, the theater makers are likely confounded. Second acts should come with a notice like the one you get when you order a deck chair from Home Depot: “Assembly Required.” Often there are a few apparently extraneous parts in the box that don’t seem to fit anywhere.

  The reason for this is simple: subplots.

  Subplots are part of the fun of a show, and subplot characters are often entertaining foils for the leading players. Every good storyteller understands that we need relief from the central plot from time to time. But whatever the subplot in a musical story—it’s usually a romance that somehow reflects on the main couple’s romance, and maybe there’s also a villain, a clown, or both—it is often no further along at the end of Act 1 than the main story, which means it needs some stage time in Act 2 to come to its own conclusion. And by then, we may or may not be all that interested in a subplot. We start to yearn to know how the main story comes out.

  No matter how compelling a subplot couple may be, you can’t drift away from the main plot for long, or the show inevitably feels as though it has sailed into dead calm and stopped moving; it is no longer focused on its principal story and the audience gets restless and starts to cough. Why this is the universal response of bored people in the theater is an enduring mystery, but it’s a good tip-off that you’re in trouble, real second-act trouble. Coughing is, apparently, an involuntary response to disapproval of your musical’s structure, though not the only potential one. One well-known producer made a list of alarms that are set off in the au
dience when things aren’t going well that looked like this:

  Program rustling

  Coughing

  Yawning

  Sneezing (rare)

  Snoring (not as rare as you might hope)

  This was in the days before texting, of course. It’s important, then, that whatever happens to the subplot people, it has to happen in a couple of swift, efficient, entertaining strokes, separated by scenes involving the main characters. Alternatively, the two plots can collide in ingenious ways that keep things moving while keeping the main story in view.

  It was permissible in the ’40s and ’50s for the subplot couple to have their own little story, and that story, while it might be in telling contrast to the central story, didn’t have to intersect with it much. In Oklahoma!, Ado Annie and Will Parker run on a parallel track to Curly and Laurey. They are already romantically attached at the show’s outset, but Will discovers that Annie has also been spending time with the Arabic peddler Ali Hakim, a community outsider. Curly and Laurey, meanwhile, are meant for each other, but she’s been spending time with the farmhand Jud Fry, a community outsider. Ali Hakim is comical, while Jud is dangerous. The two plots reflect each other, but each stands pretty much on its own. In Act 1, Will Parker gets a solo, and so does Ado Annie. But there’s no time for that in Act 2—they share a single duet, “All er Nothin’.” One number is enough for them to state their differences and patch them up. Ali Hakim leaves the territory (at least for a while) and we can turn our attention back to the matter at hand. Still, for all its trailblazing fame, it’s permissible to find Oklahoma!’s subplot a little wearying by evening’s end.