The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

  He has also brought the world down around his shoulders by letting this new cosmology out into the open, where it can only be rejected and vilified by those in charge, who fear the power of a myth that speaks to the people more effectively than their own. In this neatest trick in Mormon’s entire bag of tricks, we actually see how a religion gets created—more or less by mistake. “Joseph Smith American Moses” handles its main event chores dazzlingly, including the obligation to entertain and energize us while creating the greatest possible jeopardy for the characters we care most about. It tweaks one of the icons of the Golden Age and leaves the audience sated but still in suspense. The piper, as always in a well-constructed story, has yet to be paid, and it is time for the next-to-last scene.

  17. I Thought You Did It for Me, Momma

  The Next-to-Last Scene

  In his great theatrical memoir Act One, Moss Hart tells the—somewhat self-created—story of his entrance into the world of Broadway in the 1920s, and spends the last part of the book describing the shaping of his first hit collaboration with George S. Kaufman, Once in a Lifetime. This was back in the day when Broadway shows tried out in places like Atlantic City and Philadelphia, and wholesale changes were made overnight in an atmosphere that was both exciting and chaotic. The entire enterprise amounted to a roll of the dice. If the show was in trouble and inspiration struck, it might be fixed. If the muses stubbornly refused to appear, another promising show ended up on the ash heap of theater history. The overall results were probably about the same as they are today, when plays are typically first developed and presented by regional theaters around the country, and Broadway producers shop for them by going and having a look. But the old-time tryout was much more romantic, at least in theory, if not in practice. As Larry Gelbart famously said during the disastrous and tortured tryout of The Conquering Hero, “If Hitler’s alive, I hope he’s out of town with a musical.”

  Once in a Lifetime was not a musical but a particularly promising comedy, dogged by third-act trouble. Days before it decamped from Philly to face audiences and critics on Forty-fifth Street, Hart came up with the scene that saved it, and his story is instructive and entertaining. As Hart tells it, the play’s producer, the formidable Sam Harris, took Hart out for a drink a few nights before the end of the out-of-town run, got drunk, and told Hart, “I wish, kid, that this weren’t such a noisy play. Just think about it. Except for those two minutes at the beginning of the first act, there isn’t another spot in this whole play where two people sit down and talk quietly to each other.”

  Hart puzzled over this assessment—it could hardly be called an analysis—and made a bold move. He took the scene that he and Kaufman were proudest of having created—a rambunctious Hollywood farrago in a night spot called the Pigeon’s Egg—and tossed it out the window. It was the biggest and most ambitious scene in the play, but also the noisiest, and it was late in the act. He threw out the most impressive, wittiest, and biggest set in the play—the set itself got laughs—and replaced it with an unprepossessing pair of seats on an eastbound Pullman car. The hugely populous Pigeon’s Egg started out funny but gradually exhausted the audience, and the play had no real emotional payoff. Hart replaced it with two characters the audience actually cared about, who had a simple conversation. An attempt to top everything that had come before was replaced with something that didn’t resemble anything else in the play—a heart-to-heart talk. And suddenly the play worked; it still works today, eighty-five years later. The young Moss Hart had inadvertently written a classic next-to-last scene.

  * * *

  Act One was a seminal book for me, as it was for a lot of theater people in my generation. But I never thought of it as an instruction manual until I got the chance to work on my first Broadway play, M. Butterfly. I had brought the play to New York in my suitcase when I moved east from Los Angeles to take the job at Jujamcyn, and I was eager to get involved in it—I admired its author, David Hwang, enormously and had been trying to get the play under way at the Mark Taper Forum when I suddenly changed jobs.

  Based on a true incident, M. Butterfly had been commissioned by an independent, idiosyncratic producer named Stuart Ostrow, and he wanted to do the play directly on Broadway, not at a regional theater. In other words, he wanted to try it out like Once in a Lifetime, although this route of march was already becoming unfashionable and unaffordable. But Ostrow had a vision for the piece that involved a lot of expensive production values, and he didn’t think he’d get a first-class production from the Taper or any other regional theater, so he raised all the money for Broadway, booked a tryout at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., and agreed to play Jujamcyn’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre in return for a significant investment.

  John Lithgow signed to star in the show as a French diplomat in China who falls hopelessly in love with a Peking Opera diva. In the course of the play, the diva becomes his lover and confidante, and listens to him pour out not only his heart but also a number of state secrets. And shockingly, the diva turns out to be not only a spy but a man. He/she was played by an amazing young actor named B. D. Wong.

  The play opened in Washington to respectful mixed reviews and spotty business, but Ostrow was undaunted. He knew he had a hit on his hands—or behaved as if he did. He was an old-time impresario, with a strong stomach for risk and a lot of bravado. He was small of stature but had an ego that more than compensated, and he was great fun to be around.

  During the third week of a four-week engagement in Washington, Ostrow called me on the phone.

  “There’s an emotional gap in the next-to-last scene,” he said. “Can you look and listen?”

  I hopped on a train and, during the ride down, remembered that section of Act One. Hart threw out a multilayered scene for a simpler, two-person one and saved the day. The problem I was pondering was this: David Hwang already had written a two-person scene in that very spot, so I couldn’t see how Hart’s lesson would be of any use. Still, I was trying to remain alert to the fact that these next-to-last scenes are best when kept simple and when they answer questions for the audience in a direct way.

  As I watched the play that night, I thought I detected a parallel between Hart’s problem and Hwang’s. Once in a Lifetime had tried to use that penultimate moment to top everything that came before it—more scenery, costumes, characters, and gags than in any other spot in the show. Hwang had written a scene that looked simpler and, indeed, featured only two characters. But the language and ideas were dizzyingly complex, a pileup of political and philosophical notions that raced forward at an alarming pace—like Kaufman and Hart, he was trying to top himself. And audiences simply gave up on it in frustration. They were focused on something much simpler.

  Over drinks after the show I gently and, I think, shyly (I was in awe of David Hwang; I still am) said I was puzzled by the audience’s drift. He was too. Maybe, I said, the problem was that the scene was answering complicated thematic questions while the audience was wondering about a simple and literal one: How could a “sophisticated” French diplomat have fallen hopelessly in love with a Peking Opera diva and lived with her in the same bed for years without knowing she was a man? In the most literal terms: What made it credible, at least in the context of the play? Was there a way to answer this big metaphorical, apparently unanswerable question in a simple, human way that would set the audience’s mind at rest and give it the release it was seeking and the opportunity to embrace the play’s larger questions? I understood the whole play to be about how the West mistakes what the East is in the most fundamental way, but could this moment just be about two people instead? Could we settle the big dumb question before attacking the smart, complex ones?

  “I can do that,” David said casually. But he didn’t say how.

  He didn’t throw out the scene, but he wrote a simple and startling line in the middle of it. The opera star has been revealed as a man—designer suit and all—and the diplomat is pressed to explain how this confusion could have continued f
or so many years. Was it deception, self-deception, or what? The diva needles him: How could it have been love? How could the lie have lived so long? How could a man, even an awkward, emotionally clumsy man, have clung to a fantasy so obviously implausible? How could a man love a woman so devoid of actual womanhood? The audience was right with him—that’s what it was wondering too, so a spokesperson was up onstage who wasn’t going to give up until the diplomat supplied the answer.

  The diplomat, finally pressed to the wall, says without affect, “I’m a man who loved a woman created by a man. Everything else—simply falls short.”

  That line brought an audible sigh from the audience. Sitting in the dark, everyone got it. Whether the line bears close examination in terms of plausibility in the cold light of day isn’t the point. The play had cast a spell and the audience was in the throes of it. It provided what all theatergoers want: an answer. It was the first time I ever saw what a dramaturg really does, and it was all about asking questions, not making suggestions.1

  One other significant change occurred in between the D.C. tryout and the Broadway run, and it involved, of all things, the curtain call.

  The play ends with the diplomat lying facedown on the stage floor, overwhelmed and destroyed by events, his face painted clown white in the style of the Peking Opera diva he loved. He is, in effect, a man unmanned, a shell. In the original staging, the lights went out, and when they came up for the curtain call, the ensemble took its bow, followed by the major characters in ascending order of importance, who finally brought the star, John Lithgow, his face cleansed, onstage for a well-deserved ovation. But the director, John Dexter, had a better, more unconventional idea—a cunning theater trick.

  In New York, Lithgow collapsed into his swoon, fell to the floor, and remained motionless, as in D.C. But when the lights came back up for the bows, he was still there. Then he rose slowly, in a daze, apparently in character—or somewhere in between the character and the actor, a man very much exhausted by the journey he had just taken—his white makeup now smeared and smudged. He looked bedazzled and exhausted. And the audience, as one, rose to its feet.

  The dramaturgy helped. But never count show business out of the equation.

  Nonetheless, it’s essential that the audience has its moment with the Gordian knot of the play and the way it is untangled. A couple of characters need to come face-to-face and thrash it all out in simple language, and preferably quickly, at least in a musical. The evening is getting late, and we’re ready to know the outcome of the story’s central conflict. In classic playwriting, this is called “the obligatory scene,” but that’s too pretentious for musicals. In musicals we settle for “next-to-last scene,” and it’s not always—or even often—done in song. The main event earns the writers the opportunity to speak plainly for a few minutes.

  But time is of the essence. No audience comes to musicals to listen to dialogue, though they understand there’s likely to be a certain amount of it. Still, if everything is going to stop cold for a book scene at this point, it had better be good or short, preferably both. Contrarily, this is where Gypsy, as original as it is iconoclastic, places its longest scene between mother and daughter. Daring, but it works. Rose and Louise really have it out, in one of the more entertaining verbal battles in all of American playwriting. The subject is love and abandonment—how we project our failed dreams onto our children and how we tragically confuse their needs with our own.

  Louise, now rechristened Gypsy Rose Lee, is in charge of her world, of her stardom, and of herself for the first time. Rose, who was once the boss, can’t even get Louise to let her help put the costumes away. Louise is having a life beyond her wildest dreams, and for her mother it’s a nightmare. She’s been put out to pasture, and she knows it. And Louise is actually enjoying it—it’s payback time. In constant combat, Rose and Louise review the tangled conflicts of their lives in corrosive detail. Finally, having lost the battle and the war, Rose shoots off one last salvo:

  ROSE

  All right, miss. But just one thing I want to know: All the working and pushing and fenagling, all the scheming and scrimping and lying awake nights figuring: How do we get from one town to the next? How do we all eat on a buck? How do I make an act out of nothing! What’d I do it for? You say I fought my whole life. I fought your whole life. So now tell me: What’d I do it for?

  LOUISE

  I thought you did it for me, Momma.

  That’s it. That’s what the play is about. In one simple—if wordy—question and one terse answer, the entire evening is thrown into high relief, in a way that anyone can appreciate and be moved by.

  When a playwright can nail a moment like that, two things are happening. First, the playwright is letting the audience know that he understands and is in complete control of his work, his subject, his reason for writing the play. That in itself is satisfying to an audience. Second, we are given the opportunity to rack back through the entire evening and see how it fits together. It’s deeply pleasurable. We understand why we came to church.

  And at its best—in plays and musicals—it often comes in the form of a question and an answer.

  In Fiddler on the Roof, the question-and-answer moment is in the hands of two minor characters, the Rabbi and a young villager. During the course of the evening, the little village of Anatevka has been defined as being held together by tradition, and the traditions have crumbled from within, as Tevye’s three adult daughters have taken their love lives into their own hands and made bolder and bolder choices about whom to love—the third of them breaking the final taboo by marrying outside the faith.

  But there is equal pressure on Anatevka from without; the Russians have taken more and more from the Jews and finally seize their land and purge them. There is an edict from the authorities, and just like that, Anatevka is no more. Everyone gets out the wagons and donkeys and packs up what little they have and prepares to leave a town that will instantly disappear. A place they’ve called home for generations is now vanishing before our eyes. They are about to begin their wandering—off to America, to Europe, to Palestine—when a young villager turns to the Rabbi.

  MENDEL

  Rabbi, we’ve been waiting for the Messiah all our lives. Wouldn’t this be a good time for him to come?

  RABBI

  We’ll have to wait for him someplace else.

  This is the point—the question-and-answer moment—where the 899 other Jews I first saw the show with in 1964 began to understand the scope of Fiddler’s subject. It’s a song cue, but it makes you inhale sharply. Because “someplace else” means “everywhere” to these villagers—the entire diaspora, the world of Jews who had lost and found and kept in touch with each other since the day they packed their candlesticks and prayer shawls into carpetbags and trudged off to discover a new life. Again.

  I was completely startled by this moment when I first heard it, though I had been brought up in suburban Stamford, Connecticut, and really had very little idea what it meant to be Jewish—my family was more zealous about assimilation than about Judaism itself. My father was also deeply affected, but he was a great needler and didn’t trust sentiment. He pulled himself together quickly, and on the car ride home he said, “I don’t understand the ending of that show. All those Jews standing in the aisles crying their eyes out. Every one of them the grandchild of someone who left Anatevka so sadly—they all came to the United States, became successful, and their grandchildren can afford to sit in orchestra seats at the biggest hit in town. What the hell are they crying about?!”

  But he knew. His father had fled Minsk in 1895 at age five.

  There was a deeper resonance to “someplace else.” The line was being spoken by a simple man of God who had no idea of its implications—assimilation in the United States, a Holocaust in Europe, an unending struggle in what became Israel. There was more than a century of happy endings and tragic endings, and no real ending at all, in those two simple words. And that’s one of the reasons Fiddler rema
ins immortal.

  * * *

  The exchanges are not so simple in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, which can be read as a kind of country cousin to Guys and Dolls. Willson’s Iowa townsfolk are flimflammed by Professor Harold Hill, a slick salesman with an apparent heart of tin, who vaguely resembles Sky Masterson in his firm belief that women are for momentary amusement, not for life commitment. His opposite number, Marian the librarian, is a kind of rural Sarah Brown, committed to keeping dangerous men at bay while she pursues her higher ideals, which include bringing culture to the benighted citizens of River City.

  They’re a perfect match for a musical or any romantic comedy—two people who can’t possibly end up together but somehow do. That’s the myth we love to believe in.

  Under their armor, Marian is a pure romantic, and Harold is simply waiting for someone to awaken his true heart. But the armor is thick. The agent of the awakening is not Marian but her troubled, shy little brother, Winthrop, who is afraid to talk because he has a pronounced lisp.

  Harold genuinely takes to Winthrop and feels for him, so he enlists him as the cornet player in the band that he’s promoting—a band that will earn him some quick money in sales commissions but will never actually materialize, since Harold knows nothing about music. This is a fatal turn in Harold’s life because his fondness for Winthrop is real, but the dream he sells the boy is a phony. Marian knows it—she’s done her research on the professor’s nonexistent credentials—but she loves him anyhow, because he has saved Winthrop. The question is: What will happen when the flimflam is revealed? How will Winthrop survive it, and what will Marian do with the love she’s invested in this disreputable man?