The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

  Hello!

  My name is Elder Price!

  And I would like to share with you the most amazing

  Book.

  Hello!

  My name is Elder Grant!

  It’s a book about America a long long time ago

  we now find the Ugandans, some in Mormon uniform, some in traditional tribal garb, mixed in with the Mormon elders, in a pose that is eerily reminiscent of the opening tableau, with all the uniformity of that picture in happy tatters. As in Hairspray, the whiteness has been left behind. And they sing to us:

  Hello!

  My name is Elder Mutumbo!

  And I would like to share with you the most amazing

  Book

  Hello!

  My name is Sister Kimbay!

  It’s a book about a people who were poor and sad

  Like you!

  The number chatters along to its climax, introducing the “Prophet,” Arnold Cunningham, and concludes with a joyful ode to the new church, the new members, and the promise of redemption:

  Join our family

  And set your spirit free

  We can fully guarantee

  That

  This book will change your life …

  The book of Arnold!

  Hello!!!

  And with the show’s apparent last line (except for the jubilant “Hello!!!”), the story has finally been told to its satisfying conclusion. We’ve seen a religion invented and a people saved. Or sort of saved, at least spiritually. But Gotswana, the doctor, who complains all night of having “maggots in my scrotum,” actually gets the last line. After a quick celebratory restating of “Tomorrow Is a Latter Day” sung by the entire company, Gotswana has the last word—or words—of wisdom and warning to the newly ecstatic Ugandans: “I still have maggots in my scrotum!” he sings resonantly. And then the show’s really over. The Book of Mormon gets to eat its cake and have it too, which makes some audiences angry—even the ones that love it. It gives value to faith and cheerfully admits that faith is no substitute for worldly things like food, shelter, and medicine. So what good is it? It’s like art: we can’t live without it, the show seems to be telling us, even if its purpose is unfathomable. And that’s just the way it is.

  Mormon’s finale may not be the greatest ever written, or the only one that has employed resources from the past, but in terms of where the musical theater stands at the moment, it’s fair to say that no show has ever gathered more techniques and ideas from classic Broadway and put them in one place at one time. It’s a finale that’s a new number, a reprise, a rock anthem, a deliverer of moral judgment, and a perfect example of how new lyrics on a familiar melody can change the game completely. Practically the only things missing are Tevye and his cart.

  That, in the end, is what the American musical theater has always done, just like every other form of commercial endeavor: tried to keep—or steal—the best of the past while continuing to invent as the world around it keeps changing. Although today’s musicals bear so little resemblance to American operetta or the Jazz Age shows of Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart that it’s hard to imagine they are natural offspring, the trail is there to follow. As musical tastes and social mores and taboos change, certain things fall away and others take their place, but the theater tries to keep up. It’s a business, with customers and investors to satisfy, and inventors and manufacturers (otherwise known as theater artists) with continually evolving ideas. Still, having created a way of telling stories that involves a certain overall architecture, it hasn’t, at its best, ever abandoned that aspect of what it does. Shows as disparate as Wicked, Mormon, Hairspray, and Caroline are, wittingly or unwittingly, using the building blocks that evolved beginning three-quarters of a century ago or more.

  In some cases, we’ve circled back even farther. The musical plays introduced by Rodgers and Hammerstein led to the megahits of the ’80s, like Phantom and Les Miz, which were in some ways still musical plays and in others resembled a second coming of Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml, with their lush, sometimes overstuffed melodies and exotic locales and situations. The crazy, almost plotless ’20s musicals that provided little more than an outlet for hit tunes seem to have begun to revisit us in the “jukebox” musicals like Rock of Ages and Mamma Mia! that derive pleasure from shameless plots leading to old hits instead of new ones. No one has a scheme for how to grow the musical theater. Somehow it takes care of itself in surprising ways, and keeps on moving.

  How it moves is described, metaphorically, by Ira Gershwin in a number from the aforementioned Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. In those days, new dance crazes were a fixture (as they were thirty years later with the twist and the mashed potato). Dances that took off were lucrative for the composers and lyricists who invented or codified them in song. The Charleston and the black bottom both started as show tunes in the ’20s. In the ’30s, the Lambeth Walk took Great Britain by storm while Americans were learning to jitterbug and lindy hop their way through the Great Depression. Gershwin, looking for a little comedy to tweak the fads, wrote a number for the Follies called “The Gazooka.” The dance came with instructions that were not really instructions and couldn’t be followed. They went like this:

  First you take a step

  And then you take another

  And then you take another

  And then you take

  And then you take

  And then you

  And then you

  And then you

  And that’s … the gazooka!

  Musicals had been doing the gazooka since long before Gershwin wrote it. And yet each one is always searching for the same elusive goal, which is to turn the machine into the living, breathing animal—to be that rare beast that has both good bones and a unique voice. Those are the ones that stand up on their own and begin to live and breathe and dance to their own music. When that happens, we slip into an unexplored world to hear a story that holds us in awe and delivers us to a new destination, that engages the dramatic and the ecstatic simultaneously, and sends us back home reeling from the sheer joy of having been somewhere new.

  19. Curtain Call

  How Woody Guthrie—of All People—Changed Broadway Musicals Forever

  The changing of the guard took place in an empty theater between engagements, almost as if it were a secret too dark to reveal. On January 17, 2010, a rapturously reviewed but lightly attended revival of the 1947 musical Finian’s Rainbow played its final performance at the St. James Theatre on West Forty-fourth Street, and it was announced that it would be replaced by the Broadway opening of American Idiot, a musical based on a bestselling album by the punk band Green Day. Thus the stage was set. It’s not surprising that this happened at the St. James, a theater that was witness to the seismic shift that took place when Oklahoma! opened there in 1943, not to mention the evening fifty years later when John Raitt led a sing-along of the title song with an audience of young stoners waiting for a preview of The Who’s Tommy. These things seem to happen at the St. James, belying the elegant classical design of the building itself, not to mention its stuffy English name. It’s a building in forward motion, if such a thing is possible.

  Finian is a loopy, decidedly left-wing musical about a community of tobacco growers in a fictional southern state and a trio of Irish immigrants who show up there, one of them a leprechaun. But its nominal hero is a community leader, labor organizer, and wandering folksinger called Woody, after Woody Guthrie, the real-life hero of the labor movement and the folk boom. Yip Harburg, who conceived the piece, cowrote the book, and wrote the brilliant lyrics, was an agitator in Broadway disguise, and he no doubt revered Guthrie and his heroic place in the movement.

  A great lyricist, but never a clear storyteller, Harburg liked to mix left-wing politics with whimsical plotting and fanciful rhyme; the result is that Finian, which makes only a modicum of sense but has irresistible characters and songs, is one of his few Broadway credits that anyone really remembers.1 Among the characters, Woody
has the singular distinction of carrying a guitar with him wherever he goes, though he doesn’t know how to play it.2 It’s a serviceable joke that the fictional Woody can neither put down the guitar nor perform with it, no doubt created to accommodate the actor who originally played the part. That damn guitar goes everywhere with Woody.

  When the Finian revival ended its disappointing run, the guitar was hauled off to God knows where with the rest of the props, never to be heard from again, and American Idiot loaded in. The album had sold fifteen million copies, and hopes were high. Where Finian was an old-fashioned, somewhat political, but deeply optimistic American fable, Idiot was a postmodern, somewhat political, but deeply nihilistic American snapshot—of a country gone to hell. But here’s the thing: at the curtain call on opening night, the lights came up on the entire cast of nineteen, and all of them had guitars slung over their shoulders. And all of them played. There wasn’t a man or woman among them who couldn’t play the guitar, some of them damn well. Woody who couldn’t play had vanished. And that, in essence, is what happened to Broadway.

  * * *

  Until the mid-twentieth century, most middle- and upper-class families who had any interest in culture had a piano in the house, and someone in the family knew how to play it. The children took lessons. This tradition, very European, dated back to the days before there were phonographs or radios, and if music in the house was considered an asset, someone had to be able to make it. The rest of the family could listen or sing along. Sheet music was the only way of spreading music around. On the Lower East Side, up in Yorkville, and in Harlem, pianos were hauled up tenement stairs and squeezed into overcrowded flats so that the likes of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Vincent Youmans could learn. Richard Rodgers learned in a more luxe apartment on the Upper West Side, and Cole Porter learned in a comfortable midwestern home in Peru, Indiana. But they all learned, and had no choice but to learn, along with tens of thousands of other, less talented youngsters. But in the teens and ’20s, phonographs and then the radio came into regular use, and knowing how to play the piano became a mark of culture but no longer a necessity for hearing music after supper.

  By the late 1950s, though, another music had begun to dominate both the airwaves and the record business, and it was driven not by pianos but by guitars. Rock bands often included pianos, but the stars, with exceptions like Jerry Lee Lewis and Ray Charles, played the guitar. Mainly, Elvis Presley played the guitar, and he could perform standing up in front of a microphone while playing his instrument and moving in a stunningly sexually suggestive manner. Guitar-playing stars were more immediately available to an audience—which now included a TV audience—than piano players. The music itself had, to a great degree, originated in the South, where hillbilly bands, old-timey musicians, and country blues players had been perfecting an array of guitar techniques for decades while almost no one in the North paid any attention. This music didn’t come from the “cultured” population of the Northeast and Midwest, with their musical debt to Italy and Germany. It was the creation of poor populations whose roots were more likely to be Scottish, English, or African. They were rural or small-town people, with an argot and a vernacular all their own. For decades, the music bided its time on the margins of pop culture. Then, in the mid-’50s, it began to explode all across America, thanks to radio and TV.3

  In 1958, however, after Elvis and his cohorts had scared the hell out of mainstream America, the Kingston Trio, three clean-cut young men (playing two acoustic guitars and a banjo), had a gold record hit with an old Appalachian murder ballad called “Tom Dooley,” which sold three million copies. And for a time, everything changed. Rock had a new competitor. The folk boom was on, and initially it was a great relief for parents across the country; they were only too happy now to provide guitars and lessons to their teenage children. (The piano in the house had suddenly become a piece of furniture.)

  The Kingston Trio functioned as a kind of anti-Elvis as pop music continued to evolve, though they never seriously threatened the position of the King as king. Nonetheless, it was only a matter of time before the folk generation, fueled by performers like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, rediscovered Woody Guthrie, a fountainhead of songs that were easy to learn and play, politically progressive, and brilliantly memorable, and could be sung by crowds. Suddenly there was a popular movement to replace “The Star-Spangled Banner” with “This Land Is Your Land” as our national anthem. Guthrie, who had once been tacitly acknowledged on Broadway in Finian’s Rainbow, was now everywhere, and by 1963 he had a newly famous disciple, Bob Dylan. The fuse was lit.

  The Beatles and the Stones arrived from England. In a controversial move, Dylan went electric in 1965 and took most of the folk generation with him. In the long run, the folk boom’s marriage to rock and roll, and the age of psychedelia that followed, did to Broadway what Audrey II did to Mushnik’s little flower shop—devoured it. But it took a long, long time to happen.

  Still, the die was cast. America had learned to play the guitar, and classic Broadway songwriting, which had been the outgrowth of many young people sitting at many pianos over many decades, started to fall out of step with American pop entertainment.

  The isolated success of Hair in 1968 notwithstanding, Broadway hated the change and denounced it loudly and largely successfully. It was a mere three decades later that Rent came along. Rent owes plenty to Hair, but contemporary Broadway owes a great deal more to Rent. In fact, in some ways, Hair was to Rent what Show Boat was to Oklahoma! It came first, but the street wasn’t interested in playing catch-up. Hair, you might say, was simply ahead of its time, though so politically of its time that it became a great success. Its chaos and freedom enthralled audiences and terrified professionals up and down the street. In The Season, William Goldman quotes a veteran theater professional’s prediction of the influence of Hair on the American theater in the coming seasons: “There will now be a spate of shitty rock musicals.”

  And that’s pretty much what happened. A few of them had merit, most did not, but Broadway was not about to open the door for any of them if it could avoid doing so. Entrenched interests were in a panic, as entrenched interests in the pop music field had been when rock appeared in the mid-’50s. They sensed a conqueror in their midst and built as high a wall as they could. As a result, Hair left a relatively invisible wake. Shows like Promises, Promises and Company employed a few rock elements in their orchestrations (both by Jonathan Tunick), but the pure rock musicals were decapitated on sight, often for good reason. And 1776, that paean to the good side of American history, beat Hair for the Tony.

  By the time Rent came around, though, a lot had changed. The traditional American songbook had long since given way, and rock had evolved into America’s music, with many subspecies and offshoots—including rap—thriving. On Broadway, the last of the consistent, traditional top-shelf theater songwriters were old enough to be collecting Social Security, and the younger group had grown up with rock as the only popular music. The argument that a loud rock score with an insistent backbeat was antithetical to limning character and dealing with dramatic situations remained largely true. But audiences were beginning to demand something different anyhow. The live rock concert world had been theatricalized by new technologies—moving (sometimes blinding) lights, pyrotechnics, special effects—and the public had grown used to live entertainment that morphed easily from the theatrical to the purely musical and back again. Broadway finally had no choice but to catch up. Rent lit up the passageway.

  The 1990s saw one post-Rent musical with a rock-inflected score winning the Tony—Disney’s The Lion King. The dam broke during the succeeding ten years: Hairspray, Avenue Q, Jersey Boys, Spring Awakening, In the Heights, and Memphis each took the Tony.

  On the opening night of Spring Awakening, the evolution was duly noted in a memorable exchange at the party that followed the performance. The journalist Harry Haun, a fixture of such events, approached Bert Fink, an executive at the Rodgers and Hammerstein O
rganization, and asked, “Do you think we can safely say the Rodgers and Hammerstein era is dead, now that we have a song on Broadway called ‘Totally Fucked’?”

  Fink, who is quicker on the uptake than most, responded unflappably.

  “You know, Harry,” he said into Haun’s ever-present microphone, “when The Sound of Music was trying out in Philadelphia, there actually was a song in it called ‘Totally Fucked.’ Maria and the children came to the convent in the last scene, and the Mother Abbess explained that the entire place was surrounded by Nazis, and Mary Martin came downstage center and sang this song called ‘Totally Fucked’ about how they were all done for. But then Oscar realized that they could climb up the mountain to Italy, so they cut the song.”

  It was a great improvisational moment that left Haun amused, if flat-footed, but the irony was not lost on anyone. By 2006, ten years into the post-Rent era, Rodgers and Hammerstein and so many of the theater writers who had trained themselves up on the standards R&H had set were, not to put too fine a point on it, totally fucked.

  That didn’t mean, however, that the Broadway musical could abandon structurally sound storytelling without paying a price, a point proved, ironically, by Spring Awakening itself. Based on the 1891 Frank Wedekind drama of sexual emergence and teen rebellion, the original play had proved scandalous in subject matter but solid in its storytelling. The musical adaptation kept the story in the nineteenth century but told it with a rock score. This is not as revolutionary as it may sound. Rodgers and Hammerstein had written contemporary music for period stories. Contemporary theatergoers were unfazed. They got wrapped up in the story.

  Four years later, Michael Mayer, the gifted director who guided Spring Awakening through its development, its off-Broadway premiere, and its transfer to Broadway, was back with American Idiot. The production itself was more elaborate and imaginative than Spring Awakening had been, and the design qualified as among the most ceaselessly inventive ever seen on Broadway. Yet where Spring Awakening had won the Tony, run 859 performances, and returned a tidy profit to its investors, American Idiot, despite terrific reviews, never caught on in the same way. Unlike Spring Awakening, American Idiot lacked the one thing that might have given it long-term popularity: a story about people you could care for. Though Mayer tried mightily to humanize its three protagonists, he didn’t have a play to work with, only an album. And, like The Who’s Tommy (based on a double-record album from the vinyl years), which had opened to thunderous reviews but never became a perennial, the original work had a voice but no compelling bones. Without the underlying thing that has always drawn us around the campfire—a real and engaging tale to tell—the rock musical is neither better nor worse off than the Golden Age one. Jonathan Larson, in an admittedly shaggy way, made us care. So did the creators of Spring Awakening, not to mention Wicked and Avenue Q. Jersey Boys did it without a new score, just the reliable Top 40 catalog of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but with a good yarn about the group’s birth and career as, well, Jersey boys. Without that compelling story line, it would have been a long hill to climb, and the boulder gets heavier as you push it. Rock has probably made it harder to tell a coherent, absorbing story, though by no means impossible.