The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

  The Wedding Singer

  Why is The Wedding Singer a part of this collection while similar, and in some cases more commercially successful, pop-rock shows like Legally Blonde and Kinky Boots are absent? The simple reason is that I worked on The Wedding Singer, and I’m the one with the pen. But in truth, I think the sweet, often funny score from the composer Matt Sklar and the lyricist Chad Beguelin is more delicate and more fully realized than the scores for many more successful shows. It’s underappreciated, though no one would qualify it as a masterwork.

  The Book of Mormon

  The original cast album captures the spirit, the performances, and the sheer skill of what is probably the most expert musical comedy of recent years. Along with The Producers and Hairspray, Mormon represents the tradition that How to Succeed in Business and Forum held aloft during the ’60s, and Guys and Dolls and Kiss Me, Kate represented in the ’50s. If you track the progress of this kind of musical comedy, you can see tastes expanding (or collapsing) from the witty to the sly to the vulgar to the downright obscene, and it’s an enjoyable ride, assuming you have broad standards—or none. Mormon, whatever one may think of its morals, makes a wonderful album.

  5. Put On Your Sunday Clothes

  Li’l Abner

  We all have our guilty pleasures, and this is mine. Both the original cast album and the film soundtrack are first-rate, and while Al Capp’s comic strip characters may seem funny only to people old enough to have been around when the strip was in its prime in the mid-’50s, there’s no gainsaying Gene de Paul’s tuneful score or Johnny Mercer’s offhandedly brilliant comic lyrics. You can hardly top the villainous galoot of the piece introducing himself as follows:

  Step aside for Earthquake McGoon,

  Bustin’ out all over like June.

  I stands on the corner

  Enormous and ornery,

  Makin’ the fairer sex swoon.

  In addition to a good in-joke about Carousel (not a show the denizens of Dogpatch would likely be familiar with, although audiences at Li’l Abner certainly were), Mercer makes a wonderful rhyming mouthful out of “I stands on the corner, enormous and ornery”: “corner” with the beginning of “enormous,” and “corner / E——” with “ornery.” Earthquake McGoon appears to be a hillbilly Ogden Nash.

  6. Bushwhacking 1

  Cabaret

  Kander and Ebb’s breakout score has been much recorded—seven times that I’m aware of—and at least three of them are worth hearing. The original cast features the excitement of a groundbreaking if imperfect show, and—in 1966—the beginning of Hal Prince’s reign as the most innovative director on Broadway. Don Walker’s flavorful orchestrations are memorable, as are the performances of Lotte Lenya and Jack Gilford, both toward the end of their careers. And let’s not forget Joel Gray!

  The first-rate soundtrack album features Liza Minnelli, and the revised version of the show, codirected by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall, got a good recording featuring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson in 1998. The score itself is always a pleasure to encounter, in whatever form, bristling with audacity, with welcome doses of sentiment along the way.

  7. Bushwhacking 2

  Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street

  Another show of which there are at least seven recordings, with more on the way, no doubt. The double-CD original cast recording is flawless, and the only one you’ll ever need, though Sweeney fanatics enjoy comparing it with other productions, including the director John Doyle’s cut-down version in which the actors play their own instruments. But the original—with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou—is the only one I ever reach for.

  It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman

  Eddie Sauter, who spent the mid-’50s co-leading the wildly eccentric jazz aggregation known as the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, drew the orchestration assignment for this Hal Prince–directed oddball of a show, and Sauter’s work is reason enough to own the album. The show features two overtures (the one before the second act can hardly be called an entr’acte) and about as much orchestral wit and invention as a Broadway musical can handle. The score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams is their best after Bye Bye Birdie (Golden Boy runs a close third), and Jack Cassidy is in a class by himself as the evil columnist loosely based on Walter Winchell, while Linda Lavin made her Broadway debut singing the show’s only even mildly well-known song, “You’ve Got Possibilities.” A simple listen to the first overture may make you want to pick up a Sauter-Finegan recording as well. It’s always worth revisiting “Doodletown Fifers.”

  9. Adelaide’s Lament

  The Light in the Piazza

  John Kander, who has written some of the most irresistible and memorable tunes of the last half century, once said that he loved Adam Guettel’s far-from-easy score for The Light in the Piazza so much that he’d “like to bathe in it.” That’s high praise, imaginatively put, from a man of taste and talent, and it makes a certain amount of sense. The score feels liquid somehow, and it is beautifully represented on its cast album—a translucent-sounding, delicate recording featuring Victoria Clark and Kelli O’Hara, two of Broadway’s premier voices, with appearances by Sarah Uriarte Berry and Patti Cohenour to boot; it’s a boatload of wonderful sopranos, and a justly celebrated score, handsomely preserved.

  11. La Vie Bohème

  Rent

  Jonathan Larson’s score—and the show that contained it—created such a sensation when it was first presented in 1996 that it took years before you could really listen to it as just another show album, which is what it is. There is some terrific writing, and some hammered-together chunks (Larson died just as he was completing the work), and a host of young voices who were making their first marks in the theater with this show. That spirit of reckless abandon is captured on the album, but for a score that perfectly captured its time and place it has, like Company, become something of a period piece. There’s also a movie soundtrack, but why would you?

  17. I Thought You Did It for Me, Momma

  Fiddler on the Roof

  Another much-recorded score—I count five obtainable versions as of this moment. But why wouldn’t you go with Zero Mostel and the original cast? This and the original Forum recording preserve two great performances by a unique theater star who never flourished in any other medium. And the score, by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, is ageless and deeply idiomatic. “If I Were a Rich Man” is as good a performance of as good a song as has been written for Broadway.

  Caroline, or Change

  This show had trouble convincing the critics—which puts it in a category with Porgy and Bess, Pal Joey, Follies, and a handful of others that were so fearless in their convictions and made of such inventive materials that it took years for the world to catch up. Sadly, the world has yet to catch up to Caroline in the same way as the others. It’s rarely performed in major productions, and rarely written about. But it’s a masterpiece, and Jeanine Tesori and Tony Kushner’s score is well captured on this 2004 cast album. As with The Light in the Piazza, the score is not easy and hardly replete with what we used to call “take-home tunes.” But it’s galvanic where Piazza is full of grace, and Tonya Pinkins is a force of nature in the title role. Chuck Cooper’s performance as a city bus (that’s right) burdened down by carrying the news of JFK’s assassination is also a memorable moment in a score that is full of them.

  The King and I

  This is among the all-time champions in numbers of recordings; there are twelve that I can find. A lot of them are good. Donna Murphy starred in a successful production in 1996, and there’s even a cast album of an animated version. Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner appear on the original, which—rarely for me—is not my favorite. It sounds shallow (Decca again) for a deeply opulent show, and Lawrence, who was apparently an incandescent performer in her prime, doesn’t have much of a voice left—she was ill and died during the original run of the show. There’s a Barbara Cook version and a Julie Andrews, but for me the most satisf
ying so far is the Thomas Shepard–produced recording of a revival that starred Constance Towers and Brynner in 1977. It captures the theatricality of the show (Columbia again) and contains just enough dialogue and connective tissue to make you feel like you’ve been there.

  Hairspray

  There’s a soundtrack, of course, but I much prefer the original cast. Marissa Jaret Winokur is incredibly winning as Tracy Turnblad, and Harvey Fierstein is, well, Harvey Fierstein. A singer he is not, but few entertainers come across better on a cast album. He’s like a gay Jimmy Durante. Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s score sounds as fresh as paint considering that it’s made up of clever pastiches of early-’60s pop songs. But this isn’t Grease—it has a subversive streak, and brains. And the final song, “You Can’t Stop the Beat,” is miraculous in its ability to sustain the resolution of all those subplots without losing energy.

  18. You Can’t Stop the Beat

  The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936

  Michael Strunsky, executive director of the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts, agreed to have the orchestrations of this rare complete Follies score restored to mint condition, under the supervision of the trust’s Mark Trent Goldberg and Encores! founding music director Rob Fisher. Encores! then produced the show itself, which proved somewhat problematic, as the sketches were dated and some of the casting was imperfect. But the production got recorded, and the recording is sensational. Like The New Moon, it’s a trip in a time machine to a period of very sophisticated “disposable” entertainment with great sheen and wit. There are a couple of forgotten gems of the period, like “My Red-Letter Day” and “Words Without Music,” and one standard—“I Can’t Get Started.” The whole thing is an opulent trip back to the days when you would have applauded the show at 11:00 p.m. and then gone upstairs to the roof garden for a champagne supper and … the Midnight Frolic. Who stepped in and put an end to all that? It doesn’t seem fair.

  She Loves Me

  The original cast album, issued on a double LP by MGM (a company that didn’t do much in the way of Broadway albums), is a joy from start to finish. It’s arguably Bock and Harnick’s best score, featuring Barbara Cook singing “Ice Cream” and the artlessly irresistible Barbara Baxley delivering one of the best story songs ever written, “A Trip to the Library.” Jack Cassidy, playing the cad, has a lounge-lizard charm, and the orchestrator, Don Walker, makes great use of the accordion since the show was set in Budapest, and played at the Eugene O’Neill, where the pit wasn’t big enough to accommodate a grand piano with the rest of the band. I take a deep breath before writing these words, but this, I think, is a perfect cast album.

  The Missing Links

  Acknowledging the eccentricity of the above list of show albums, I was easily able to find an additional forty or so titles that deserve attention. But writing about all of them seemed excessive and a little self-indulgent, so I’ve limited myself to a list of twenty that simply can’t be ignored, even though they are not quoted in the book.

  Annie Get Your Gun

  There are twelve different recordings I can find, but Merman is who you really want to hear sing this score. The original is fine, but I actually prefer the 1966 Lincoln Center production. She was way too old to play the role by this time, but you’d never know it by the recording, and it includes “An Old Fashioned Wedding,” which Berlin wrote especially so that she’d have something new to sing in an old show.

  Brigadoon

  Well suited to the Hollywood treatment—it’s a great romantic fantasy—this is one of the few where I would choose the soundtrack over the original cast, but both are pleasurable. There are also at least two studio albums that feature virtually the complete score, one of them with Rebecca Luker, who, after Barbara Cook in her prime, has the most seductive soprano in the history of modern-day Broadway. If you love this score, it’s thrilling to hear her sing it.

  Bye Bye Birdie

  The original cast album features Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera and some great orchestrations by Robert “Red” Ginzler, including four flutes playing behind “Put On a Happy Face.” This is the orchestration that made a young jazz cat named Jonathan Tunick decide he wanted to work on Broadway, and that was good news. Ginzler died young, just as he was emerging as a Broadway powerhouse, but the work he left behind—Birdie, How to Succeed, Wildcat, and many parts of Gypsy, just for starters—is always distinctive and often thrilling.

  Candide

  A Bernstein masterpiece—the score, not the show—and the original cast has great energy and wit, though it’s pretty highbrow. The stripped-down 1974 Hal Prince production is much hipper, though it’s hard not to long for that great big orchestra. They make good side-by-side listening, each representing an era. It’s Broadway taking itself very seriously in the ’50s versus Broadway trying really hard to embrace hippiedom in the ’70s. And the winner is …

  Chicago

  Kander and Ebb doing Bob Fosse’s cynical but brilliant bidding. The original cast album is great, but so is the recording of the revival-that-threatens-to-run-forever. Take your pick. The original may be the better album, but the show in the ’70s seemed too cynical for words and was only a moderate success. Then the revival happened, opening right on top of the O. J. Simpson verdict, and suddenly the material seemed right in line with the times. Fosse, it turned out, knew exactly where American jurisprudence was going; he just got there ahead of schedule.

  Damn Yankees

  Who knows what delights the team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross would have turned out if Ross hadn’t died at twenty-nine, right after this show opened. This and their debut, The Pajama Game, were icons of the ’50s, and deservedly so. The original cast album, with Gwen Verdon and Ray Walston, is the one to get. The two Adler and Ross shows were like self-contained ’50s hit parades—a ballad, a Latin number, a cowboy number (in The Pajama Game, anyhow), a sexy dance specialty, a comedy novelty item—you might as well have been listening to the radio.

  Finian’s Rainbow

  The original cast album is wonderfully seductive, but the sound is better and the score more complete and better sung on the 2010 revival album. Take your pick—it’s a crazily inventive, witty, and romantic score, certainly Burton Lane’s best Broadway work (he wrote some terrific movie songs as well), and the lyrics, by Yip Harburg, are in a class by themselves.

  Follies

  The original cast album was mangled by Capitol, which squeezed a very long score onto a single LP, making incomprehensible cuts and depriving us of the chance to hear complete versions of some great performances. There have been several more complete albums made since, which are better, but it’s depressing that the original cast—especially Dorothy Collins and John McMartin—didn’t get to give us the genuine article. As is the case with Carousel, there’s lots to choose from, but no definitive version. The British cast album has some alternative songs, but none better than the ones written for Broadway.

  Hello, Dolly!

  Jerry Herman’s breakout score (with some ghosted help from Bob Merrill and a title for one song supplied by Strouse and Adams) was—though no one mentioned it at the time—the perfect antidote to the Kennedy assassination, which had taken place only seven weeks earlier. As the national mood staggered under the weight of the tragedy, Dolly! reaffirmed that Americans were entitled to regain a sunny disposition and have fun, even though, under the surface, we were a changed people.

  There are eight versions that I’m aware of. I’d take the original, which features not only Carol Channing but also David Burns and the almost-impossible-to-listen-to but beloved Charles Nelson Reilly. But I reserve a special affection for the Pearl Bailey version. She’s not Dolly, but she’s Pearl, and that’s worth hearing, as is Cab Calloway in the Burns role. The British cast album features Mary Martin, who brings a nice humanity to the role, not that it was written to feature any. But it’s quite lovely to hear it.

  How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

  The original cast features
Robert Morse and Rudy Vallee, and, even more pleasurable, Red Ginzler’s mind-bending orchestrations. Listen to how he gets into “Brotherhood of Man” in the overture and you’ll know what an orchestrator can do. The score itself is angular and edgy in a way that suggests Frank Loesser was trying to get even with a newly cynical Broadway after the failure of his bucolic (and slightly anemic) Greenwillow. But on its own terms, How to Succeed is a terrific, brassy score, and Morse and Vallee seem to be having a blast.

  Kiss Me, Kate

  It’s hard to top Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison in the original, but the 1999 revival starring Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie gives the show quite a ride. The soundtrack album is interesting too; this was a rare Broadway film adaptation released in 3-D and recorded in stereo in the early ’50s. The soundtrack album is to some degree a celebration of the MGM Orchestra, with lots of overflowing underscoring, in that midcentury Hollywood style that some love and that certainly defines an era. And the soundtrack has Bob Fosse, Bobby Van, and Tommy Rall accompanying Ann Miller on “Tom, Dick or Harry.” That’s kind of historic, too.

  A Little Night Music

  Virtuosic without being showy, as lovely as it is low-key, written entirely in variations of three-quarter time, this has been better sung on recordings other than the original cast, but never better performed. Glynis Johns is heartbreakingly sexy, tart, and maternal at the same time, and all the elements—Tunick’s orchestrations, the recording production (shared by Lieberson and Shepard), and the shimmering score itself—are beautifully represented. There’s a movie soundtrack if you dare, and at least two London cast recordings, but none of them delivers this kind of pleasure.