by Joel Derfner
ON MUSICAL THEATER
I always thought musicals were stupid.
But I changed my mind during my senior year at Harvard not long after a girl named Gina Grant was admitted for the following autumn. The national media made a huge fuss over her: she had an IQ of 150, she was co-captain of her high school’s tennis team, in her spare time she tutored underprivileged children—and all this despite the fact that both of her parents had been dead for years. She became a latter-day Horatio Alger, shining proof that anybody could scale Olympus by working hard enough, even an orphan.
Unfortunately the reason she was an orphan, the media soon discovered, was that at the age of fourteen she had used a lead crystal candlestick to bludgeon her mother to death. She had served six months in a juvenile penitentiary for her crime and her file had been sealed, but Harvard revoked her admission all the same, and in the fall she enrolled at Tufts.
I believed, along with most of my peers, that Harvard had mishandled the situation badly. Not that Gina Grant should have been lauded for her actions, but what right did Harvard have to render its own judgment above and beyond what the state had already deemed appropriate? Horatio Alger was no longer telling this story; he had been replaced by Thomas Hardy. Here was a girl who had made a mistake—an awful one, to be sure—and whose dream had as a result been placed forever out of her reach.
None of this made the story any less funny, though, so of course my family became obsessed with her. Not only because of the Harvard connection, but also because she was from South Carolina, where we lived. I couldn’t call home without spending an hour talking about Gina Grant. It was as if we were tuned to our own Gina Grant Channel, all Gina Grant, all the time. One evening my brother, choking with laughter, suggested that I write a musical about her. I thought this was the most hilarious thing I’d ever heard and the next day I shared the joke with all my friends, who also thought it was the most hilarious thing they’d ever heard.
One of these friends was a director, coincidentally also named Gina. “I’m going to write a musical about Gina Grant, hahahahaha!” I said.
“Well, I’ll direct it, hahahahaha!” Director Gina said.
And then we stopped laughing and stared at each other. We looked at the calendar on the wall. We stared at each other again.
“The school year is almost over,” I said.
“We have to act fast,” she replied.
“Today is Wednesday.”
“If you write it by Sunday, we can rehearse next week and open Friday.”
So we did.
For the most part I felt nothing but scorn for an art form that required the pretense that it was natural for people to communicate with one another in rhymed song. Despite the many opportunities available to me in high school, the only musical I’d ever tried out for was Grease; after the auditions, during which I sinisterly hissed lines from the show like, “I don’t know why I brought this tire iron, I coulda ripped those babies off with my bare hands!” the director cast me as Eugene, the gay geek, and then cut all the homophobic jokes, leaving me with virtually no part at all. The only musicals I’d done since then were Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, in which every character is a gay geek. I felt that the world already had more than enough Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, so we modeled our show on the only other musical I really liked, which was Little Shop of Horrors, a masterpiece that uses the ridiculousness inherent in the musical theater form to its advantage. We decided that our show, too, would revel in its own absurdity. We made Gina a tragic heroine and gave her a trio of backup singers, but instead of Chiffon, Crystal, and Ronnette (the names of the girls in the Little Shop trio), we called them Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone; they were the Furies of Greek legend, the immortals who pursue the wicked unto the ends of the earth to exact retribution for their crimes. Then we threw in Gina’s abusive parents, her boyfriend, Harvard president Neil Rudenstine, his wife Angelica (who in our show wore a big pair of angel’s wings cut out of poster board), an ensemble of Harvard admissions officers, and Joan of Arc’s executioner (it was that kind of show).
For most of the musical numbers I just rewrote the lyrics to summer-camp songs or hits by the Shirelles:
GINA
Mama said there’ll be days like this;
There’ll be days like this, my mama said.
THE FURIES
Until you bludgeoned her to death!
But though I racked my brain and my CD collection, I couldn’t find a song to steal for the turning point of the show; given the tight deadline, I finally gave up looking and wrote something myself. And it was kind of fabulous—“I know I’m just a little girl,” six-year-old Gina sang, “but I’ve got dreams,” and the music communicated something of the vulnerability of those dreams. When I played the song for her, Director Gina, who had studied at yeshiva, said, “Hebrew has two words for ‘create,’ asah and bara.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Asah is to shape something out of something else that already exists. That’s what I do as a director. The script is there already, I just bring it to life onstage.” This made sense to me; asah was exactly what I did when, for example, my choir sang a piece composed by somebody else. “But bara,” Director Gina continued, “is to bring something into being out of nothing. I can’t believe I’m saying something so cheesy, but I feel like that’s kind of what you’re doing here.”
“Asah is making something from something else?”
“Right.”
“And bara is making something from nothing?”
“Yes.”
I furrowed my brow in thought. “Do you think you can figure out a way for the guy playing Alecto to have to have his shirt off for the entire show?”
We presented G! for two nights in a black box theater in the basement of my dorm with a cast made up of friends who owed me favors (and at first a guy I had a crush on—not the guy playing Alecto, a different guy—but he sent a clear signal by not showing up for the first rehearsal, so we fired him) and tape-recorded piano accompaniment. I played Tisiphone, in fishnets. Sixty or seventy people came to see the show, and they all loved it (“The best thing I’ve seen in thirty years,” said a professor of mine afterward, though I’m not sure he would have been so effusive had he not been four or five sheets to the wind). The show ended with Gina Grant on a ladder, barred from climbing any farther. She sat down on the top step, sighed, and put a Columbia cap—the real Gina had not yet chosen a college—on her head.
I did not realize that in doing so she would change my life.
For most of my childhood I knew that when I grew up I wanted to be a cantor, the second-in-command who leads the sung prayers in synagogue. This filled my relatives with dismay, because rabbis, they explained, make much better money. It turned out not to be a problem, however, since, after the Facts of Life episode in which Mrs. Garrett’s bakery burned down and was replaced by a gift shop, I realized that, although being a community’s religious leader would be deeply fulfilling, the spiritual rewards it offered paled in comparison to those of running a boutique.
I changed my mind again after a meeting of the Charleston Young Musicians’ Society. (If there had been a shred of doubt in anybody’s mind that I was gay, my membership in the Charleston Young Musicians’ Society should have removed it.) My friend Cathy’s voice teacher Sam came to talk to us, and I have no recollection at all of what he said; I remember only that he was brilliant and terrifying. I began lessons with him and before very long it became clear to me that I was destined to be the greatest tenor in the world.
Strictly speaking, my desire was not so broad. I was not interested in the unsubtle opera written by Puccini and Wagner. Far more satisfying were the songs of Schubert and his ilk, composers who opened three-minute windows into the soul until syphilis turned them into gibbering madmen. But it was Baroque music that thrilled me to the marrow of my bones, music from the pens of Handel and Couperin and Bach, music of the early eighteenth century, music written in a ti
me when everybody wore wigs but homeless stinking urchins, when parfumiers filled women’s makeup with lead for its whitening properties, when singers shone more brightly in the firmament than kings. And the men who first sang this music were the most glamorous creatures ever to stride the earth. (Much of their glamour sprang from the castration they had undergone as children to preserve their soprano voices—audiences were known to cheer “long live the knife!”—but after very brief consideration I decided that, even though castrati could maintain erections and reach orgasm, there was still such a thing as going too far in the name of historically informed performance.) In later years I saw a sumptuous Belgian movie called Farinelli, based on the life of the most famous castrato of them all, and I have never forgotten a scene at the opera in which, approaching the climax of an aria, the title character suddenly stops singing and fixes his gaze—“icy” doesn’t even begin to describe the malevolence in those eyes—on a woman in the audience whose attention is focused not on the stage but on the cup of tea in her right hand and the book in her left. She keeps reading for a moment and turns a page before realizing that the entire audience is staring at her, at which point she pales and sets her cup down, trembling so violently she almost overturns it. Farinelli smiles coldly and starts the aria again. After the opera is over she sends him her diamond necklace and then he publicly and viciously rejects her sexual advances.
Who wouldn’t wish to command such power?
Furthermore, the lyrical and musical language of Baroque music is extravagant, unequivocal, full of lines like The serpent, once insulted, rests not until his venom spreads through his enemy’s blood and Come, my son, and console me; but if life is forbidden you, at least die on my breast, lines that allow the singer to cry out with the fullness of every honest emotion and at the same time to refine each of those emotions to its noblest state. Anger, love, despair, joy, hatred: the alchemy in this music transmutes them into gold that fills the voice.
But as I improved—Sam was a very good teacher—I began to discover an even deeper desire underneath the hunger for glory and purity of feeling. One week the supplemental reading in my high school English class (I was the kind of teenager who did the supplemental reading in my high school English class) was Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Poetic Principle,” and in it I found the following lines:
It is in Music perhaps that the soul most nearly attains…the creation of supernal Beauty. We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels.
Manic-depressive, laudanum-addled, Poe had captured the essence of what I longed for. And that’s the amazing thing about singing: when you do it right, you are that earthly harp. If you can let the notes come not from you but through you, if you can empty yourself of pride and cunning and rodomontade, then you leave room for music to fill you, to melt everything in you that is not holy, to lift you up and fling you to the farthest reaches of human possibility.
Not that I did it right all or even much of the time. But occasionally I came close. A few years after my first professional gig I was giving a concert in a Boston chapel with an acoustic that softened every sound in it. “Gentle airs, melodious strains,” I sang, my voice caressing every molecule of air in the room as even the dust motes shimmered in the setting July sun, “call for raptures out of woe,” and the melisma on the word “woe” floated higher and higher and then higher still, and I felt I could sustain it forever, and my body disappeared and I understood what it is to be eternal.
Until my junior year of college, that is, when I lost all physical sensation in the back of my throat.
I could still produce a pretty tone; I just couldn’t perform the subtle manipulations of the vocal apparatus necessary for glorious singing, because I couldn’t feel the vocal apparatus.
And I spent the next two anguished years in the offices of doctors none of whom could figure out what the fuck was going on, not even the really really hot one who waited just a moment too long to release my hand when he introduced himself and whose subsequent failure to heal me was therefore an even greater betrayal than the failures of all the others, and I woke up every morning crying and I wrote overwrought letters to my friends during the summer (this was before e-mail) about how my own body was cutting me off from my destiny. Luckily I had very forbearing friends but still.
And then finally somebody diagnosed me with severe gastric reflux and told me the acid shooting up from my stomach into my throat had done so much damage my voice would never come back.
At which point nothing was easier than emptying myself of pride and cunning and rodomontade, but what filled me was not music but despair. Also chocolate, so that in the end I wasn’t just miserable; I was miserable and fat.
And I sleepwalked through my life, not really paying attention, because why bother, and I graduated from college and applied for teaching jobs and didn’t get any. And I figured maybe I could go to grad school somewhere or become a lawyer even though my dad the civil rights lawyer who’d won every case he’d ever argued before the Supreme Court said he didn’t want me to be a lawyer because he thought I could do better, but I couldn’t do better, I’d tried and I couldn’t. And when they’d assigned Steppenwolf in high school I’d memorized the part about living with such strength and indescribable beauty that the spray of your moment’s happiness could be flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering that the light of it, spreading its radiance, might touch others too with its enchantment, but that wasn’t an option anymore so instead I’d just have to tread water in the sea of suffering until I drowned and it was just too fucking bad.
And then one day in the midst of this agony I was having dinner with a slightly kooky older friend with long fingernails who had once dated my father and all at once she said, “I just had a psychic vision! I saw you at age twenty-seven and you were surrounded by light and you were incredibly happy.”
And I said, “Was I a singer?”
And she said, “No. I don’t know what you were doing, but whatever it was, you felt totally fulfilled.”
And I understood all at once, as I headed back to the salad bar despite the fact that they had run out of Baco Bits, that I could do something else with my life and still be happy. And I felt the tar pit that had been sucking me relentlessly into its depths begin to liquefy and I realized I had been given back my liberty and my life and I didn’t know yet what I was going to do with them, maybe I’d establish world peace or find a cure for AIDS or hatred or maybe I’d grow wings and fly, because I could do any of those things, and then I asked my friend an even more important question, which was, “Do I have a boyfriend, and is he blond?”
To my dismay, she said she hadn’t seen whether I had a boyfriend or not, because I had been so complete in her vision as I was. I found this a deeply unsatisfactory answer but it was clearly the best I was going to get.
I spent the next few days trying to figure out what I wanted to do now that I didn’t have to do what my stomach wouldn’t let me do. I blathered to my father about my options; I blathered to friends; I blathered to strangers at the pizza parlor. I was paralyzed with indecision. How could I possibly choose a path? Any door I approached would open at my knock; after all, I was smart and funny and could type eighty-five words a minute.
And then I remembered how much fun I’d had writing G! and working on it with Director Gina. Perhaps, I thought, I should become a writer of musical theater. I called a friend in NYU’s Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program, and he couldn’t endorse it highly enough. So I decided to apply and, at the same time, to try writing a full-length musical. A thirty-minute jeu d’esprit is one thing; sustaining both the jeu and the esprit over the course of an evening, however, might be entirely beyond my reach. For one thing, what would I write about? How could I possibly top teenage matricidal Harvard applicants?
The answer was: with Princess Di: A Fairy Tale (written before Diana’s tragic death), in which
the Furies came back for a repeat engagement, joined this time by Carmen Miranda, Ed McMahon, Maleficent the witch from Sleeping Beauty, Lady Macbeth, McDonald’s Grimace, and a chorus of reporters named Nigel. Director Gina directed brilliantly, one of my friends dressed in drag to play Camilla Parker-Bowles, and for the show’s finale I turned a Bach chorale into a rousing gospel number. The Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program accepted me and I moved to New York.
Musical theater, more than any other art form, forces its practitioners to collaborate. Lerner and Loewe, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bock and Harnick—the people who write successfully almost never write alone. Even when one person writes music and lyrics, somebody else usually writes the script (Sondheim and Weidman, Finn and Lapine, Herman and Stewart). The Musical Theater Writing Program trained its students for this reality by insisting that, for the two years we were under its tutelage, each of us choose to focus on either music or words, as we would do most of our work in collaboration with other students.
I found this profoundly annoying; I didn’t need to collaborate with anybody, because I already knew everything. All the same, I did not wish to gain a reputation as a troublemaker, so I enrolled as a composer.
And no matter which lyricist I was working with, I brought in the same goddamn song every week. I used the same six chords (four, really, since two were variations) over and over again whether the song was about a Southern beauty pageant contestant or a town overrun by zombies or a war between a gang of chickens and a gang of frogs, and before long everyone had begun to dread my workshop presentations, me most of all. The music I wrote shone extravagantly and unambiguously, just like the Baroque music I had sung with such passion, yet more and more it illuminated nothing but the paucity of my imagination. I was writing the musical equivalent of lead and I was helpless to transmute it into anything that contained even a hint of gold.