The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (2 page)

I was the dramaturg, a German word that, in this case, translates as “noodge.” One of the most heated arguments I lost (thank God) was with
Hairspray
’s director, Jack O’Brien, about the penultimate moment in the show. The scene is set in the local Eventorium, where the entire company is gathered for the Miss Teenage Hairspray contest of some year in the early ’60s. Only two people are missing: the heroine, Tracy Turnblad, and her mother, the “ample American” Edna, played in drag by gravel-voiced Harvey Fierstein in a fat suit. But there is a surprise coming. Onstage is a gigantic can of hairspray, and someone is hiding in it. Who? It had to be Tracy, I argued: she’s the heroine of the piece, she’s engineered the entire event so that it will work out to a happy ending, she’s the one who is going to arrive to save the day. She has to be in the can so she can arrive in the most spectacular way.

“Nonsense,” said O’Brien. “Edna is in the can.”

“Why?” I asked petulantly. “It makes no sense.”

“Because,” he said, “when the audience sees Harvey Fierstein explode out of that can in a huge red dress, they’re all going to come, from sheer joy. And they won’t care about anything else.”

He was right, of course. Show business and dramaturgy—the happiest war ever waged. I still maintain that the end of
Hairspray
makes very little logical sense, and I’m still right. But what does it get me? Musical theater is that exact thing: the intersection of craftsmanship and the irrationally thrilling. When you know who the characters are and what they want, when you root hard for them all night, when you’ve been properly cared for and fussed over by artists who know how, you are set up to have the greatest creators reach right past your intellectual faculties at the last minute and press down on that joy buzzer that lurks in the back part of your brain. When they do, your spirit levitates, just like Peter Pan heading out the window to Neverland. I’ve seen it happen, and that’s why I wrote this book.

A Note About the Shows Discussed—and a Few Other Matters

The title of this book was originally “The Secret Life of the Broadway Musical,” but I changed it when I realized I was going to write only about American shows. During various periods of Broadway’s history, the street has been dominated by musicals from England, but I’ve chosen not to deal with any of them. This may reflect a personal prejudice, but I hope it has more to do with the British musical itself, which, when not imitating the American musical, has always been created around its own set of traditions and a history of entertainment—Gilbert and Sullivan, the music hall, the Christmas Pantomime, the Dickensian yarn—that are distant cousins of our own. British musicals, though they’ve sometimes been the economic engine of Broadway, don’t actually help tell the story I wanted to tell, so I’ve left them out. No disrespect intended.

I’ve not spent a lot of time in these pages talking about dance in any formal way—I don’t feel qualified to do so. Dance has been an integral part of Broadway musicals since the beginning.
The Black Crook
, arguably the very first musical, allegedly came into being in 1866 because a Parisian dance troupe was stranded when the New York theater it was supposed to appear in burned down, and the company was rescued by being shoehorned into a musical melodrama. But even so, I don’t have a great deal to say on the subject of how dance has evolved in the modern musical. Dream ballets existed from the 1930s on, became standard fare in the ’40s with Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins doing most of the innovating, and then lived on to be ridiculed by some of today’s musicals. Big production numbers have usually featured dance breaks, and dance has always been a useful, sometimes blissful tool for romantic expression. As the director-choreographer Warren Carlyle said about musicals, “When you can no longer speak, you sing; when you can no longer sing, you dance.” I don’t think I have anything further to add.

I’ve also returned often in these pages to a handful of mostly classic shows, at the expense of discussing many others.
Gypsy
,
My Fair Lady
,
Fiddler on the Roof
,
Guys and Dolls
,
Little Shop of Horrors
,
Hairspray
,
The Book of Mormon
, and a few others predominate, and in some cases, their entire plots seem to emerge. The reasons for this are numerous, but the best one is simply that these are the shows that taught me the most, that I spend the most time teaching. Perhaps they’re not perfect, and none of them is my absolute favorite (that would be
Follies
), but for the purposes of this book, they were the most useful to me. And that seemed reason enough. As a consequence, a number of successful and well-constructed shows—
Kiss Me, Kate
and
La Cage aux Folles
come to mind—are only occasionally mentioned. Rodgers and Hammerstein get a lot of space, but not one show in particular. There’s a lot about Stephen Sondheim and not enough, perhaps, about his wonderful contemporaries, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, John Kander and Fred Ebb, Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, Jerry Herman, Bob Merrill, and the like. And there are other important musicals—
Funny Girl
,
Brigadoon
, and
Annie Get Your Gun
, to name just three—that have escaped notice altogether. A number of important creators whose work I admire—William Finn comes immediately to mind—are similarly not to be found. This book isn’t intended to be a survey or a complete history of Broadway musicals, and it is not even slightly democratic; it has no intention of paying tribute to all worthy competitors. Nor is it any kind of instruction manual. It’s a personal way of talking about the art and craft of making musicals, very much from one man’s point of view. I’ve tried to use what has seemed most telling to me, and I’ve tended to wander off in all directions from time to time, just as I’m making the case that a well-structured musical should never do so. There are stories that I felt were worth telling, bits and pieces of trivia that I’ve accumulated, and somewhat off-topic observations that seemed worth a paragraph here and there. I considered cutting each one, but most have remained, for better or worse. The book is, in some senses, a ramble.

One other point is worth making. Nothing in these pages is meant to imply that the artists creating musicals knowingly follow a well-worn formula. Quite the opposite is true. While musicals tend to follow patterns, the writers and directors who create them are generally rediscovering how to make each show completely fresh and original every time out. It’s only in hindsight that the patterns emerge. Not only that: there are big hit shows in which few of the patterns I describe actually appear. Take a look at
Chicago
or
1776
if you doubt it. Not every show has an I Want song. Or a conditional love song, or a main event, or even an 11 o’clock number. But most do, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and that’s what makes writing about them fun.

Still, any reader of this book who wants to point triumphantly to some show that doesn’t seem to be built on the classic chassis I’m writing about will get no argument from me, just a tip of the hat. If I still wore a hat.

1. Overture

Is the American musical an animal or a machine? That’s a peculiar question, but think about it for a moment. A machine is made from standardized, manufactured parts, assembled according to a particular logic; when switched on, it does a task, or perhaps a series of them. An animal is, in some ways, not so very different. We human animals are also standardized to a great extent. Two eyes, two lips, a nose, as Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote, and we perform a certain set of actions, some of them repetitively. These include the mundane (brushing our teeth) and the profound (falling in love). We’re like machines, but we’re not machines; we’re individuals with our own hearts, our own brains, our own ways of looking at the world informed by experience, temperament, taste, and desire. We’re better than machines.

A lot of Broadway musicals are well-made machines, but the best ones rise above—they stand up and dance on their own, with their own unique beating hearts. This book is mostly about those very best ones, and about deconstructing the machined parts that allowed them to work.

Why? Because that other element, the lightning bolt that gives life, can be described but never entirely understood. That intangible thing that separates the special Broadway shows from the routinely competent ones—
My Fair Lady
from
Camelot
, or
Hairspray
from
Legally Blonde
—is partly a matter of craft, but who really knows what makes that final difference happen? Every now and then the divine spirit comes down for a visit, that’s all. The idea behind this book, though, is that such blessed events don’t have much of a chance of happening unless the machine is up and running. Without the lungs and liver, there’s no way for the heart to soar or the brain to make lightning and thunder. So this book is an attempt to describe the mechanics of the great musicals—how they were planned and built, and why, so often, they get under our skin and remain a part of us for a lifetime.

The architecture of musicals dates back to Broadway’s Golden Age, the dates of which can be agreed upon by no one. My opinion is that it begins on the opening night of
Oklahoma!
(March 31, 1943) and ends on the opening night of
A Chorus Line
(July 25, 1975). During those decades, musicals found a form that was so rock solid and so satisfying to audiences that the components of that form served as the road map for creators who revised and refined but never abandoned it. There were great musicals produced before and after, of course, and I do have some things to say about shows in the ’20s and ’30s, and about shows that Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators wrote in the post–
Chorus Line
era. And there’s a lot to be written about shows like
Wicked
,
The Producers
,
The Book of Mormon
, and, of course, those produced by the Disney empire. But my Golden Age ends where it ends. By the mid-’70s, the world had changed both on- and offstage in a way that caused a flurry of experimentation, some notable disasters, and a period of wandering in the desert.

The ’70s and ’80s saw a scattering of attempts to exploit the fashionable on Broadway—hence musicals like
Got Tu Go Disco
, a curiosity that tried to cash in on the disco craze without a discernible plot or characters, and
Rockabye Hamlet
, a rock version of Shakespeare’s classic that proved something really was rotten in the state of Denmark. There was a lot of confusion about appropriate subject matter too—was it really a strong idea to write a musical about the Shroud of Turin?
Into the Light
gave it a try, leading to one of the more memorable lead sentences ever published in a
Variety
review: “Those who never miss a musical about the Shroud of Turin will rush to
Into the Light
.”

There seemed to be a lot of amateurism around, and to some extent that’s still the case today. As the ideas for new musicals and the justifications for producing them got thinner and more erratic, the craftsmanship often evaporated altogether. Part of the reason for this, to be fair, was that there were suddenly some extremely compelling shows rooted in the most unlikely source material, seemingly semi-improvised:
Hair
may have started the trend, which has continued and encouraged both inspired outsiders and rank incompetents alike. Opinions may differ on shows like
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson
and
Passing Strange
, but their failure to find large, appreciative audiences has a lot to do with their formlessness. Audiences really do like to be told a definite story in a compelling way. It has to have captivating characters, an exciting challenge for them to solve, and a solution that’s worthy of the time we’ve taken to watch it.

Nowhere was this clearer to me than in the long journey taken by August Wilson’s play
The Piano Lesson
, which is, admittedly, not a musical (though it has a couple of amazingly powerful musical sequences in it). Set in Pittsburgh, the play revolves around an almost three-hour argument between a brother and a sister over who gets to control the piano in the parlor, a mystical heirloom onto which the family’s history was carved by an ancestor who was a slave. The sister wants to save it as a testament to the family’s suffering. The brother wants to sell it to a collector and buy a piece of land in Mississippi so he can start a farm and begin to help the current generation prosper. What does one do with one’s legacy?

The play is also a ghost story; the spirit of the white man whose family once owned both the piano and the land in question has arrived from Mississippi and is terrifying the residents of the house, though what exactly he wants isn’t stated. It is a wildly entertaining, imaginative evening. In the original script, the ghost was exorcised in the end, but the question of who winds up with the piano was left unresolved. At its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre, audiences appreciated the play, but they left the theater a little baffled. Through three or four out-of-town productions, I kept gently asking the playwright a simple question: After three hours of argument, who gets the piano? He purported not to be interested in the question (I actually think he just didn’t know the answer). He’d given strong arguments to both combatants. With a Broadway opening staring him in the face, he finally went into retreat and came back with two new scenes, one in the middle of the second act in which the sister explains why, although she won’t let go of the piano, she’ll never play it again. And one at the end where, to exorcise the ghost, she changes her mind and plays it, driving away the sprits of the past. She earns the piano, and her brother gives in.

The first night the play was performed with those two new scenes, the audience whooped and cheered at the end and stood up and whistled. They had their answer. Thematically, August Wilson may have been right that it didn’t matter who got the piano. The argument was more important to him than the outcome. He could have found a justification for the brother winning, and the audience would probably have been just as happy. But in a show about who will end up with a piano, the spectators want to know and won’t be satisfied until they do. That’s what makes a story a story, as anyone who has ever told a bedtime story to a child—or watched a baseball game—will immediately understand. Something is at stake. Someone wins the stake and someone else loses. There are mechanical niceties, and they have to be observed, “The Lady or the Tiger?” notwithstanding.