The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (10 page)

The impulse behind these songs was undoubtedly a good one: take two immature young people with too much power and too little knowledge of the world, satirize their shallowness, and then, in the play itself, chronicle their coming of age, their understanding of the world as they inexorably experience it. As they acquire the scars of living, and strive—once again, as in
My Fair Lady
—to civilize the world, we’ll come to appreciate how far they’ve traveled, how noble their ultimate desires really are.
Camelot
has a great subject. It chronicles the mythical attempt by a young royal family to create a civil society in a world that has so far been dominated by killing, conquest, lust, and greed. It’s no wonder that the young President Kennedy and his spectacular first lady were enchanted by it. It spoke to everything in the president’s program that was directed at humanizing American society, from the civil rights movement at home to the quest for democracy abroad. It was easy to fall in love with the show’s ideas but harder to like the show itself. To make it work, the audience had to get attached at the beginning. You have to get on the ride when the ride starts. In the case of
Camelot
, Lerner and Loewe depended on cleverness, not on our actual sympathy. The audience almost reattaches when Arthur sings to Guinevere of Camelot itself, in the charming second number of the show—the title song. But in some sense, it’s already too late. And that is
Camelot
’s curse—it keeps wobbling back and forth between sin and redemption. Audiences admired its brains and ambition, and the loftiness of its goals, but it made them irritable, impressed, and drowsy by turns.

*   *   *

Why do we need these I Want songs at all? Not all forms of storytelling require this early expression of passionate desire. Lots of successful movies and novels concern themselves with protagonists who think they’re perfectly happy the way they are. It may take them a very long time to comprehend their discontent.
Clueless
, the blockbuster 1995 movie based on Jane Austen’s 1815 novel
Emma
, underwent a number of attempts to convert it into a musical. To one producer after another, it seemed like a natural. But every incarnation was ultimately doomed by this problem: the heroine starts out happy. Her ignorance of the world is so comically complete that she’s utterly content in her upper-class Beverly Hills world. This wasn’t a problem for the film, which had energetic fun satirizing the morals and mores of overprivileged teens living in an ultracomfortable, technologically miraculous, but emotionally empty bubble. And the novel has stood the test of time, heaven knows. But the musical simply couldn’t be brought to life.

Self-satisfied protagonists aren’t the only challenge. There is a whole other class of stories that stubbornly resist adaptation. These concern the Everyman thrust into a situation he’s not equipped to handle—a nice enough fellow who makes an inadvertent wrong turn into adventureland. I struggled mightily and futilely for ten years on one of these—Jack Finney’s wonderful time-travel novel
Time and Again
. In it, a vaguely discontented but unmotivated adman is thrust back into the nineteenth century, where he finally engages with the world in an era a hundred years before his own. The novel is a fascinating mystery-romance full of period detail and surprising plot developments. The front end of it is kept alive by the common device of having the protagonist, Simon Morley, narrating it and continually promising magical events to come. His constant unpreparedness for what is about to happen to him is entertainment enough, because he’s the one describing it to us. But without his narrative voice, we were sunk. No matter what my collaborators and I did (I was the book writer), and despite a wonderful, sophisticated score, we couldn’t interest anyone in the first half hour, and by then it was much too late. Watching an average Joe wander around New York worrying vaguely about whether he’s wasting his life designing soap ads just doesn’t motivate an audience on Broadway, and why should it?

In the first volume of his complete lyrics, Stephen Sondheim suggests a reason for this peculiar structural requirement that seems to drive—and be a necessity of—successful shows. “Farces are express trains,” he writes. “Musicals are locals.” They keep stopping for songs, dances, and set changes. If they’re not powered energetically right from the start, the distractions take over completely, and the story gets lost, along with the audience. Novels can often survive on the strength of the author’s voice alone, if it’s strong enough. And we can read at whatever pace we choose, savoring the poetic, breezing through the expositional, taking control of the prose. In the theater, however, the show comes at the audience at the pace of the spoken (or sung) word. Someone has to be gathering up the audience to take them on the journey, right from the start. Hence, the I Want.

Of course, anything that comes this close to being a basic minimum requirement runs the risk of also becoming a cliché, and audiences are inevitably bored if they think they’ve heard it all before. What keeps these songs fresh? Unique characters, striking situations, and vividly drawn worlds.

Madame Rose in
Gypsy
wants to get her two little girls out of Seattle and into the big time—onto the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. Her father wants her to settle down and find a (fourth) husband. Rose isn’t having any of that. In
Gypsy
’s second scene, she lets him have it:

Some people can be content,

Playing bingo and paying rent—

That’s peachy for some people,

For some

Hum—

Drum

People to be,

But some people ain’t me!

I had a dream,

A wonderful dream, Poppa,

All about June and the Orpheum Circuit—

Gimme a chance and I know I can

Work it.

I had a dream,

Just as real as can be, Poppa.

There I was in Mr. Orpheum’s office,

And he was saying to me:

“Rose!

Get yourself some new orchestrations,

New routines and red velvet curtains,

Get a feathered hat for the baby,

Photographs in front of the theatre,

Get an agent—and in jig time

You’ll be being booked in the big time!”

There’s nothing generic about Rose. Her specific description of vaudeville defines her and teaches us some things we might not know. You can hear this woman’s passion, her strange combination of savvy and naïveté about show business (she really believes there is a “Mr. Orpheum”), her thirst for life, and her contempt for everyday drudgery. You can also, subtly, hear the era in which she lives—feathered hats, bingo, words like “peachy” and “jig time.”

*   *   *

Rose is impossible to miss, and that’s part of the point of an I Want song. The stage may be full of people singing and dancing, but the I Want song tells the audience, “
Watch this one
. This is the important one. This is the one with the superhuman passion.” We want our heroes to be somehow heroic.

At the beginning of
West Side Story
, we’re introduced to two street gangs of young men—bristling with anger, hostility, clan loyalty, and the danger that goes with those things. They’re the world of the play—an unending gang war for turf that has no real value—and we spend enough time with them to see how that world, defined by poverty, racism, and a grim lack of opportunity, is likely to crush their unbridled energy. They are youth, testosterone, and possibility, but with no outlet for it all, it’s a toxic cocktail.

Then we travel to Doc’s neighborhood drugstore, where we meet young Tony, who is patiently painting a sign for Doc. He’s an artist of a sort—or at least a young man with artistic impulses—and his latest move has been to resign from his gang, the Jets. Why? “Something’s Coming,” he sings. He doesn’t know what, but it’s out there—something better. This is a hard kind of I Want song to write, because Tony doesn’t actually know what he wants—he just knows that it’s going to be superior to what he has, more valuable, more human, more poetic, some kind of trajectory away from hopelessness and toward a meaningful life. He has an inchoate desire, yet Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyric make it feel specific and hugely important. Musically, the song pulses with possibility and trails off into dreams. Tony has a different rhythm than his erstwhile cohorts—more introspective, more complicated. The lyric matches this tone, as Tony sings of miracles that are right around the corner—or “cannonballing down through the sky.” Tony believes in it, because he
has
to have it. And among the rabble that surrounds him onstage, with all their desires to crush each other, we know that this is the man we’re supposed to watch. He’s of more moment—he’s better than his surroundings, though what’s valuable about him is also what’s vulnerable. He’s the reason there’s going to be a story: his escape—if any—will be difficult and by no means certain. But it will be worth watching the attempt.

Valuable and vulnerable also describes Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton, who, almost half a century after Tony stepped away from his gang, also defined himself as an individual outside of his surroundings. But Hamilton is no Tony—he’s the immigrant, the Shark, so to speak; he’s arrogant, self-assured, and charismatic, which also makes him a natural target in the emerging world of American politics. Hamilton’s I Want rap (it’s not a conventional song) is called “My Shot,” and it’s a distant but recognizable descendant of “Something’s Coming.” Hamilton is trying to
join
a gang, not escape from one, but it’s a gang of aspirants, revolutionaries with a new idea about a new country. They’re going to fight a war to get it, and Hamilton is eager to fight a war. But unlike the rest of them, he lacks breeding, finesse, a common background. He’s an outsider, and he’s the one worth watching. Of course, each time he declares

Hey, yo, I’m just like my country

I’m young, scrappy and hungry

And I’m not throwing away my shot …

we wince a bit, because in the end, what Hamilton does is throw away his shot, first figuratively, then literally, while Aaron Burr takes deadly aim and wipes out one of the great characters and intellects of early American history. “My Shot” happens in a context that we barely recognize as American musical theater—the actors are dressed in costumes that might have been preserved from a production of
1776
, but from the neck up they look like a motley gang of street-corner revolutionaries in the Bronx in 2015. And they sound like that too. Yet
Hamilton
presents an opening number that sets the style, the tone (unique as it is), and the point of view of the show perfectly (complete with the information that the hero will be dead at the final blackout) and then proceeds to “My Shot,” secure that its insurgent style will only be helped by adhering to the classic niceties of getting a show off the ground.

*   *   *

If Tony is a descendant of
Carousel
’s Billy Bigelow—an earlier man with poetry locked away inside him and violence in his future—and Hamilton is his offspring many generations down the line, Seymour Krelborn, the meta-schlep at the center of
Little Shop of Horrors
, stands between them as the nephew or uncle they would probably both want to forget.
West Side
,
Little Shop
, and
Hamilton
all deal with a dangerous underbelly of the American landscape, in three wildly divergent tones. In
Little Shop
, Seymour lives in a cartoon version of
West Side Story
’s mean streets. Like the denizens of
West Side Story
, the characters in
Little Shop
occupy the slums—skid row, to be specific. And for the most part, they’re acclimated to it. Racial disharmony and general dissatisfaction make up the daily diet, just as they do in
Hamilton
. In the show’s weirdly cheerful-sounding opening number (irony and camp are hallmarks of the whole event), they describe their surroundings—the grime, the bums, the minimum-wage jobs, the overwhelming sense of hopelessness—until a spotlight picks up young Seymour, a clerk in an all but bankrupt flower shop. He sings of his orphanhood, his dependence on the misanthropic, intolerant owner of the shop, and his existential nightmare:

Poor!

All my life I’ve always been poor.

I keep asking God what I’m for

And he tells me, “Gee, I’m not sure,

Sweep that floor, kid!”

The tone is as far from “Something’s Coming” as one could get, but the problem is the same. Seymour doesn’t have Tony’s gift of poetry—in fact, he seems short on gifts altogether. But he’s lovably direct, as a cartoon character should be. After making sure that we understand his circumstances, he turns directly to us, stops whining, and starts venting his passionate desire:

Someone show me a way to get outta here

’Cause I constantly pray I’ll get outta here

Please won’t somebody say I’ll get outta here?

Someone gimme my shot, or I’ll rot here!

The tone is knowingly dopey, but the passion and the desire could not be clearer—or more real. It’s the rock-and-roll version of “Something’s Coming” minus the big dreams, and Seymour is begging, not promising. Little does he know what’s about to come cannonballing down through the sky. And, of course, when his shot comes, he doesn’t throw it away—with catastrophic consequences. Howard Ashman, who wrote the lyric for the composer Alan Menken’s music, was a young man at the time—but one with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of musical comedy mechanics. He combined the opening number and I Want into one song, but his interlude for Seymour appropriately trumps the rest of the number and sets up the character and the arc of the show: Seymour’s journey out of skid row and what he’ll pay to escape.