The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (16 page)

JULIA

So tonight you made some mistakes

I admit it, you hit a few bumps

But I hate to see you like this

Down on your luck, down in the dumps …

So come out of the dumpster

Don’t leave me standing here

Come out of the dumpster

It’s ok; the coast is clear

The cop cars are leaving

Channel 5 packed up its crew

So come out of the dumpster

I’ll be right here waiting for you

The song, with a lyric by Chad Beguelin and music by Matt Sklar, plays innocence and delicacy against the grotesque. A drunken young man is coaxed out of a heap of rotting rubbish in the sweetest possible way, and we find Julia’s appeal actually touching, not just amusing. These characters are, in a sense, contemporary equivalents of Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow—stuck in a low-paying, no-expectations world, but in 1980s New Jersey instead of 1880s Maine.

Location, of course, is far from the only—or the significant—difference between
Carousel
and
The Wedding Singer
. The former places its romance against a backdrop of fate and myth—don’t forget those blossoms descending.

“You’re right about there bein’ no wind,” Julie Jordan says to Billy Bigelow. “The blossoms are just comin’ down by theirselves. Jest their time to, I reckon.”

This kind of exchange, even if you could figure out how to update the language, could never find its way into
The Wedding Singer
, yet it’s one of the key reasons
Carousel
has endured. It treats the fate of a lower-class couple in love as an essential examination of human nature, and makes bold to say so—it strives, not always gracefully, for stature.
The Wedding Singer
, on the other hand, remains determinedly domestic. It is also about working-class stiffs, and it seems to believe that nothing more ambitious than sitcom-world thinking is available to them, that any other claims to a real subject would inevitably be pretentious, given the often silly and trivial events of the story itself. And that’s probably true, and probably another good reason it wasn’t appropriate underlying material for musical adaptation. It can amuse an audience, but never soar.

“Musical successes,” according to the producer Kevin McCollum, “have to ascend to heaven in the end.” It may not be a clear dictate, but it’s not wrong.

And yet, “Come Out of the Dumpster” remains a lovely, unique conditional love song—a link in the chain that stretches back to “Make Believe” in 1927 and marks how social interaction—and style—have evolved while human need remains immutable.

*   *   *

As the Golden Age slips further into the past, the American musical has refocused its search for underlying material on almost a single source: the movies. This trend has been decried in various quarters, and there are certainly a few bad things to say about it. It’s a trend born partially out of fear of the unknown; producers like a nice famous title to depend upon for advance sales and a structure already worked out by some high-priced screenwriters before they begin the adaptation process. Neither is a really honorable desire from the point of view of trying to make art. But the truth is that most modern musicals have been adapted from some kind of underlying work—all of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hits were based on books or plays, as were all of Loesser’s, most of Lerner and Loewe, and even Jerry Herman and a lot of Sondheim. Add a single ballet (
Fancy Free
) and you can throw in Leonard Bernstein.

But that’s the point. Producers and artists used to have lots of variety when they went looking for source material. Light novels like
The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant
(which became
Damn Yankees
) and popular stage comedies like
My Sister Eileen
(which became
Wonderful Town
) were there to be harvested. All those genres have grown scarcer over time. Neil Simon, the last of our great “light” playwrights, had his last hit more than two decades ago. What’s left to adapt? Movies and TV. Completely original Broadway hits were scarce in the Golden Age—actually, there are probably more of them now, beginning with
A Chorus Line
and including
Avenue Q
and
Next to Normal
.

Why should this be so? First of all, Broadway musicals have always been a business, and most businesses look for safety. Only the rare product generators actually prefer to innovate. But beyond that, the great original storytellers, the creators of striking and memorable characters, the writers with prodigious imaginations, are unlikely to decide that the best use of their talents is writing the librettos for musicals. They tend to write novels or plays or screenplays or, these days, TV. They’re not so interested in having the emotional high points of their work cannibalized by songwriters who get all the credit. For the most part, good book writers are craftsmen. They’re dramaturgical cabinetmakers, and it’s a great skill. But it’s not the same as having a completely original turn of mind and the particular talent to express it. So musicals tend to lean on story material that comes from somewhere else—that already works and has stood the test of time. These days, that often means successful films.

This has led to at least one interesting challenge: the conditional love song in the age of the buddy story, or, in that awful Hollywood term, the bromance.

The Producers
was among the earliest of these—the story of two men who need each other to make their dreams come true but are ill matched in every other way. All they have in common is a goal—to produce the biggest Broadway flop in history. But in the number where they express this desire, “We Can Do It,” something slightly larger is going on—they’re forming a bond, one that will eventually lead to the discovery that the musical they produce,
Springtime for Hitler
, has been nothing more than the means to a much greater end—true friendship, albeit behind bars. (
The Producers
, as previously noted, is a classic hill-beyond-the-hill story.)

Wicked
, which, refreshingly enough, is actually based on a novel, meets the challenge in the same way, in a number called “What Is This Feeling?” It’s a song of mutual loathing that—like “I’ll Know” in
Guys and Dolls
—joins the characters in a common emotion that is, presumably, the opposite of attraction. But of course we know better. In this case, it’s a womance, and, as in
The Producers
and
The Book of Mormon
, which I’ll get to presently, there is an actual opposite-sex romance to follow. But first there are the two buddies / best girlfriends / rivals, who use the conditional love song spot to express their need for each other in ways that the audience can perceive even if the characters can’t.

If
The Producers
celebrates strangers with a shared goal and
Wicked
reveals two young women who hate each other on sight but will nonetheless grow up by growing to understand each other,
The Book of Mormon
gives us a pair who are, reluctantly, willing to accept the hand that’s been dealt them by forces greater than themselves. They are Mormon missionaries about to be sent—as a badly matched pair—to Uganda. Baby-faced, handsome, and self-involved to a pathological degree, Elder Price was hoping for an assignment in Orlando with a cool companion. Instead he’s paired with the über-schlub Elder Cunningham, who combines ineptitude and insecurity in ways that are bound to be toxic—especially in war-torn Africa. It’s not a good situation for either young man, but in “You and Me (But Mostly Me)” the writers, Robert Lopez, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone, let each elder blindly assume it’s all going to be okay.

“
You and me, but mostly me, are gonna change the world forever
,” Price sings, combining naïveté, arrogance, and narcissism with breathtaking efficiency. “’
Cause I can do most anything
,” he asserts, to which Cunningham replies,
“And I can stand next to you and watch!”
As Yente the Matchmaker says under different circumstances, it’s a perfect match.

Mormon
coolly borrows bits and pieces from about a dozen old musicals, and takes at least one page from
Gypsy
: its characters exactly switch places between the beginning of the evening and the end. Price wants nothing but to change the world—or so he thinks. The disheveled Cunningham only wants a best friend. At the final curtain, it is Cunningham who has changed the world and Price who has acquired enough humility to gain a best friend. As it is in
Gypsy
, it’s a deeply satisfying structural knot. And “You and Me (But Mostly Me)” sets it up by merging (as one might expect in a twenty-first-century musical) the I Want with the conditional love song. By the time it concludes, we’re set up for a satisfying array of personal, religious, and global catastrophes, which will all, of course, end happily—and ascend to heaven by creating a whole new religion.

5. Put On Your Sunday Clothes

The Noise

An awful lot has been accomplished by the time a traditional musical reaches the third or fourth song slot, and the audience has been asked to do a lot of work. We get the milieu, the time, the place, the style, and the point of view. We meet the hero and learn what’s on his or her mind, which defines the hill to be climbed. We get the romance started and come to understand its challenges. We get the big picture of what the story’s to be about and begin to understand the details. Time for recess.

Depending on the choices the authors have made about how much to tell how quickly, and given that this whole enterprise is supposed to be fun, a pure expression of energy is usually called for at this moment. This is where, in some senses, the musical departs from the world of logic and begins to respond to the biorhythms of the thousand or so people who paid their money to sit in the dark—the collective living, breathing thing that Oscar Hammerstein dubbed “the big black giant,” and Mike Nichols and Neil Simon used to refer to, less poetically, as “the 900 Jews.” Whoever they are, they are fused into one being by this time, and they probably need a little energy boost, a little fun, a little relaxation to restore their concentration and curiosity; they need to hear a big sound, and they probably need to watch some people dance. Musicals depend on these rhythmic energy shifts. Quiet thoughtfulness must be followed by noisy energy, and vice versa.

In
South Pacific
, after twenty minutes or so of watching Nellie Forbush and Emile de Becque angsting about the possibilities of having a life together and bridging their not inconsiderable differences, and hoping that some enchanted evening something good will happen to them, wouldn’t you like to take a break and hear a chorus of sailors sing “Bloody Mary” and “There’s Nothin’ Like a Dame”? Luckily, that’s just what
South Pacific
has planned for you—a day at the beach, even in World War II.

This being Rodgers and Hammerstein, the scene is not without its own form of theatrical nourishment. R&H, in particular, lived by that old Puritan dictum “Waste not, want not.” Even recess had a meaning and a purpose. The first song introduces the show’s subplot (though we don’t know it yet) as the mercenary Pacific Islands native Bloody Mary tries to sell junk souvenirs to the sailors. She and her daughter Liat will be the fulcrum of the show’s secondary story. And the second number merely expresses, with lively vulgarity, the desire of men far from home for some female companionship and all that it implies. The song, rousing and mildly comic, may not appear to have much on its mind, but don’t forget that for audiences in 1949, the loneliness, the deprivation, and the fear that home might never be glimpsed again were all raw and recent memories. Whether they had spent World War II on the front line or the home front, people watching the original production of
South Pacific
bore the scars of war. The men remembered the emotion, and the women appreciated hearing about it from R&H, since many of their husbands wouldn’t talk about it. The number was funny, but somehow touching as well. And it bridged a story gap: by the end of the scene, Lieutenant Cable, who will fall in love with Bloody Mary’s daughter, has arrived. But first, the noise.

Not all creators are as scrupulous, and there are some wildly entertaining production numbers that barely scratch the surface of storytelling utility. They’re worth a look, though, because they reinforce one of the basic ideas that guide the building of Broadway musicals: the energy in a theater has to move in both directions. The audience reacts to shifts in tone and mood and tempo by sending out its own bursts of applause, laughter, and even tears. It’s a vital, living part of the equation. And the performers and creators need to control the flow, keep the connection alive. Theater is about engagement in the moment. And it doesn’t take more than one black hole for the whole apparatus to stop breathing. Standing against the back rail during a rough early preview of
Guys and Dolls
, the director, Jerry Zaks, turned to a companion after a weak scene transition—a scene transition, mind you—and said one ugly word: “Death.” He was speaking literally. The connection was lost. The plug was pulled; the 900 Jews were suddenly dozing comfortably. And the show, that night at least, expired shortly thereafter. Recognizing the fatality pushed Zaks to go back to work and make sure it never happened again.

*   *   *

The recharging of the audience needn’t be as meaningful as it is in
South Pacific
or a couple of other shows that we’ll look at presently. Sometimes it’s a recharge, plain and simple. Though it serves no real purpose, in the classic B musical
Li’l Abner
, a subsidiary character named Marryin’ Sam turns to a chorus girl in the town square and proclaims, “Honey, it’s high time you knew that our town was founded by that beloved man a-settin’ up there on that beloved horse, Jubilation T. Cornpone.” This portends the noise: Sam is going to sing a jaunty comedy number by Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer about the worst Confederate general in history, and make us laugh at some classic Mercer lyrics, and before long the entire town is going to be dancing, and the whole thing, nonsensical as it is, is going to bring down the house. When it’s done, the story will start again. Audiences in the ’50s expected that and loved it. “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo.” from
Damn Yankees
works the same way. Ditto “With a Little Bit of Luck” from
My Fair Lady
, “A Bushel and a Peck” from
Guys and Dolls
, and, though it’s sung by a barbershop quartet and not the entire company, “Standing on the Corner” from
The Most Happy Fella
. Just give us a treat.