The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (18 page)

How these second parts of Act 1 develop is a lot harder to characterize than how the first parts do. The beginnings of shows have such specific requirements that they tend to explain themselves. Once the story has wandered off, who knows what complications will ensue?

As a result, laying out a song plot for the late middle of Act 1 isn’t simple, because good shows are happily unpredictable. But it usually involves some of the following: a number for the villain, if there is one; a number for the star, if there is one; and some time spent with the major subplot, whatever it might be. In the Golden Age, and often even now, it usually involves a second romantic couple.

The second couple is an age-old device, of course. Shakespeare used it a lot (think
Much Ado About Nothing
), and operettas in the 1920s usually had them—a soubrette and a comedian—principally to provide laughs, since the leading couple had to sing like birds, and actors who could do that tended to be stiff and humorless. By the time Hammerstein got to
Oklahoma!
the idea was virtually obligatory—hence Ado Annie and Will Parker (
Oklahoma!
), Carrie Pipperidge and Mr. Snow (
Carousel
), Liat and Lieutenant Cable (
South Pacific
), and Tuptim and Lun Tha (
The King and I
). The structure remained unchanged as Hammerstein laid out his librettos, but the intention evolved quickly into something more sophisticated and challenging than it had ever been.

Ado Annie and Will Parker are really in the shadow of operetta, there to provide comedy and up-tempo fun. But in
Carousel
, Carrie and Mr. Snow have a deeper purpose, which is to hold up a reverse mirror to the main romance, to make manifest the values that the main couple has rejected: a conventional marriage, hard work and prosperity, a legacy of success, and a proper and rising place in society. The two characters also demonstrate, of course, the flip side of that equation: sexual and conversational boredom, narrow-mindedness, and the stultifying life that a proper and rising place in society brings. Julie and Billy, driven recklessly by erotic love and a need to escape their own dead-end lives, wouldn’t make the same choice even if it were available to them, but they are forced to confront it right in front of them—and so is the audience. The second couple is comic, and maybe even endearing, but their values are hopelessly middle class, dull, and exclusionary. Both couples are doomed to a destined outcome, in a sense, but only one—the conventional one—can survive as a couple. That’s part of
Carousel
’s power—the greater the passion, the greater the danger.

In Frank Loesser’s
Guys and Dolls
, the couples are split evenly—it’s hard to tell which one comes first. Based principally on two Damon Runyon short stories, each a full-blown romance, the musical version does keep to the operetta model in one sense: Sky Masterson and Sarah Brown are the romantic ones with the legit voices, while Nathan Detroit and Miss Adelaide are the comics. But Abe Burrows, who wrote the book and was just beginning to emerge from the radio sketch comedy world, used a structure common to radio and, later, to classic TV sitcom writing. He began the show with all four characters, then methodically switched focus, bouncing between the two couples—and the two plots—scene by scene. First couple A, then couple B, then couple A, then couple B, reuniting them at the end. If you call Sky and Sarah’s plot the Mission plot and Nathan and Adelaide’s plot the Crap Game plot, the show lays out neatly, as shown in the chart opposite.

Note the way the plotting begins to throw characters from the two different plots together in Act 2 but still maintains a focus on bouncing from plot to plot. Lest we grow tired of seeing Nathan always paired with Adelaide, and Sky with Sarah, in Act 2 we get a scene with Nathan and Sky, and another with Adelaide and Sarah. It keeps us off balance just enough.

In Loesser’s next show,
The Most Happy Fella
, for which he wrote the book himself, he took the operetta convention both forward and backward, employing it while lampooning it. In the process, he created what is probably the only successful musical with two different scores.

Happy Fella
is almost an opera. Tony, the middle-aged Napa Valley grape farmer, and Rosabella, his mail-order bride, have big gorgeous arias to thrill audiences with; even Joe, the ranch hand who impregnates Rosabella, needs to have a booming baritone, which means Loesser didn’t ask that he also have wit. By contrast, the “comic” couple, Cleo and Herman, needs to sing loud, but in a musical comedy manner. (Auditioning Susan Johnson, who eventually got the part of Cleo, Loesser told her, “Sing like someone’s chasing you.”) Loesser wrote for the characters in their own style, ignoring the idea of overall unity. Accordingly, Cleo and Herman’s songs might have come from an entirely different musical than those written for Tony, Rosabella, and Joe. Stylistically,
The Most Happy Fella
is a mash-up of Puccini and
The Pajama Game
, except that in both styles, Loesser always sounds like himself, melodically and harmonically as well as lyrically. This score-within-a-score technique was met with skepticism by some critics of the day (and still comes up when the show is revived), but Loesser was essentially amplifying a pattern established by Victor Herbert, Sigmund Romberg, and Rudolf Friml back in the day. They, too, wrote in two distinct styles for their two distinct couples, but the contrast was a delicate one. Loesser was nothing if not brash, and he took the idea all the way. In any case, the American operetta composers had been forgotten by the time
Happy Fella
opened in 1956 and no one thought to reference them. What was perceived at the time as an experiment was, in some ways, nothing more than a brilliantly skillful tip of the hat, executed with characteristic boldness in a way that would never have occurred to Herbert, Romberg, or Friml.

The second couple in
Happy Fella
actually had distinguished material, which such couples almost never did in the operetta era. “Lover, Come Back to Me” has long survived its source, 1927’s
The New Moon
, while “Try Her Out at Dances,” which was written for the comic lead in the same show, has happily vanished into the mists of time. By contrast, the best second-couple songs in
Happy Fella
, “Ooh, My Feet,” “Big ‘D,’” and “Standing on the Corner,” are still a part of our consciousness if we’re fans of the genre.

*   *   *

As for
Sweeney Todd
itself, Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, working from Christopher Bond’s version of the nineteenth-century melodrama, took a more jaundiced look at the operetta tradition. The psychology of the characters is distinguished not by nuance (it’s a melodrama, after all) but by the way they sing. Sondheim and Wheeler make sure that the second couple’s state of mind—innocent, naïve, and hopeful—stands in stark contrast to the main couple’s cynicism, rage, and madness. Dark is balanced by light, and both Johanna and the sailor have mid-act solos—“Green Finch and Linnet Bird” for her and “Johanna” for him—that give definition to their characters and their dilemma. They also share a giddy duet, “Kiss Me,” that furthers the plot and clues us in to the possible limits of their intelligence, particularly hers. The songs are about as far as they could be from the kind that were written for second couples in the heyday of the convention, but one could argue that Johanna’s addle-headed observations do owe something to the kinds of soubrette roles that were typical of comedy in the operetta era.

*   *   *

What distinguishes these second-couple songs that populate the middle third of the first act? People tend to refer to them as “Ado Annie songs,” and, to be sure, Annie and Will Parker have a couple of standard comedy numbers, “I Cain’t Say No” and “Kansas City,” early on in
Oklahoma!
Both are examples of what passed for comic erotica in 1943, or 1943’s impression of 1906, and they’ve stood the test of time, at least as period pieces. Will’s is about encountering indoor plumbing for the first time and going to a burlesque show in Kansas City, considered the big time if you lived in the Oklahoma Territory; Annie’s is about a very mild and charming case of nymphomania.

But by the time of
The King and I
, R&H were well beyond focusing on the “comic” couple as necessarily comic. The progression is interesting and speaks to Hammerstein’s conviction that there is no point in a subplot unless it illuminates the plot.
1
In
Carousel
(1945), Mr. Snow and Carrie are both comic and somewhat alarming, and slightly more integrated into the central story than are Ado Annie and Will Parker. Mr. Snow seems like an ambitious buffoon in the beginning (his big dream is of a fleet of herring boats), but as American business has proved countless times, buffoonery is no bar to wealth and power. And in the end, the prosperous Snow family displays a level of class consciousness and intolerance that turns them into implicit villains. In
South Pacific
(1949), Liat and Lieutenant Cable are in some ways more like Billy and Julie than like a typical second couple—eager for escape from two different repressive worlds and doomed by their dreams and their erotic awakening.

They are something new: the tragic second couple. R&H went a step further in
The King and I
(1951), introducing a second couple whose love is forbidden by the hidebound regime of the King. The slave girl Tuptim sings “My Lord and Master,” about her servitude, and she and her secret lover, Lun Tha, have a romantic duet, “We Kiss in a Shadow,” that makes explicit how risky their love affair is, both during the middle of the act. In some respects R&H, by this moment, had turned the traditional subplot tone upside down, though they continued to use the device for the same purpose: to expose, through the second couple, the depth and shape of the problem being experienced by the first. Anna and the King are locked in a conflict over modernity. Tuptim and Lun Tha are threatened by the potentially fatal consequences of Anna losing the battle, their love forbidden by the ancient political caste systems over which the King continues to rule.
2

*   *   *

Liat and Lieutenant Cable, and Lun Tha and Tuptim, represented a new kind of idea for second couples, and decades later the idea resurfaced in an entirely different context in, of all places,
Hairspray
.

By this point, the convention had worn out its welcome as a structural tool of modern musicals and was only occasionally on display.
Hairspray
embraced it with a vengeance and turned it back into comedy, but with a common theme.

Tracy Turnblad,
Hairspray
’s heroine, has a best friend, Penny, who is as pathologically shy as Tracy is bold. When Tracy reveals her plan to audition for
The Corny Collins Show
, Penny proudly says, “And I have to go
watch
you audition!” Penny has an awful, repressive mother and lives by trying to be invisible, until the moment when she meets Seaweed, a black student whose mom runs an R&B record store on the wrong side of town and hosts “Negro Day” once a month on
The Corny Collins Show.

“Hey gal,” Seaweed says, “I’ve seen you at the vending machines gettin’ your Juicy Fruit.”

“I’m up to two packs a day,” she replies shyly, but feels something new stirring within.

“All that chewing must make your jaw pretty strong,” Seaweed replies—a unique pickup line that, nonetheless, has the desired effect on the clueless Penny.

Seaweed and Penny are an interracial second couple like Lieutenant Cable and Liat, and they serve the same old function of amplifying and explicating the main couple’s problem: how to confront bigotry in America (it’s a big one). It’s really the same problem Anna and the King were dealing with internationally—confronting progress in a world moving erratically forward—but in a different guise. Penny and Seaweed, like Tuptim and Lun Tha, and Liat and Lieutenant Cable before them, put a human face on the problem. This means Tracy is fighting for her best friend, not just for a cause, and that helps keep the show, which is, after all, a campy comedy, from getting didactic. Tracy doesn’t have to make big statements about integration and liberty (though she makes a few hilarious ones), she just has to fight for Penny’s right to be kissed by the man she loves, forbidden though that may be in the Baltimore of the early ’60s.