The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (19 page)

Forbidden love, especially when the taboo is racial or religious, feels like a very American subject, but it serves a classic second-couple purpose in
Cabaret
, which is set in Berlin between the world wars. Written by Joe Masteroff (book) and John Kander and Fred Ebb (music and lyrics), it was the first of the producer-director Hal Prince’s departures from the classic Golden Age style he had spent a decade producing. In 1964, Jerome Robbins announced his retirement from Broadway right after directing the Prince-produced
Fiddler on the Roof.
A year later, Prince produced Kander and Ebb’s first musical,
Flora the Red Menace
, directed by George Abbott, who had given Prince his start and was now pushing eighty. Much as he revered Abbott, Prince knew that with
Flora
, he’d made a mistake. He wanted to push the musical into new territory; efficiently deploying the hoary conventions of the ’50s, Abbott was the wrong man. And Robbins was back at City Ballet. Prince would have to do the job himself.
Cabaret
was something of an in-betweener, a transitional piece neither completely free from old conventions nor a slave to them. But one of its conventional paradigms that worked particularly well was the second couple.

They were played by Lotte Lenya and Jack Gilford—she a German émigré and the widow and chief interpreter of Kurt Weill, he an American vaudevillian. Both in the story and in real life, she was gentile, he Jewish. And they were older, not the young innocents to whom the roles were traditionally assigned. In a musical that chronicled the rise of Nazi Germany, their romance was destined to be brief and tragic. The main couple, an expat American writer named Clifford Bradshaw and an amoral carouser named Sally Bowles, promised excitement, but not warmth or tenderness. She was in it for kicks; he was a cool, sexually ambivalent outside observer. (In the subsequent film and later productions, Cliff’s bisexuality was made explicit, but that would have been too big a reach in 1966.) To point up the hard edge of Cliff and Sally’s doomed affair, the show offered an opposing portrait in the subplot: the warm, deeply human courtship of Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz.

Kander and Ebb, who had written some terrific and underappreciated songs for
Flora
, came into their own with
Cabaret
, providing a consistently first-rate score that alternated traditional “book songs” relating to the plot with cabaret numbers that explored the themes of louche Berlin falling inexorably under the spell of fascism. It was a dazzling display for the young songwriters. The songs that are best remembered are the cabaret numbers, particularly the title song and “Willkommen,” an opening number in the mold of “Comedy Tonight” and “Tradition.” But their songs for the second couple chart a perfect arc. Lenya’s Fräulein Schneider endears us with a Weillesque “So What?” early in the first act, and then, in the classic midway spot in the act, there is a wonderful conditional love song about, of all things, a pineapple.

“It Couldn’t Please Me More” is a charm duet, which both Lenya and Gilford used to create a three-way love affair—she with him, he with her, and the audience with both of them. Herr Schultz, the Jewish fruit dealer, brings Fräulein Schneider a pineapple as a gift, and they sing about it ruefully, shyly, complete with Hawaiian guitar accompaniment, although the pineapple’s provenance isn’t so glamorous:

SHE

Ahh-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah, I can hear Hawaiian breezes blow

Ahh-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah …

HE

It’s from California

SHE

Even so …

How am I to thank you?

HE

Kindly let it pass.

SHE

Would you like a slice?

HE

That might be nice,

But frankly, it would give me gas.

Fräulein Schneider is “overwhelmed.” But not as overwhelmed as she will be a scene or two later when Herr Schultz proposes marriage. In a simple but telling duet, they contemplate a modest but rosy future, and Ebb, the lyricist, turns into folk poetry the everyday speech of two working-class people who thought their lives were essentially done.

How the world can change

It can change like that—

Due to one little word:

“Married.”

See a palace rise

From a two-room flat

Due to one little word:

“Married.”

Somehow we know that it can’t happen, and that it won’t happen, which makes the modesty of their courtship heartbreaking in its directness and simplicity, and a perfect foil for the tart and alienated central relationship between Cliff and Sally.

*   *   *

Second-couple songs rarely get the kind of attention they are entitled to—of necessity, they exert less of a pull than the songs written for the main plot. We don’t want them to upset the story architecture by seizing the stage too forcibly. They tend to do their work subversively, drawing our attention just long enough to add a layer of meaning to what the leading players are going through, while simultaneously providing some relief from it. Originally a comic device, they have evolved over the decades to play every conceivable supporting role—young, old, comic, tragic, and thematic. As time progresses, the adventurers, from Hammerstein to Loesser to Sondheim, Prince, and Kander and Ebb, keep asking them to do more, and to do it differently, but the basic architecture of the musical show is designed to contain multitudes.

7. Bushwhacking 2: Villains

Not every show has a villain, of course, but there must be adversarial forces if there is to be a contest worth watching. And not every villain has to sing. The murderous Warlord in
The Book of Mormon
is a perfect example. The authors, who had comedy galore everywhere else, may have considered giving a comedy solo to the vicious general with the unprintable (but I’ll print it anyway) name of Butt-Fucking Naked, but letting villains sing funny tends to domesticate them. And this villain really needed to be scary, which is why, instead of singing, he shoots an innocent bystander in the face right in front of our eyes. Trey Parker and Matt Stone had command of how to tell their story, even though they were musical theater newcomers.

During a rehearsal, one of the veteran actors in the company talked about how two guys who had never tried it before were getting it so right with such seeming ease.

“The thing about these guys,” he explained, “is that they’ve been telling a twenty-three-minute story a week for about twenty years on TV. You get good at it after a while. You have no idea what it’s like for an actor to work with writers who just know how to tell a story—it’s bred into them, and they have an answer for every question. We never doubt them; we have no reason to.”

That said, in shows that aren’t crazy comedies, it is possible to have the villain sing and actually gain stature in the process.

“A story is only as gripping as its villain,” goes an old Hollywood saw, which is ironic, considering the blandness and predictability of so many Hollywood villains—at least the ones who are on-screen, as opposed to those who are running the studio. Generally speaking, villains are most compelling when, however terrible they are, we’re forced to understand their point of view. If they seem like simple paper tigers, the audience is likely to lose interest.

Here again,
Oklahoma!
and
Sweeney Todd
are instructive. In the former, Jud, the sex-starved farmhand who wants desperately to get his hands on the heroine, has all the hallmarks of a generic baddie—he’s unwashed, he lusts after pornography as well as actual women, and he isn’t above trafficking in murder weapons. He’s unquestionably a figure of the times (we’re not so tough on porn enthusiasts these days, unless they’re politicians), but even in this early version of the modern musical Hammerstein felt compelled to make sure we heard Jud’s side of the story. In a song called “Lonely Room,” Jud, alone in the outdoor shed he’s forced to call home, ruminates frighteningly on his lot in life. There’s no question we find him dangerous in this moment, but he is also somehow humanized.

“
The floor creaks, the door squeaks,
” he complains.

There’s a field-mouse a-nibblin’ on a broom,

And I set by myself

Like a cobweb on a shelf

By myself in a lonely room.

We’re immediately captured by him in a way we didn’t think we could be. There’s poetry and self-loathing in the man in equal measure, and the power of his loneliness seems to have driven him mad. He’s not just a baddie, he’s ill, maybe more than ill, as Rodgers’s creepy music makes clear. And the danger that’s in him becomes immediately more powerful, more alarming than it has been, because we’re tainted by it. We have to recognize him. He has dreams, just like the other characters in the piece, and just like us.

But when there’s a moon in my winder

And it slants down a beam ’crost my bed,

Then the shadder of a tree

Starts a-dancin’ on the wall

And a dream starts a-dancin’ in my head …

And the girl that I want

Ain’t afraid of my arms,

And her own soft arms keep me warm.

And her long, yeller hair

Falls acrost my face,

Jist like the rain in a storm!

What can you say about a man who expresses himself like this?
“Her long, yeller hair falls acrost my face, jist like the rain in a storm!”
he says, and we simply can’t ignore that. He’s a man for whom tenderness will never come, but he can imagine it easily and with a colorful gift for imagery. He’s going to go off the deep end, if he hasn’t already, and he’s going to have to die. But the moral quandary that he presents is one of the reasons
Oklahoma!
is what it is—the golden door through which the musical play had to one day finally pass.

*   *   *

In
Sweeney Todd
(which also uses the phrase “yellow hair” to great effect), Judge Turpin stands in for Jud Fry. Unlike Jud, he’s politically powerful—the most powerful character in the piece, in fact. But he, too, is overcome by lust and alarming sexual tastes. And Stephen Sondheim, with characteristic boldness, wrote him a villain’s number (one of the three different songs in the show called “Johanna”) in which he spies on his young ward, masturbates, and whips himself with a cat-o’-nine-tails. The number was cut from the original production, allegedly because the show was running long, but it’s hard not to suspect an element of faintheartedness entered the argument. One can only imagine what commercial producers thought of the song—certainly it was the first time the American musical had ever featured an old man flagellating himself to orgasm on a Broadway stage. Is this what Cole Porter meant by “Anything Goes”? Perhaps, but he didn’t say so explicitly.

In the years since that original production, the number has been restored and we’ve all gotten a little more accustomed to a wide-angle view of human sexual activity. But looked at without the filter of conventional censoriousness, “Johanna” is revealing and alarming in many of the same ways as “Lonely Room.” It presents a character out of control, lost to his own fantasies, and crippled by an ambivalence that won’t allow him to do the right thing, even as doubt engulfs him. He cries:

God, deliver me!

Release me!

Forgive me!

Restrain me!

Pervade me!

But obsession, as with Jud, is the boss. And the outcome can only be fatal.

*   *   *

Villain numbers don’t have to be scary, of course, and a far greater number of them were designed to be funny. In musical theater, the comedy villain dates back beyond the days of George M. Cohan, who wrote “Then I’d Be Satisfied with Life” at the turn of the century, a list song in which a fraudster ticks off the simple pleasures (
“All I need is fifty million dollars…”
) that would make him a happy man. But the appearance of comic villains has been more of an option than a staple of Broadway musicals, and most often the jokes in their songs, with some lucky exceptions, aren’t that funny. What the songs do provide is a performance opportunity based on character—a chance for a good comic to have the stage all to herself or himself and display a unique gift and the craft that goes with it. The tradition probably evolved from vaudeville, and even in modern times it often feels like a throwback to earlier times. That’s certainly the case with one of the most successful of them all, Miss Hannigan’s “Little Girls,” from
Annie
.

Dorothy Loudon originated the role of the dipsomaniacal mistress of the orphanage. Finally, after laboring in the Broadway fields since 1962, Loudon got a role worthy of her comic talents. She was loud, brassy, and slightly out of control, and could make pure, unmotivated meanness into something joyful to behold. Watching her drunkenly threaten a pack of defenseless little girls was inherently funny, so it doesn’t really matter that the lyric to “Little Girls,” on paper, is only fair. Loudon found the laughs, expanded them, savored them, and drop-kicked them all the way to the balcony. All she needed was a funny idea to work with, which “Little Girls” provides.

A similarly out-of-control baddie, the sadistic dentist in
Little Shop of Horrors
, gets his moment mid-act, and here the number is actually a witty send-up of the rebel-without-a-cause James Dean/Elvis types who were always threatening the sanctity of suburban teen-girl purity in early rock-and-roll America. The score, remember, tips its hat to those late-’50s and early-’60s chart hits that were knocking conventional show tunes off the hit parade, and “Dentist!” is a “He’s a Rebel” pastiche that takes the genre into a kind of delicious netherworld. The Dentist (
“Here he comes, girls, the leader of the plaque!”
) simply sings his autobiography, relating how his proud mother, discovering his proclivity for twisting the heads off kittens and poisoning tropical fish, realizes that there is a budding professional in the house: