The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (20 page)

That’s when my mama said,

“You’ll be a dentist!

You have a talent for causing things pain.

Son, be a dentist!

People will pay you to be inhumane.”

Though he does, in fact, ride a motorcycle just like James Dean, the Dentist takes the convention into the land of reductio ad absurdum. He’s a laughing gas addict, which should be funny, but he’s also an actual sadist and misogynist, and within the confines of
Little Shop
’s loopy comic book world, he’s genuinely dangerous. This combination of absurdity and earnestness accounts for a great deal of the show’s appeal. It appears to be a cartoon, but it’s lifted from
Faust
. It appears to be a camp comedy, but at the same time, it takes its characters and their moral and psychological dilemmas completely seriously. It’s unique in this way: it lampoons itself while simultaneously selling itself to you as something that matters. Audiences grow to care for Seymour and Audrey, to empathize with Seymour’s dilemma. His handshake with the devil actually affects us and makes us wonder what we would do, or what we’ve already done. The devil, in this case, is the plant, which also has a villain number in Act 1. But the secondary villain, the Dentist, in this strangely dark/light world, is as scary as Jud, and as funny as Miss Hannigan.

The Dentist’s lyric is actually funnier than the one Howard Ashman wrote for the villainess of
The Little Mermaid
, the blowsy lady octopus named Ursula. But this reinforces the point that these songs don’t generally survive on the strength of their punch lines. They’re effective because they’re character numbers for funny characters. We laugh at the kind of person who is singing, not at the quality of the jokes—at least usually. “Poor Unfortunate Souls” is a reasonably obvious number, but we love the idea of an evil lady octopus. Why? Because physically, a blobby, shapeless female baritone is a comic stereotype we can’t resist, political incorrectness notwithstanding. Ursula the Octopus and Miss Hannigan are, for all intents and purposes, the same character. We want to think they’re funny, and we’re certainly willing to cut the lyricist a break in the service of our own amusement.

The Dentist is also a stereotype, of course, as comic villains tend to be, especially when the musicals in question—from
Annie
to
Little Shop
—are genre pieces. A less successful genre piece, 1966’s
It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman
, featured a well-worn stereotypical villain—the mad scientist. In this case he’s mad because he’s lost the Nobel Prize ten times in a row, which is kind of funny to start with. His comedy number, “Revenge”—in the usual mid-act spot—is worth noting purely for the best joke in Lee Adams’s lyric, which chronicles the scientists who have beaten him, concluding with Harold Urey.

“
The shocking thing about the matter is
,” he sings, “
my heavy hydrogen was heavier … than his!
”

For a musical comic book, the show had wit, though not quite consistently enough to survive.

The question every show with a villain has to answer is how much to expose. In a comedy, the villain is likely to be tweaked, to make us laugh. She or he remains at a safe distance, a type, not a person.
Little Shop
,
Annie
, and
Superman
are all based on material rooted in comic strips, or at least in comic strip thinking.
Oklahoma!
and
Sweeney Todd
are sterner stuff, and in a drama, we’re usually made to understand that there’s a deeply troubled and complicated person struggling with demons. In either case, the decision of how to treat the villain is usually at its clearest when the villain takes center stage about two-thirds of the way through Act 1 and finally sings.

8. Bushwhacking 3: The Multiplot, and How It Thickens

In 1975, two new works—one literary, one cinematic—changed the rules for storytelling in America, and it was only a matter of time before Broadway woke up to the possibilities. E. L. Doctorow’s novel
Ragtime
and Robert Altman’s film
Nashville
appeared within months of each other, and each had the daring to look at narrative as if it were a form of plate spinning, trying to keep multiple stories moving at once, and letting them bounce off one another in continually surprising ways. Both works thrived on a new kind of energy, created by a constantly shuffling deck of protagonists and antagonists. Critics, audiences, and readers took notice—and took pleasure. Something new, it appeared, had arrived.

It only took Broadway eight years to catch up. In 1983, Stephen Sondheim, collaborating for the first time with James Lapine, moved off Broadway to experiment. He’d never really worked off Broadway before, but after the failure of
Merrily We Roll Along
had ended his long professional partnership with Hal Prince, Sondheim turned to a form of musical storytelling that would have been risky on Broadway even for him. And Lapine, who had begun his professional career as a visual designer and moved into the theater world as a practitioner of the off-Broadway nonprofit process—readings, workshops, and semiproduced productions that allowed for recalculation and recalibration outside the pressure of the commercial maelstrom—felt comfortable developing shows within institutions. Besides,
Sunday in the Park with George
needed that. It was a musical about a painting.

The painting, Georges Seurat’s
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte
, depicted the French bourgeoisie passing a sunny day on a small island in the Seine, apparently doing not much of anything. Lapine and Sondheim had the intriguing notion of trying to answer two questions in their musical: Who were these people—what were their lives really about? And who was Georges Seurat that he felt so compelled to depict them in an apparently documentary fashion—an elaborate snapshot of a community in repose that presented many more questions than it answered? True, the actual subject was the artist’s insatiable need to create and connect. But there were lots of stories to tell along the way, and no one had done that in a narrative musical before.

The musical spends Act 1 answering Lapine and Sondheim’s two questions, while Act 2, set a hundred years later, asks an updated set of the same questions, as Seurat’s (fictional) grandson deals with the making of art in the 1980s, in a technological world and a community of arts funders, society types, and pretentious critics and kibitzers. In both acts, however, the dominant quest is the same: an artist is struggling to connect with a community and break through to an original statement about it. Needless to say, it’s an unconventional work, and it took time to develop. It substitutes many stories for one, though it focuses on Georges and his mistress-model Dot more often than not. But it really is a multiplot affair like
Ragtime
and
Nashville
. Would the ricochet effect of one little story pushing another one into action create its own energy onstage? It had begun to work not only in novels and film but also in television, where it has since become a staple.

But it’s more difficult in a musical, where forward motion is always threatened, if not brought to a halt, by the music and lyrics. Sondheim and Lapine solved this problem neatly by recognizing Seurat as an obsessively motivated artist, whose invention of pointillism and whose passion for completing the painting, despite the fact that no one thought it was any good (except for us—we know it takes up a whole wall at the Art Institute of Chicago), drive the action as relentlessly as they can. Also, the show has to compel an audience for only a little over an hour at a time. Since
Sunday in the Park
is really two intersecting one-acts, the audience isn’t expected to stay on the ride for as long as it would in a traditional musical.

Yet for all its experimentation, the middle of
Sunday
’s first act finds its musical voice in a number of the same ways that traditional musicals do. It has not one second couple, but four or five of them. And one of them even functions as a kind of villain. He’s an art critic, she’s his snobby wife, and their utter conventionality and misapprehension of what Seurat is up to refract his obsessive drive to break through to something new. They are art-as-status-quo success, while Seurat, who is making art that pushes away from the present and into the future, refers to himself, with knowing irony, as “the loony with the palette.”

Jules and Yvonne, as this second (or third, or fourth) couple is known, even have a small second-couple song that encapsulates their—and the Parisian world’s—point of view about Seurat. It’s called “No Life” and expresses an opinion of the painting Seurat is working on, which, of course, has had a long one. It’s also a comment on Seurat himself, who seems to lack any social existence. In expressing their views, Jules and Yvonne manage to become stand-ins for the myopic conservatism of critics generally, something that may have brought Sondheim some pleasure, given the length of time it took for most of them to recognize his unique genius as a composer.

Critically, Sondheim had one of the easiest introductions into the Broadway world as a writer of words, and one of the hardest as a writer of music. Critics who noticed his lyrics for
West Side Story
(not all of them did) singled them out for their freshness. But his first full score, for
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, was generally dismissed by the critical fraternity and wasn’t even nominated for a Tony Award, though the nominators had to look pretty deeply into the land of flopdom to find a way to snub it (
Bravo Giovanni
got the fourth and final nomination.
Bravo Giovanni
?). His next score, for the unworkably experimental
Anyone Can Whistle
, established the musical voice that is now instantly recognizable. The music got a good review from a single critic, the former symphony trombonist Norman Nadel, who sort of knew a new voice when he heard one, though he had dismissed the
Forum
score two years earlier. Nadel came around more quickly than most. Sondheim wasn’t heard as a composer on Broadway again until 1970’s
Company
, which, while greeted ecstatically in some corners, was viewed with suspicion by Clive Barnes of the
Times
; the music rattled him. It took Barnes’s stunningly wrongheaded assessment of the
Follies
score before he finally caved in when
A Little Night Music
opened in 1973, eleven years after
Forum
. Today, all these scores—even
Whistle
—have become a part of the American theatrical pantheon, but it’s hard not to imagine “No Life” as a little bit of revenge on critics everywhere for how long it took.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, many of the critics were as buffaloed by the totality of
Sunday
as they had been by the scores for
Forum
and
Whistle
. It took a rave—followed by constant reminders—from the
Times
’s Frank Rich, who had long since replaced Barnes and his successor Richard Eder, to keep the show in the public eye. The Pulitzer Prize didn’t hurt. The Tony was won by
La Cage aux Folles
, however. Admirably, the first Broadway musical about an (almost) openly gay couple, it had optimism, some very fat tunes, and a good old-fashioned plot.

Intentionally or not,
Sunday
led the way to a series of less convincing multiplot shows, including
Grand Hotel
, which had been in the works since the ’50s but finally reached Broadway when the director Tommy Tune got involved in the late ’80s (it opened in 1989). Based on the classic if somewhat tinny movie of the same name, and the novel that preceded it,
Grand Hotel
followed a number of stories all crossing paths at the Grand in Berlin between the wars. The stories, of a fake count who’s really a jewel thief, an aging ballerina and her lovesick companion, a dying accountant, a ruined businessman, and the like, were melodramatic, sentimental, even camp. But they were enough of a springboard for Tune’s stunning visual imagination and staging inventiveness, and the show—one of the last to be hammered together out of town with new writers arriving like the cavalry in Boston—ran for two and a half years.

*   *   *

Titanic
, which won the Tony in 1998 in a very weak field, also followed multiple characters and stories, the ship itself functioning as the doomed protagonist. The book writer Peter Stone, in his Tony acceptance speech, thanked the critics “for their astonishing reviews.” The reviews had mostly been terrible but were no doubt astonishing to Stone. And to the millions watching the telecast, he imparted an implied endorsement from the press. It was a moment more brilliantly conceived than anything in the show, alas, which nonetheless lumbered along for another unprofitable year on the strength of the win.
Ragtime
, based on the novel that began the whole multiplot trend, also made it to Broadway to some acclaim, but it couldn’t sustain a profitable run, given its cost and the meandering quality of its storytelling. Despite a skilled set of collaborators doing some excellent work, the train seems to have stopped once too often, and too many audience members disembarked.

The most successful multiplot show didn’t come along until the summer of 2003.
Avenue Q
thrived on the strength of a single brilliant concept: the Muppets on
Sesame Street
all grew up just like we did, and they have all the same intractable problems that we do.
Sesame Street
may have its virtues, the show seemed to say, but it doesn’t solve anything in the long run. The idea was so good, and connected with audiences so strongly, that the show, which basically rings a set of mild variations on the theme, has proved immensely popular.

The multiplot show is bound to run into trouble in the middle of Act 1, because that’s when the rules of all shows are loosened and the direct line between I Want and its outcome is allowed to slip the tether. Audiences want to be glued to their seats—an infelicitous cliché, but it perfectly describes the situation. When the glue is weak and runs off in all directions, the audience tends to do the same. In a multiplot affair, we may be fascinated by the setup and by the degree of difficulty that’s presented at the start (
Ragtime
has one of the most brilliant opening numbers ever written), but watching the authors struggle to keep all the plates spinning is sometimes not so much fun. It’s often an effortful job, and no one really wants to see them sweat, especially at these prices.