The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (21 page)

9. Adelaide’s Lament

Stars

With all this necessary adventuring into the unknown, it becomes increasingly important as the act progresses not to ignore the known. Villains may need to sing, and second couples certainly do. Multiple subplots may make things too complicated—or not—and there’s no doubt that audiences enjoy variety as the act progresses. But somewhere in the midst of all of this, we’re going to want to hear from the protagonist or protagonists, loud and clear. If one or both are played by stars, it becomes doubly important that the show clear the decks for them.

In terms of plotting, it’s generally a bad idea to spend more than one scene without revisiting the main story. A subplot scene may be appropriate, but two in a row constitute a mistake. We need to keep checking in with the hero, or the whole show gets quickly derailed.

If there is a bona fide star involved, this usually won’t be a problem—stars are not shy about reminding producers, directors, and writers that they need to be seen and heard. No one did this more forcibly than Ethel Merman.

Merman starred as Annie Oakley in
Annie Get Your Gun.
She had nine songs. No one else had more than four. Irving Berlin, like a lot of songwriters, loved writing for Merman with her peerless clarion call of a voice and her perfect diction. But nine was a lot. The equally peerless Alfred Drake, starring in
Oklahoma!
three years before, had five, and only one was a solo. But Merman wasn’t crazy about the idea of other people singing in her shows, and neither were audiences. They came to hear her, and, as her career progressed, she became more and more dominant. Ironically, in
Gypsy
, the young Gypsy Rose Lee says to her audience, “My mother—who got me into this business—always told me, Make them beg for more. And then, don’t give it to them!” The real Rose Hovick may have believed in this dictum. The real Ethel Merman, who played Rose, did not. In
Gypsy
she had eight songs. On the cast album, “Small World,” which is a duet in the show, becomes a Merman solo. Make of that what you will.
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Merman made clear that the appearance of the star, when a show has one, is what the audience is paying for. In addition to the opening number, and an I Want, and perhaps a conditional love song, likely the first act finale, not to mention a star-led production number and an “11 o’clock” in Act 2, there often needs to be an Act 1 solo, usually somewhere in the middle.

Part of the reason for subplot couples singing, villains singing, and other kinds of distractions is that the audience needs different forms of stimulation. So it’s a balancing act—too much of a star is probably a bad idea and monotonous. But too little is worse. For songwriters, this spot in the middle of Act 1 is a golden opportunity. This doesn’t have to be the most important song in the show or the most telling. Nothing is coming to a climax. Instead, it’s an opportunity for a showcase: What does the star do best? Let’s let her do that. What makes these songs unique is that they’re tailored to the performer, often as much as or more than to the show’s plot.

If I had to pick a favorite, it would be certainly be “Adelaide’s Lament” from
Guys and Dolls
. Not that Vivian Blaine, who played the long-engaged and long-suffering fiancée of Nathan Detroit, was any competition for Merman in the star department. But she was the comic singing star of this particular vehicle. And Frank Loesser hit the mother lode with a number that won the audience’s heart and set up the possibility that this brassy floor show performer actually had one of her own. And that it might break. It does, in a short reprise in Act 2. The song is actually the first important solo in a show that has featured an opening ballet, a male trio, an ensemble number for the men, another for the women, and a comic/romantic, I hate you/I love you conditional love song for the romantic leads. It’s a first-class assortment, and the solo helps create continued variety.

“Adelaide’s Lament” grows out of a unique comic situation: Adelaide’s fourteen-year engagement to Nathan Detroit has left her with a stress-anxiety condition—a common cold that never goes away. This creates an opportunity for Loesser; he dreamed up a moment in which a working-class girl tries to decipher the complexities of a psychiatric tome about the physical manifestations of an unfulfilled romantic life. It was a perfect fit for Blaine, who specialized in playing the guileless-but-not-clueless blondes who were a fixture of ’50s comedy. Here she struggles mightily. She can barely pronounce the words, but she gets the meaning: “
In other words
,” she says, after quoting the psycho-lingo of the text,

You can spray her wherever you figure the

Streptococci lurk

You can give her a shot for whatever she’s got

But it just won’t work

If she’s tired of gettin’ the fisheye

From the hotel clerk,

A person can develop a cold.

The comedy grows from the contrast of a chorus girl grappling with a pedantic text. But it’s more than comic—it’s heartwarming because her struggle is so sincere and her triumph in understanding it is so well earned. To top it off, it even has good punch lines. In three minutes, we understand her completely, and we want her to win. We want Nathan to stop being such a boob and marry her, for God’s sake. The “Lament” is, of course, an I Want song in disguise. It also stacks the jokes in order of quality, so that they keep topping each other. This is a key to the success of a comedy number. If the jokes get more familiar and less funny as the number goes along, it’s doomed to disappoint. But in “Adelaide’s Lament,” Loesser is a master builder. Not only do the jokes get funnier, but also the desperation gets more real and more acute. Miss Adelaide begins the number as an eager but intimidated titmouse, gains confidence (and volume) as she realizes that she can understand this psychology book perfectly well and that it’s all about her, and ends it with a clarion call—almost worthy of Merman herself—that brings down the house. The number is so completely crafted that the second-act reprise comes as a total surprise and, characteristically, contains the coup de grace of defeated expectations, which also happens to be the funniest image:

So much virus inside

That her microscope slide

Looks like a day at the zoo!

Just from wanting her memories in writing

And a story her folks can be told

A person can … develop a cold.

Miss Adelaide is the soul of
Guys and Dolls
, and while her solo is tailored to the performer’s assets and the character’s interests, it’s also an indispensable asset to the show itself—a rare warm moment in a big, brassy musical.

Sometimes these songs are written for specific performers, but just as often the performer is cast for his or her ability to climb the hill of the number. Barbara Cook was a relatively minor figure on Broadway when she was cast as Cunegonde in
Candide
. “Glitter and Be Gay” was already written, and Cook got the part because the composer, Leonard Bernstein, believed she could make hay with it—it’s a dazzling soprano aria about a formerly pure and virtuous heroine caving in to the pleasures of the flesh and the jewels that can decorate it. It’s comic and difficult and entertainingly tricky, written to stop the show, which Cook did nightly. It’s a classic mid-act star solo. Bernstein had already written another, tailored to Rosalind Russell’s comic gifts and limited range in
Wonderful Town
. Playing the tough but romantically challenged Ruth Sherwood, Russell chronicled her mistakes and missteps in courtship on her way to potential old maidhood in “One Hundred Easy Ways.” Funny and perplexed without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, it’s a cousin to “Adelaide’s Lament,” though made of somewhat lesser metal. The lyric, by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, isn’t as clever, nor is the struggle within the song as touching, but still, it gives a real established star a chance to go at it. Unlike Vivian Blaine, Russell was bona fide Hollywood royalty, and all she needed was a number that was good enough, that allowed her to do what her fans wanted her to do. And she got one—not a masterpiece but, like “Little Girls” in
Annie
, a big performance opportunity. Russell made it work for her, and in a later revival, Donna Murphy found gold in it too.

*   *   *

Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison—he a star, she a star in the making—each got one in
My Fair Lady
, and here the challenge was what you might call stacking each of their performance tracks correctly. Although Lerner and Loewe—and the director Moss Hart—found various ways of opening up Shaw’s
Pygmalion
with glamorous settings and the occasional chorus number, the basic story remains intimate and largely involves two characters. They both sing a lot (to the degree that Harrison sings at all), and it was important to save the best, or at least the most emotionally full-hearted, for last. Andrews’s numbers are carefully balanced one on top of another. “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” is a simple I Want, lovely but without fireworks. Her mid-act solo, “Just You Wait,” is an angry comic tirade, in which she imagines her tormentor, Higgins, with his head on a platter and facing a firing squad. It establishes her fierce temper and her wit, with a dose of sadomasochism thrown in to keep things interesting. “I Could Have Danced All Night”—the closest thing the show has to a conditional love song—is pure Edwardian romance with a little sex in it. “Show Me,” in Act 2, is an angry expression of desire for real physical love, and “Without You,” her final number, is a defiant, strong, yet sad declaration of independence. Eliza has gone from snuffling flower girl looking for a warm stove to completely self-possessed Mayfair lady (hence the show’s little-appreciated title pun) in a little over two hours, and we’ve watched the transformation in song, each song a step in a carefully constructed ladder.

Higgins, meanwhile, has his own ladder, beginning with “Why Can’t the English?,” a defiant comic I Want that shows him to be as passionate as he is intolerant. “I’m an Ordinary Man,”
his
mid-act solo, demonstrates the challenge for anyone trying to worm her way into his emotional life—he’s self-contained and unbreakable. And his galling pride in his own intolerance and upper-class self-satisfaction is really funny. “A Hymn to Him,” in Act 2, shows him protesting too much on the same subjects, his temper at having lost Eliza getting the better of him, which signals to us, if not to him, that a dam might just break after all. And in “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” the dam breaks—well, it cracks. The man who was a self-contained prig discovers that he’s human after all, that his heart, his brain, his nerves, and his sense of need are all connected and, perhaps, the connection is not to be avoided. By Higgins’s straitened means of expression, he’s saying, “I’ve fallen in love. Imagine that.”

For both Eliza and Higgins, the mid-act solo is actually the least important step in the ladder, though there’s certainly not much wrong with either song. They do less work than the songs that precede them and are less emotionally redolent than the ones that follow them. But they provide variety, coming after the noise (“With a Little Bit of Luck”) and before the multivoiced teaching sequence (“The Rain in Spain”). And they give the stars one more chance to be stars and share a private moment with the audience.

Jay Binder, for many years the dean of Broadway casting directors, defined stars this way: “A star comes out onstage and every member of the audience feels that the star has a secret which is shared only with them. The star is looking directly at them, saying, ‘You and I know something no one else in the room knows.’ That’s what’s mesmerizing, and they do it to fifteen hundred people at the same time.”

What the secret is, is anyone’s guess and doesn’t matter. And how the star manages to make every member of the audience believe that she’s communing directly with him or her is a complete mystery. But you know it when it happens. A number in the middle of Act 1 reminds us of the secret, and that we share it.

One of the things that make it easier to share this one-on-one-ness is the physical life of the moment: there is no one onstage except the star. She’s all ours. And the song needn’t be spectacular or full of fireworks, like “Glitter and Be Gay” or the comparable “Rosabella,” another operatic aria, performed by Robert Weede in
The Most Happy Fella
. Sometimes the star lets us in on the secret. Sometimes the secret is what the mid-act number is all about.

“Dividing Day,” from
The Light in the Piazza
, is just such a moment—a heartbreaking discovery that the character makes and allows us to discover with her. It was performed in the original production by Victoria Clark, who isn’t a star in the conventional sense any more than was Vivian Blaine, the original Miss Adelaide. But in that mid-act slot she, like Blaine, became one—at least for a moment. Her song appears to be the polar opposite of “Adelaide’s Lament”—tragic, not comic; resigned, not defiant—but in some ways it’s the same. Both are examinations of love and its consequences for women whose men—after many years—are nowhere to be found. The song is a hushed inner monologue about the death of love. The discovery is as unexpected for the character as it is for the audience. Margaret, a middle-aged woman on a trip to Italy with her daughter, has just intuited something about her husband. It’s not an infidelity, or an addiction, or any other kind of public or private malfeasance. It’s something he may not even recognize. But distance has created the lens through which Margaret can see with a different view of her own life, and suddenly there it is, right in front of her.

Dashing as the day we met

Only there is something I don’t recognize

Though I cannot name it yet

I know it

Beautiful is what you are