The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (22 page)

Only somehow wearing a frightening disguise

I can see the winter in your eyes now

Telling me

“Thank you

We’re done here

Not much to say

We are together

But I have had dividing day”

She puzzles over where and when it happened, how she could have missed it, and how it could have occurred, but comes up empty. All she has is the strength to name it, in Adam Guettel’s memorable phrase.

So when … when was this day

Was it on the church step

Suddenly you’re out of love

Does it go creeping slowly

When was your dividing day?

I can see the winter in your eyes now

Telling me:

“Margaret

We did it

You curtsied, I bowed

We are together

But no more love

No more love allowed”

She continues to speculate, and continues to come up empty.

When was

When was

When was dividing day?

By naming it, like an annual day of mourning, Margaret gives it stature and lets us know that it is to be respected, catastrophic as it is. And, of course, it is shared and commemorated by a lot of people over the course of a lifetime, which makes it worthy of a name, and of a song. The lyric doesn’t snap and pop with the classic lyricist’s sense of rhythm—it’s almost prose, but that’s part of what gives it power—it seems naked of conventional artifice. And it tells. It has the ability to stop the breath of any audience, and the authenticity of its emotion is one of the reasons we go to the theater—to see the skin of human life peeled back and the nervous system and heart revealed. On the one hand, we’re almost ashamed to be eavesdropping on such a private discovery. On the other, she is holding up the mirror in the most artful yet direct way. That’s what makes it a star moment, as well as an important piece of theater. Like Miss Adelaide, Ruth Sherwood, and even Cunegonde and Eliza Doolittle, Margaret has paused the play itself to tell us something that she now understands for the first time. And she’s told us at just the right time.

But, looked at mechanically, it’s a mid-act solo for the star, neither more nor less.

10. Tevye’s Dream

Tent Poles

In a good show, an hour into the first act we’re deep into the story and living life along with the characters. The protagonists, the antagonist, the subplot couple, and any other supporting players have crashed into each other in combustible ways, and things are complicated. From the opening number to the I Want to the conditional love song to the presentation of the ensemble (long known in the business as “merry villagers”) to all the obstacles standing in the way of a happy outcome, the authors have led us on quite a long and circuitous ride. The hero is still far from achieving his or her goal—probably further than at the beginning. And, frankly, we’re starting to get a little weary. Our energy begins to flag. We realize we may need a drink and a bathroom pretty soon, but there’s still another ten minutes of story—one or two scenes—before intermission. Almost every show solves this problem in the same way—with a high-energy number that gets everyone’s blood pumping hard enough to get us to the first-act curtain.

Tent poles keep the roof from caving in on the audience. They may or may not be relevant to the story—the best ones in the most unified shows usually are, of course. But, as with the noise, it’s not a requirement that they be anything but energizing. This is another one of those places where musicals are allowed—even required—to defy the logic of storytelling and operate on the other part of the brain—the part that responds to color and light, rhythm and pace.

The “Havana” sequence in
Guys and Dolls
is a classic example, and like so much about that almost perfectly structured show, it seems in some ways random. The number that precedes it, the title song, is a brilliant little vaudeville turn sung by two minor characters, commenting on the war between the sexes, but it neither furthers the plot nor reveals character. It’s like Brecht touring the borscht belt. You could actually cut it, and you might never know it had been there. Of course, it’s a great song, it is the title song (one suspects it was written before the show’s book), it’s a perfect encapsulation of the theme, and it covers a somewhat vague time lapse, which gives Sky Masterson the opportunity to get the reluctant Sarah Brown down to Cuba.

Once we see them strolling the boulevards of Old Havana, however, it seems the jig is up for Nathan Detroit—his bet is lost. He won’t get the $1,000 he needs to buy off Joey Biltmore and hold his floating crap game in the garage, and his very life may be in danger from a particularly trigger-happy crapshooter who is looking for action and won’t take no for an answer. We feel sorry for Nathan but happy for Sky—and at the moment, Nathan’s story is on hold. Sky is in Havana with a buttoned-up “mission doll” whose behavior is true to form—she’s got a sightseeing book and is dragging him from one ancient ruin to another, much to his consternation. This is not how Sky usually spends time in Havana. Finally, he draws her into a bar and gets her to drink a couple of dulce de leches, and suddenly, she loosens up.

Then, not surprisingly, a band starts playing and people start dancing (this is Cuba, after all). Like the title song, this might seem arbitrary, but the plot is complicated, the characters have all gotten themselves in one kind of trouble or another, and frankly it’s a welcome relief to have some up-tempo Latinish music. The ensemble, suddenly all Cuban (the costume department’s problem), starts to rumba across the floor; Sky and Sarah join in. Sarah gets picked off by a particularly attractive and supple dancer and then finds herself the object of a jealous battle between two dancers we’ve never met before. Mayhem ensues. Punches are thrown. Sarah is delighted. The music turns wilder, Sarah begins to get into the fight, the alcohol in her bloodstream fueling her newfound sense of freedom, and the next thing we know, we’re in the midst of a full-fledged high-energy brawl. Sky comes to the rescue, and at the number’s conclusion (to thunderous applause), he is throwing Sarah over his shoulder and hauling her out of the bar and back onto the street. He quickly discovers that she doesn’t want him to put her down on the ground. She’s deliriously happy, not to mention just plain delirious. What happens next onstage will be saved for the next chapter, but what has happened already has occurred mainly on the other side of the footlights. The audience is renewed, refreshed, and ready for one or two more of whatever the show is serving.

That’s the way it works. But it’s not always like “Havana,” which has music and dance but no words. As with opening numbers, there are a handful of variations. “Havana,” without a word spoken or sung, has brought a reluctant couple together physically and emotionally, with consequences still to come that neither of them anticipates. It has actually furthered the plot. But that was hardly required.

In the same spot in
Hello
,
Dolly!
, we are on the point of having the whole story ruined if the skinflint merchant Horace Vandergelder discovers that his clerks, who are supposed to be at home working, have escaped to the big city and are hiding in the very hat shop he and Dolly Levi have stopped into. He’s about to open the cabinet in which the two clerks have secreted themselves when Dolly, desperate to protect them, bursts into an anthem about American virtues, called “Motherhood March.” It’s not a masterpiece of songwriting, and not even a very logical thing to do under the circumstances, though it does distract Horace from the discovery he was about to make. But the main thing it does is pick up the tempo, get fifteen hundred pairs of toes tapping, put a smile on fifteen hundred faces, and stave off whatever indications of ennui were beginning to overtake the generally happy audience. “Motherhood” is a classic tent pole in the category of “meeting the minimum basic requirements.” The song that precedes it, “Ribbons Down My Back,” is a beautiful and rueful ballad. The song that follows is called “Dancing,” and while it develops into a lovely waltz number, a waltz is, by definition, not high wattage, unless it’s a jazz waltz like “The Last Midnight.” “Motherhood” covers for both numbers, though it’s the weakest of the three. It has a job to do and it does it.

It’s easy to spot these numbers, some greater than others: “Cool” in
West Side Story
, “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little” from
The Music Man
, “N.Y.C.” from
Annie
, and, in the modern era, “Keep It Gay” from
The Producers
, with its unmotivated celebration of gay pop culture from the Choreographer’s Ball to the Village People. Tent poles are usually fun. They’re usually up-tempo, too, though “One Short Day,” from
Wicked
, in which we finally arrive at the Emerald City, is a midtempo pop-rock odyssey, which suddenly morphs into double time as the gates open, and backs down with the introduction of the Wizard himself. By the end of it, we’re willing to sit still for another little while and see what the Wizard has to say.

Hamilton
makes a tent pole out of the entire American Revolution—a bold step and hardly a “fun” number. But the kinetic excitement of watching a real showman figure out how to do a war in one extended number manages to thrill and reignite an audience that has already been sitting for a long time and processed a surprisingly large number of events. The show brings all its resources to bear in one explosive sequence comprising two numbers—“History Has Its Eyes on You” and “Yorktown”—at the end of which you’d think it would be time for intermission. But cannily, the number gives the audience enough energy to sustain it through a couple more scenes.

As is true with
Hamilton
, tent poles usually involve lots of people, too, but not always.

In Stephen Sondheim’s
Company
, there is a showstopping turn in this spot—but it’s a solo. “Another Hundred People” was written for a specific performer—twenty-one-year-old Pamela Myers, who auditioned for the show but didn’t suit any of the roles in it. The character she played was reimagined around her; the number was created for her, too. And it was in the second act. As Sondheim recalls in his lyric collection
Finishing the Hat
, the number was cut after a three-hour first preview in Boston. In a last-ditch attempt to save it, he refashioned it, taking three short book scenes that George Furth had written and alternating a section of the song with a page or so of dialogue, so that the song covered a passage of time and grew more intense with each appearance. He then reinstalled it in the second-to-last spot in Act 1, and it went back into the show, where it’s been ever since. There’s little doubt that tent poles were the last things on his or his collaborators’ minds as they worked frantically but systematically (such things are possible in the theater) to get the show ready for the Boston critics. But what they ended up with was a tent pole nonetheless. The character, one of the three young women the hero courts halfheartedly, is discovered alone onstage and sings, to a propulsive, shifting rhythm, about the unending daily arrival of young hopefuls to a big, exciting, cold city that doesn’t care if they live or die. Each section drives harder than the previous one, thanks in part to some great Jonathan Tunick orchestrations, and in the end it tears the place apart.

In some respects, the number is a distant cousin of the title song in
Guys and Dolls
—it’s a statement about the way things are from the point of view of a specific character, but the character is standing in for the authors. It’s not a plot song. But unlike “Guys and Dolls,” which is up-tempo, ingeniously funny, and harmless, “Another Hundred People” wounds as it excites—it causes audiences to sit up and take notice, and it gives a performer an opportunity to stop the show. In
Company
, numbers were shifted around a lot as the show found its form. Since it was essentially plotless—a show built around a subject instead of a story—the placement of the songs was in some ways up for grabs and ended up having more to do with controlling the biorhythms of the audience than with revealing specific story information at a specific time. (The final number, “Being Alive,” is a notable exception, dealing as it does with an emotional dam finally breaking for the hero. It can go only at the end, but it was written out of town after most of the rest of the show had found its form.) As a result, “Another Hundred People,” coming after the hero’s heartbreaking confession of loneliness in “Someone Is Waiting,” fit the bill at the one-hour mark. It roused the audience and raised the emotional stakes in a way that kept it alert for that last section of Act 1 still to come.

This underlines the reality that good musical theater writers rarely write to pattern, even though this book keeps describing the pattern they don’t write to. The best writers are always trying to break the mold they perceive in the work of their predecessors and mentors, none more than Sondheim. And yet, when the dust settles, the result often fits the pattern anyhow. There’s no logical explanation for this, but the best one I’ve heard came from a veteran producer who was reacting to the discovery that his own show was falling into line around the very commonplaces he was hoping to defy.

“The fact is,” he said, “if we want to succeed, we’re owned by the audience. And as many hot new ideas as we may have, the block of people who buy the tickets remains more or less the same—they’re human beings, and they behave like human beings. So who are we to ask them to behave different? They want to know who the show’s about? We better tell them. They want to know
what
it’s about? We also have to tell them that—before they lose interest altogether. They want to pee at nine-twenty? We’d better arrange for that, too. We’re charging a lot of money here, and the bathrooms are too small.”