The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (30 page)

Hairspray
, as previously noted, owes more than a little to
Little Shop of Horrors
, that off-Broadway cartoon with a brain. Both shows are stylistically two-dimensional but deeply invested in their subjects: diversity in
Hairspray
, the cost of moral compromise in
Little Shop
. And if
Hairspray
begins to show its true colors with the brief “Baltimore” reprise,
Little Shop
takes this opportunity early in the second act to go all the way, with a song called “Suddenly Seymour,” which is both a joke and not at all a joke. The title makes it sound like a joke. Seymour is a perfect schlub with a perfect schlub’s name. The idea of a woman—any woman—feeling the intense passion for a schlub that’s implied by the song’s title is inherently funny, but why? As Motel the tailor says in
Fiddler
, “Even a poor tailor is entitled to a little happiness.” By “a little happiness,” he means a love that will last forever. And that’s what “Suddenly Seymour” turns out to be about. Two lost souls on skid row pour their hearts out to each other, and though they do it in the show’s unique vernacular (complete with a backup girl group), they beg to be taken seriously. Audrey, responding to Seymour’s sudden discovery that he wants to take care of her, sings:

Nobody ever treated me kindly

Daddy left early, Mama was poor

I’d meet a man and I’d follow him blindly

He’d snap his fingers, me I’d say, “Sure.”

Suddenly, Seymour is standing beside me

He don’t give me orders, he don’t condescend

Suddenly, Seymour is here to provide me

Sweet understanding, Seymour’s my friend.

If Seymour doesn’t condescend, why should we? We’ve been watching a living comic book for most of the evening, and we’ve been focusing on Seymour’s relationship with a murderous, blood-sucking Venus flytrap that has come to conquer the world. The scenery and costumes are wittily tacky, and the characters often speak in cartoon bubbles. When the real human element enters, it turns the show around, and that, finally, is what the early part of a good second act is often about: confounding expectations and raising them.

Little Shop
does it by revealing raw feelings in their full-throated glory. It exposes passion where we never suspected we’d find any. In an odd way,
My Fair Lady
does the same thing, though the two shows could hardly be more unrelated on the surface. But structurally, they face the same problem—each has run out of room to explore its original plot idea. In
Little Shop
, we’ve seen Seymour’s discovery of the amazing plant turn the fortunes of Mushnik’s flower shop around. All that’s left is for Seymour to pay the horrifying bill for his Faustian bargain. In
My Fair Lady
, the entire first act is about whether Henry Higgins can win his bet to pass the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle off as a highborn lady by teaching her to speak proper English. (Let’s note in passing that both shows do have flowers in common, but that’s about it.)

At the beginning of Act 2, we learn that Higgins has prevailed. The bet is won. Eliza has triumphed, and for all intents and purposes, the story is at an end. And it might actually stop right there, if not for the following exchange:

HIGGINS

I suppose it was only natural for you to be anxious, but it’s all over now. There’s nothing more to worry about.

ELIZA

There’s nothing more for
you
to worry about. Oh, God, I wish I was dead.

HIGGINS

Why in Heaven’s name, why? Listen to me, Eliza, all this irritation is purely subjective.

ELIZA

I don’t understand. I’m too ignorant.

HIGGINS

It’s only imagination. No one’s hurting you. Nothing’s wrong. You go to bed like a good girl and sleep it off. Have a little cry and say your prayers; that will make you comfortable.

ELIZA

I heard your prayers: “Thank God it’s over!”

HIGGINS

Well, don’t you thank God it’s over? Now you can do what you like.

ELIZA

What am I fit for? What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do? What’s to become of
me
?

Eliza has just galvanized the entire second act with five succinct questions. She’s found the hill behind the hill and put her tormentor on notice. As in the Pygmalion myth, he’s invented a new woman, and now he’s responsible for her, which he can’t accept. It never occurred to him that she was a human being, not simply the subject of an experiment. She gives him hell on his own silver platter. And then she runs away. And he misses her. The story is far from over.

Credit George Bernard Shaw for the structural smoothness with which this happens, but in its way, it’s not so different from the disparate qualities of “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” or the “Good Morning Baltimore” reprise or “Suddenly Seymour.” It fulfills the larger purpose of changing the game. And now the audience is hungry again.

15. All er Nothin’

Beginning to Pack

If the audience is hungry, the theater makers are likely confounded. Second acts should come with a notice like the one you get when you order a deck chair from Home Depot: “Assembly Required.” Often there are a few apparently extraneous parts in the box that don’t seem to fit anywhere.

The reason for this is simple: subplots.

Subplots are part of the fun of a show, and subplot characters are often entertaining foils for the leading players. Every good storyteller understands that we need relief from the central plot from time to time. But whatever the subplot in a musical story—it’s usually a romance that somehow reflects on the main couple’s romance, and maybe there’s also a villain, a clown, or both—it is often no further along at the end of Act 1 than the main story, which means it needs some stage time in Act 2 to come to its own conclusion. And by then, we may or may not be all that interested in a subplot. We start to yearn to know how the main story comes out.

No matter how compelling a subplot couple may be, you can’t drift away from the main plot for long, or the show inevitably feels as though it has sailed into dead calm and stopped moving; it is no longer focused on its principal story and the audience gets restless and starts to cough. Why this is the universal response of bored people in the theater is an enduring mystery, but it’s a good tip-off that you’re in trouble,
real
second-act trouble. Coughing is, apparently, an involuntary response to disapproval of your musical’s structure, though not the only potential one. One well-known producer made a list of alarms that are set off in the audience when things aren’t going well that looked like this:

Program rustling

Coughing

Yawning

Sneezing (rare)

Snoring (not as rare as you might hope)

This was in the days before texting, of course. It’s important, then, that whatever happens to the subplot people, it has to happen in a couple of swift, efficient, entertaining strokes, separated by scenes involving the main characters. Alternatively, the two plots can collide in ingenious ways that keep things moving while keeping the main story in view.

It was permissible in the ’40s and ’50s for the subplot couple to have their own little story, and that story, while it might be in telling contrast to the central story, didn’t have to intersect with it much. In
Oklahoma!
, Ado Annie and Will Parker run on a parallel track to Curly and Laurey. They are already romantically attached at the show’s outset, but Will discovers that Annie has also been spending time with the Arabic peddler Ali Hakim, a community outsider. Curly and Laurey, meanwhile, are meant for each other, but she’s been spending time with the farmhand Jud Fry, a community outsider. Ali Hakim is comical, while Jud is dangerous. The two plots reflect each other, but each stands pretty much on its own. In Act 1, Will Parker gets a solo, and so does Ado Annie. But there’s no time for that in Act 2—they share a single duet, “All er Nothin’.” One number is enough for them to state their differences and patch them up. Ali Hakim leaves the territory (at least for a while) and we can turn our attention back to the matter at hand. Still, for all its trailblazing fame, it’s permissible to find
Oklahoma!
’s subplot a little wearying by evening’s end.

Hammerstein had been using this parallel track construction since his days as an operetta librettist in the ’20s, but in his work with Rodgers, he moved swiftly toward integrating the second couple with the first. In
Carousel
, the integration is mostly thematic, with Carrie Pipperidge’s dull, conventional, and prosperous marriage to Mr. Snow underlining the dangerous, passionate, but impoverished marital choice of her best friend Julie Jordan. Once again, the subplot gets a single song in Act 2. But in both
South Pacific
and
The King and I
, the subplot stories are directly related to the main plot, and the outcome of the principal characters’ lives is tied deeply to the outcome of the subplot. And the subplot sings more, because it matters more and because it is never unhitched from the basic story, so we never feel we’ve stopped moving.

To tie the plot and the subplot together in a way that matters (which seemed more and more of a virtue as the form matured) requires proper planning in Act 1, which is another reason that second-act trouble is sometimes first-act trouble. If the whole mechanism is not set in motion properly to begin with, it’s going to come back and bite you before the evening is over. No show handled this challenge better than
Guys and Dolls
, in which the couples are of equal weight and completely dependent upon each other because the bet that gets the plot rolling is between the men in each couple. So when Sky Masterson goes down in the sewer to place a new, life-changing bet in the middle of Act 2, he’s arriving at the crap game run by Nathan Detroit. The event is about Sky’s story, but it’s taking place on Nathan’s turf. If Sky wins his bet (which he does), he stands a chance to win back Sarah. But if Nathan is caught by Miss Adelaide running the crap game (which he is), all hell will break loose between them. The scene makes room for a terrific comedy bit involving the show’s other subplot (about a dangerous gangster from Chicago named Big Jule who is ready to kill Nathan) and a terrific production dance number (“Luck Be a Lady”) that energizes the audience as it waits in suspense on Sky’s roll of the dice. So even within this one scene, the outcome of both plots swings one way and then another, the fate of both pairs of lovers always hanging in the balance. In a roughhouse show, it’s an elegant stroke.

Sweeney Todd
matches the elegance of
Guys and Dolls
in terms of sheer architectural beauty. Since Sweeney’s mission is to reclaim his daughter and punish the judge who stole her, while the subplot involves the daughter’s romance with the sailor who rescued Sweeney at sea, no one can make a move in either story without affecting both stories. There is something of Alfred Hitchcock in the plotting—the entire second act of
Sweeney
is about a knot tightening around the characters we care most about. As Sweeney loses his grip on reality, it seems more and more likely that his innocent daughter will suffer the consequences. In the first act, Sondheim provides a terrifying outcry called “Epiphany,” in which Sweeney, wielding his straight razor, threatens everyone within reach, including the audience, as his rage overflows. But Act 2 contains something even more frightening: a detached, docile solo (the third song in the show called “Johanna”) that shows us a Sweeney completely unhinged, living in a private world as he blandly slices throats and admits that his ability to focus on revenge is beginning to slip in and out of view as his mind falls apart. Not only is it a new flavor for the show, nothing remotely like it has ever been written for any show. It alerts us that the floor beneath our feet is beginning to tilt and we’ll soon be in dramatic free fall. It’s gruesome, but somehow placid.

*   *   *

It must be a coincidence that four of the most elegantly plotted musicals ever written—
Guys and Dolls
,
Gypsy
,
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, and
Sweeney Todd
—are pieces in which elegance has no place in the tone or flavor of the story itself. They are shows about working rough-and-tumble types (or in the case of
Forum
, low comedians), for whom refinement isn’t even a consideration. Yet they move with the grace of a ballet. For a musical that balances elegance in both architecture and tone, one has to turn to
A Little Night Music.
(It’s worth noting that four of these five can count puzzle master Sondheim among the creative team.)

Night Music
is the most like a puzzle box of all. The middle-aged Fredrick Egerman is married to a child bride of eighteen but still yearns for Desiree Armfeldt, a former lover of his own age. His son Henrik toys ineptly with the Egerman housemaid but lusts after his eighteen-year-old stepmother. Desiree, meanwhile, is engaged in an affair with a wooden-headed dragoon, whose wife is a schoolmate—and becomes a confidante—of the child bride’s sister. In order for Fredrik to end up with Desiree, the dragoon must be dispatched back to his wife, the son must run off with his stepmother, and even the maid has to find a lover of her own. It’s dizzying and wonderfully satisfying, but it took some doing to weave all the strands together—and the second act certainly has its challenges. In an arresting theatrical gesture in the middle of the act, the director, Hal Prince, staged a dinner party in which all the participants are present and all the story strands interweave in a striking way that allows us to keep track. A singular temper tantrum thrown by young Henrik about the questionable morality of everyone at the table launches the show into its final set of resolutions. The scene is practically the only one in which people remain static, seated or standing by the table, some facing upstage, and it has the feel of a slightly surrealistic tableau. It’s a unique candy in the dish, and a memorable one that serves an efficient purpose in a striking way.