The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (38 page)

Sixteen separate musical reprises (not to mention four murders) in thirteen minutes must be some kind of a modern-day record, but the idea of reprises at the end is a time-honored tradition and often an effective way of bringing the story to a satisfying conclusion. In the days of operetta and earlier musical comedy, the
finale ultimo
was almost always a set of interlocking reprises that brought the lovers together. This was not an 11 o’clock situation—there were no fireworks and not even quiet surprises. There was, instead, the satisfaction of inevitability. We like revisiting the tunes of a show, assuming it has good ones—even if, or especially if, we’re getting a new twist on the old melody. Reprises are a feature of the finales of shows as varied as
Damn Yankees
,
The Most Happy Fella
,
She Loves Me
, and
Carousel
, though more modern shows tend to avoid them, fearing sentiment, which we didn’t used to fear.

There was a more commercial impulse behind using reprises in the old days when show tunes were bestsellers. It was a way of locking a few tunes into the memory banks of the customers, which drove them to want to hear the songs again. This desire to monetize melody reached a satirically shameless zenith in Ira Gershwin’s final lyric for
The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936
, in which the lead tenor for the evening crooned:

We hope you’ll soon be dancing to the score

It helps the sales at every music store

As we start the finale, we’ll mention once more

We hope you’ll soon be dancing to the score.

What followed was a reprise of every important potential hit song in the show except “I Can’t Get Started,” which in fact was the only one to become a standard; for decades, it enriched eager would-be lovers’ chances of success, not to mention the bank accounts of Gershwin and the composer, Vernon Duke.

*   *   *

Somewhere along the line, a third type of finale came into being: the moral admonishment. These may have begun with the finale of
Forum
, where a simple reprise of “Comedy Tonight” concludes with the lines

What is the moral?

Must be a moral.

Here is the moral, wrong or right:

Morals tomorrow:

Comedy tonight!

It was sweet and an enjoyable way to conclude an evening of knockabout mayhem, but Stephen Sondheim turned it on its head at the conclusion of
Sweeney Todd
, which without its moral admonishment would end almost as quietly as
She Loves Me
, though, admittedly, with quite a different outcome. Instead, as soon as Sweeney’s been done away with and the factory whistle blows, the cast stands and instructs the audience in a way that is positively Brechtian:

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd!

He served a dark and a vengeful god!

To seek revenge may lead to hell,

But everyone does it and seldom as well

As Sweeney,

As Sweeney Todd,

The demon barber of Fleet Street!

Hardly “Comedy Tonight,” but it’s a different show.

Perhaps with the intent of a direct send-up, or perhaps just because their show also comes to an end with most of the principals dead on the floor,
Little Shop of Horrors
took the same path three seasons later. In this case, the cast has been sucked dry, so to speak, by a rapacious Venus flytrap known as Audrey II, which (who?) has come from outer space to conquer the world—a process that seems to be very much in the ascendant as the curtain is about to fall. But suddenly the cast recovers in time to tell us the rest of the tale and deliver an admonition to all of us:

The plants proceeded to grow, and grow

And they did what they came here to do, which was essentially to

Eat Cleveland

And Des Moines

And Peoria

And New York

And where you live!

They may offer you fortune and fame

Love and money and instant acclaim

But whatever they offer you

Don’t feed the plants!

This presents not only an opportunity for moral instruction but also a rock anthem that is as infectious as it is—somehow—ridiculous. And also serious, as
Sweeney
’s chorus is. Revenge is real. Temptation is real.

*   *   *

So, as it turns out, is faith, which brings us to a closing number that brought all these ideas together—the “Hello” reprise that concludes
The Book of Mormon.

Officially, this number is called “Tomorrow Is a Latter Day,” and it’s a rock groove not unrelated to “You Can’t Stop the Beat” and “Don’t Feed the Plants.” Like both finales, it’s a new number. Somehow the creators of
Mormon
intuited, however, that the big rock anthem had become a standard-issue finale for musicals in the twenty-first century and might be on the verge of cliché. Besides, they had one more big idea up their sleeve—the idea that brings the message home, just as in
Forum
,
Sweeney
, and
Little Shop
. From “Latter Day,” they morph into a reprise of the opening number, “Hello,” with new lyrics, like the “Comedy Tonight” finale or “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd.” And although it never quite goes so far as to read us the moral in so many words, it introduces one, which sums up the idea of the entire show—that doctrinal faith may have its utterly noncredible side, may be full of holes and built on unfathomable tall tales and superstitions, but somehow that doesn’t reduce its value. The show may treat Mormonism itself like a mechanical bear in a shooting gallery, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in something.

The moment comes because Elder Arnold Cunningham has created, out of necessity and a fervid if shallow imagination, a cosmology that satisfies and gives hope to the Ugandans, even while it appalls the Mormon home office. He’s mixed some chunks of Mormonism with common Ugandan cultural beliefs and a serious helping of American pop-culture schlock to create his own stew and, unwittingly, a brand-new doctrinal faith. What we don’t quite get at first is that he’s done what every great religious pioneer has done—used the old religion and belief system where it suits his purposes and worked forward from there, using whatever he’s got, to create a new one that’s relevant for the time and place he finds himself in. In effect, he has become the descendant of Moses, Jesus, Joseph Smith, and Brigham Young—because he’s been called. And he’s done it from his perch as the local outcast who becomes a charismatic leader. So it’s perfectly logical that as the show circles around to its reprise of the opening number, the words are new. Where once we met this company of squeaky-clean missionaries singing

Hello!

My name is Elder Price!

And I would like to share with you the most amazing

Book.

Hello!

My name is Elder Grant!

It’s a book about America a long long time ago

we now find the Ugandans, some in Mormon uniform, some in traditional tribal garb, mixed in with the Mormon elders, in a pose that is eerily reminiscent of the opening tableau, with all the uniformity of that picture in happy tatters. As in
Hairspray
, the whiteness has been left behind. And they sing to us:

Hello!

My name is Elder Mutumbo!

And I would like to share with you the most amazing

Book

Hello!

My name is Sister Kimbay!

It’s a book about a people who were poor and sad

Like you!

The number chatters along to its climax, introducing the “Prophet,” Arnold Cunningham, and concludes with a joyful ode to the new church, the new members, and the promise of redemption:

Join our family

And set your spirit free

We can fully guarantee

That

This book will change your life …

The book of Arnold!

Hello!!!

And with the show’s apparent last line (except for the jubilant “Hello!!!”), the story has finally been told to its satisfying conclusion. We’ve seen a religion invented and a people saved. Or sort of saved, at least spiritually. But Gotswana, the doctor, who complains all night of having “maggots in my scrotum,” actually gets the last line. After a quick celebratory restating of “Tomorrow Is a Latter Day” sung by the entire company, Gotswana has the last word—or words—of wisdom and warning to the newly ecstatic Ugandans:
“I still have maggots in my scrotum!”
he sings resonantly. And then the show’s really over.
The Book of Mormon
gets to eat its cake and have it too, which makes some audiences angry—even the ones that love it. It gives value to faith and cheerfully admits that faith is no substitute for worldly things like food, shelter, and medicine. So what good is it? It’s like art: we can’t live without it, the show seems to be telling us, even if its purpose is unfathomable. And that’s just the way it is.

Mormon
’s finale may not be the greatest ever written, or the only one that has employed resources from the past, but in terms of where the musical theater stands at the moment, it’s fair to say that no show has ever gathered more techniques and ideas from classic Broadway and put them in one place at one time. It’s a finale that’s a new number, a reprise, a rock anthem, a deliverer of moral judgment, and a perfect example of how new lyrics on a familiar melody can change the game completely. Practically the only things missing are Tevye and his cart.

That, in the end, is what the American musical theater has always done, just like every other form of commercial endeavor: tried to keep—or steal—the best of the past while continuing to invent as the world around it keeps changing. Although today’s musicals bear so little resemblance to American operetta or the Jazz Age shows of Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart that it’s hard to imagine they are natural offspring, the trail is there to follow. As musical tastes and social mores and taboos change, certain things fall away and others take their place, but the theater tries to keep up. It’s a business, with customers and investors to satisfy, and inventors and manufacturers (otherwise known as theater artists) with continually evolving ideas. Still, having created a way of telling stories that involves a certain overall architecture, it hasn’t, at its best, ever abandoned that aspect of what it does. Shows as disparate as
Wicked
,
Mormon
,
Hairspray
, and
Caroline
are, wittingly or unwittingly, using the building blocks that evolved beginning three-quarters of a century ago or more.

In some cases, we’ve circled back even farther. The musical plays introduced by Rodgers and Hammerstein led to the megahits of the ’80s, like
Phantom
and
Les Miz
, which were in some ways still musical plays and in others resembled a second coming of Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml, with their lush, sometimes overstuffed melodies and exotic locales and situations. The crazy, almost plotless ’20s musicals that provided little more than an outlet for hit tunes seem to have begun to revisit us in the “jukebox” musicals like
Rock of Ages
and
Mamma Mia!
that derive pleasure from shameless plots leading to old hits instead of new ones. No one has a scheme for how to grow the musical theater. Somehow it takes care of itself in surprising ways, and keeps on moving.

How it moves is described, metaphorically, by Ira Gershwin in a number from the aforementioned
Ziegfeld Follies of 1936
. In those days, new dance crazes were a fixture (as they were thirty years later with the twist and the mashed potato). Dances that took off were lucrative for the composers and lyricists who invented or codified them in song. The Charleston and the black bottom both started as show tunes in the ’20s. In the ’30s, the Lambeth Walk took Great Britain by storm while Americans were learning to jitterbug and lindy hop their way through the Great Depression. Gershwin, looking for a little comedy to tweak the fads, wrote a number for the
Follies
called “The Gazooka.” The dance came with instructions that were not really instructions and couldn’t be followed. They went like this:

First you take a step

And then you take another

And then you take another

And then you take

And then you take

And then you

And then you

And then you

And that’s … the gazooka!

Musicals had been doing the gazooka since long before Gershwin wrote it. And yet each one is always searching for the same elusive goal, which is to turn the machine into the living, breathing animal—to be that rare beast that has both good bones and a unique voice. Those are the ones that stand up on their own and begin to live and breathe and dance to their own music. When that happens, we slip into an unexplored world to hear a story that holds us in awe and delivers us to a new destination, that engages the dramatic and the ecstatic simultaneously, and sends us back home reeling from the sheer joy of having been somewhere new.

19. Curtain Call

How Woody Guthrie—of All People—Changed Broadway Musicals Forever

The changing of the guard took place in an empty theater between engagements, almost as if it were a secret too dark to reveal. On January 17, 2010, a rapturously reviewed but lightly attended revival of the 1947 musical
Finian’s Rainbow
played its final performance at the St. James Theatre on West Forty-fourth Street, and it was announced that it would be replaced by the Broadway opening of
American Idiot
, a musical based on a bestselling album by the punk band Green Day. Thus the stage was set. It’s not surprising that this happened at the St. James, a theater that was witness to the seismic shift that took place when
Oklahoma!
opened there in 1943, not to mention the evening fifty years later when John Raitt led a sing-along of the title song with an audience of young stoners waiting for a preview of
The Who’s Tommy
. These things seem to happen at the St. James, belying the elegant classical design of the building itself, not to mention its stuffy English name. It’s a building in forward motion, if such a thing is possible.