The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (39 page)

Finian
is a loopy, decidedly left-wing musical about a community of tobacco growers in a fictional southern state and a trio of Irish immigrants who show up there, one of them a leprechaun. But its nominal hero is a community leader, labor organizer, and wandering folksinger called Woody, after Woody Guthrie, the real-life hero of the labor movement and the folk boom. Yip Harburg, who conceived the piece, cowrote the book, and wrote the brilliant lyrics, was an agitator in Broadway disguise, and he no doubt revered Guthrie and his heroic place in the movement.

A great lyricist, but never a clear storyteller, Harburg liked to mix left-wing politics with whimsical plotting and fanciful rhyme; the result is that
Finian
, which makes only a modicum of sense but has irresistible characters and songs, is one of his few Broadway credits that anyone really remembers.
1
Among the characters, Woody has the singular distinction of carrying a guitar with him wherever he goes, though he doesn’t know how to play it.
2
It’s a serviceable joke that the fictional Woody can neither put down the guitar nor perform with it, no doubt created to accommodate the actor who originally played the part. That damn guitar goes everywhere with Woody.

When the
Finian
revival ended its disappointing run, the guitar was hauled off to God knows where with the rest of the props, never to be heard from again, and
American Idiot
loaded in. The album had sold fifteen million copies, and hopes were high. Where
Finian
was an old-fashioned, somewhat political, but deeply optimistic American fable,
Idiot
was a postmodern, somewhat political, but deeply nihilistic American snapshot—of a country gone to hell. But here’s the thing: at the curtain call on opening night, the lights came up on the entire cast of nineteen, and all of them had guitars slung over their shoulders. And all of them played. There wasn’t a man or woman among them who couldn’t play the guitar, some of them damn well. Woody who couldn’t play had vanished. And that, in essence, is what happened to Broadway.

*   *   *

Until the mid-twentieth century, most middle- and upper-class families who had any interest in culture had a piano in the house, and someone in the family knew how to play it. The children took lessons. This tradition, very European, dated back to the days before there were phonographs or radios, and if music in the house was considered an asset, someone had to be able to make it. The rest of the family could listen or sing along. Sheet music was the only way of spreading music around. On the Lower East Side, up in Yorkville, and in Harlem, pianos were hauled up tenement stairs and squeezed into overcrowded flats so that the likes of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Vincent Youmans could learn. Richard Rodgers learned in a more luxe apartment on the Upper West Side, and Cole Porter learned in a comfortable midwestern home in Peru, Indiana. But they all learned, and had no choice but to learn, along with tens of thousands of other, less talented youngsters. But in the teens and ’20s, phonographs and then the radio came into regular use, and knowing how to play the piano became a mark of culture but no longer a necessity for hearing music after supper.

By the late 1950s, though, another music had begun to dominate both the airwaves and the record business, and it was driven not by pianos but by guitars. Rock bands often included pianos, but the stars, with exceptions like Jerry Lee Lewis and Ray Charles, played the guitar. Mainly, Elvis Presley played the guitar, and he could perform standing up in front of a microphone while playing his instrument and moving in a stunningly sexually suggestive manner. Guitar-playing stars were more immediately available to an audience—which now included a TV audience—than piano players. The music itself had, to a great degree, originated in the South, where hillbilly bands, old-timey musicians, and country blues players had been perfecting an array of guitar techniques for decades while almost no one in the North paid any attention. This music didn’t come from the “cultured” population of the Northeast and Midwest, with their musical debt to Italy and Germany. It was the creation of poor populations whose roots were more likely to be Scottish, English, or African. They were rural or small-town people, with an argot and a vernacular all their own. For decades, the music bided its time on the margins of pop culture. Then, in the mid-’50s, it began to explode all across America, thanks to radio and TV.
3

In 1958, however, after Elvis and his cohorts had scared the hell out of mainstream America, the Kingston Trio, three clean-cut young men (playing two acoustic guitars and a banjo), had a gold record hit with an old Appalachian murder ballad called “Tom Dooley,” which sold three million copies. And for a time, everything changed. Rock had a new competitor. The folk boom was on, and initially it was a great relief for parents across the country; they were only too happy now to provide guitars and lessons to their teenage children. (The piano in the house had suddenly become a piece of furniture.)

The Kingston Trio functioned as a kind of anti-Elvis as pop music continued to evolve, though they never seriously threatened the position of the King as king. Nonetheless, it was only a matter of time before the folk generation, fueled by performers like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, rediscovered Woody Guthrie, a fountainhead of songs that were easy to learn and play, politically progressive, and brilliantly memorable, and could be sung by crowds. Suddenly there was a popular movement to replace “The Star-Spangled Banner” with “This Land Is Your Land” as our national anthem. Guthrie, who had once been tacitly acknowledged on Broadway in
Finian’s Rainbow
, was now everywhere, and by 1963 he had a newly famous disciple, Bob Dylan. The fuse was lit.

The Beatles and the Stones arrived from England. In a controversial move, Dylan went electric in 1965 and took most of the folk generation with him. In the long run, the folk boom’s marriage to rock and roll, and the age of psychedelia that followed, did to Broadway what Audrey II did to Mushnik’s little flower shop—devoured it. But it took a long, long time to happen.

Still, the die was cast. America had learned to play the guitar, and classic Broadway songwriting, which had been the outgrowth of many young people sitting at many pianos over many decades, started to fall out of step with American pop entertainment.

The isolated success of
Hair
in 1968 notwithstanding, Broadway hated the change and denounced it loudly and largely successfully. It was a mere three decades later that
Rent
came along.
Rent
owes plenty to
Hair
, but contemporary Broadway owes a great deal more to
Rent
. In fact, in some ways,
Hair
was to
Rent
what
Show Boat
was to
Oklahoma!
It came first, but the street wasn’t interested in playing catch-up.
Hair
, you might say, was simply ahead of its time, though so politically
of
its time that it became a great success. Its chaos and freedom enthralled audiences and terrified professionals up and down the street. In
The Season
, William Goldman quotes a veteran theater professional’s prediction of the influence of
Hair
on the American theater in the coming seasons: “There will now be a spate of shitty rock musicals.”

And that’s pretty much what happened. A few of them had merit, most did not, but Broadway was not about to open the door for any of them if it could avoid doing so. Entrenched interests were in a panic, as entrenched interests in the pop music field had been when rock appeared in the mid-’50s. They sensed a conqueror in their midst and built as high a wall as they could. As a result,
Hair
left a relatively invisible wake. Shows like
Promises, Promises
and
Company
employed a few rock elements in their orchestrations (both by Jonathan Tunick), but the pure rock musicals were decapitated on sight, often for good reason. And
1776
, that paean to the
good
side of American history, beat
Hair
for the Tony.

By the time
Rent
came around, though, a lot had changed. The traditional American songbook had long since given way, and rock had evolved into America’s music, with many subspecies and offshoots—including rap—thriving. On Broadway, the last of the consistent, traditional top-shelf theater songwriters were old enough to be collecting Social Security, and the younger group had grown up with rock as the only popular music. The argument that a loud rock score with an insistent backbeat was antithetical to limning character and dealing with dramatic situations remained largely true. But audiences were beginning to demand something different anyhow. The live rock concert world had been theatricalized by new technologies—moving (sometimes blinding) lights, pyrotechnics, special effects—and the public had grown used to live entertainment that morphed easily from the theatrical to the purely musical and back again. Broadway finally had no choice but to catch up.
Rent
lit up the passageway.

The 1990s saw one post-
Rent
musical with a rock-inflected score winning the Tony—Disney’s
The Lion King
. The dam broke during the succeeding ten years:
Hairspray
,
Avenue Q
,
Jersey Boys
,
Spring Awakening
,
In the Heights
, and
Memphis
each took the Tony.

On the opening night of
Spring Awakening
, the evolution was duly noted in a memorable exchange at the party that followed the performance. The journalist Harry Haun, a fixture of such events, approached Bert Fink, an executive at the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, and asked, “Do you think we can safely say the Rodgers and Hammerstein era is dead, now that we have a song on Broadway called ‘Totally Fucked’?”

Fink, who is quicker on the uptake than most, responded unflappably.

“You know, Harry,” he said into Haun’s ever-present microphone, “when
The Sound of Music
was trying out in Philadelphia, there actually was a song in it called ‘Totally Fucked.’ Maria and the children came to the convent in the last scene, and the Mother Abbess explained that the entire place was surrounded by Nazis, and Mary Martin came downstage center and sang this song called ‘Totally Fucked’ about how they were all done for. But then Oscar realized that they could climb up the mountain to Italy, so they cut the song.”

It was a great improvisational moment that left Haun amused, if flat-footed, but the irony was not lost on anyone. By 2006, ten years into the post-
Rent
era, Rodgers and Hammerstein and so many of the theater writers who had trained themselves up on the standards R&H had set were, not to put too fine a point on it, totally fucked.

That didn’t mean, however, that the Broadway musical could abandon structurally sound storytelling without paying a price, a point proved, ironically, by
Spring Awakening
itself. Based on the 1891 Frank Wedekind drama of sexual emergence and teen rebellion, the original play had proved scandalous in subject matter but solid in its storytelling. The musical adaptation kept the story in the nineteenth century but told it with a rock score. This is not as revolutionary as it may sound. Rodgers and Hammerstein had written contemporary music for period stories. Contemporary theatergoers were unfazed. They got wrapped up in the story.

Four years later, Michael Mayer, the gifted director who guided
Spring Awakening
through its development, its off-Broadway premiere, and its transfer to Broadway, was back with
American Idiot
. The production itself was more elaborate and imaginative than
Spring Awakening
had been, and the design qualified as among the most ceaselessly inventive ever seen on Broadway. Yet where
Spring Awakening
had won the Tony, run 859 performances, and returned a tidy profit to its investors,
American Idiot
, despite terrific reviews, never caught on in the same way. Unlike
Spring Awakening
,
American Idiot
lacked the one thing that might have given it long-term popularity: a story about people you could care for. Though Mayer tried mightily to humanize its three protagonists, he didn’t have a play to work with, only an album. And, like
The Who’s Tommy
(based on a double-record album from the vinyl years), which had opened to thunderous reviews but never became a perennial, the original work had a voice but no compelling bones. Without the underlying thing that has always drawn us around the campfire—a real and engaging tale to tell—the rock musical is neither better nor worse off than the Golden Age one. Jonathan Larson, in an admittedly shaggy way, made us care. So did the creators of
Spring Awakening
, not to mention
Wicked
and
Avenue Q
.
Jersey Boys
did it without a new score, just the reliable Top 40 catalog of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but with a good yarn about the group’s birth and career as, well, Jersey boys. Without that compelling story line, it would have been a long hill to climb, and the boulder gets heavier as you push it. Rock has probably made it harder to tell a coherent, absorbing story, though by no means impossible.

One form of post-show-tune music spent decades waiting in the shadows for the theater to realize its value.

By employing rap instead of earlier rock forms,
Hamilton
solved the narrative challenge far more elegantly than most previous rock musicals. It was no doubt an enormous challenge to tell the story of the Founding Fathers and the birth of the United States partially in a form that is built out of contemporary street language (Lin-Manuel Miranda spent six years writing it), but at least it’s a form steeped in an assertive need to communicate events and attitudes, not just emotions. Lyrically, rap is in some ways more closely tied to the protest songs of Guthrie and Dylan than it is to conventional rock. It wants to talk about life in America as it really is lived on the margins of society and chronicle the struggle to move toward the center of power. And in the United States, “the melting pot where nothing melted,” according to the Rabbi in
Angels in America
, that story has always been ours to tell.