The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (4 page)

Well, not regularly. And by the mid-’80s, the American Broadway musical had lost its grip, even as some individual shows continued to succeed and break ground. To be fair, it was largely a decade of musical hits from England produced by Cameron Mackintosh, several composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Spectacle and big rococo melodies, once the hallmark of the early operettas of Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml, returned (with the addition of some rock influences) as a principal attraction of shows like
Cats
,
Les Misérables
, and, of course,
Phantom of the Opera
. But in America, the techniques, the mechanics of show making, of musical storytelling, ceased to be passed on and built upon constructively according to tradition. The Rodgers and Hammerstein model seemed worse than dated—it seemed like a lie. Writers began trying to reinvent the wheel because they hadn’t been raised in the traditions that would inspire the next steps, or because they simply felt duty-bound to reject a past they didn’t believe in. Perhaps, by embracing rock, they embraced the not unreasonable half-truth that a backbeat and a narrative story are natural enemies. But in the process of revolutionizing the Broadway show, as much was lost as securely found. A few shows, notably the 1981
Dreamgirls
, married a rock-style score to narrative strength—a memorable protagonist, the inevitable challenges of a changing era, the satisfactions of a fully told story with a moving conclusion. But for every sure-handed experiment that worked—
Sunday in the Park with George
, Tommy Tune’s spectacularly imaginative production of
Nine
—there were a fistful of experiments that seemed lost in the dark—
Starmites
,
Into the Light
, and the legendary
Carrie
among them. And even a show like
Sunday
played as the experiment it was, not as a bona fide hit satisfying a general audience. That audience was still buying tickets for the deeply traditionally structured
La Cage aux Folles
, which had married a daring (for the time) story of gay romance to a formula plot that dated back to before Kaufman and Hart’s
You Can’t Take It with You
2
and a score that could have been written more than a decade earlier.

But in the ’90s, as the British Invasion wound down, a kind of redemption began to be seen in American musicals—fresh ideas
and
craftsmanship.
Urinetown
, a genuine satire about a ruined world where people have to pay to pee, featured a book that actually had shape, and a smart score that took its cue from Kurt Weill’s
Threepenny Opera
and updated it with a modern kick. The turn of the century brought both
The Producers
and the underappreciated
The Full Monty
—beautifully shaped comic yarns with appealing scores, which took advantage of all of the traditional structural lessons of the Golden Age.
Hairspray
followed, and
The Book of Mormon
, which consciously aped and poked fun at the Golden Age classics while telling a rude yet sentimental tale in defense of faith no matter how unlikely or illogical its tenets may be.
Mormon
demonstrated that, even as America becomes more jaded, there’s something inherent in an effective structure with a traditional song plot that taps into a fundamental human journey. Like
The Producers
before it,
Mormon
is a buddy story as much as a romance—a form borrowed from the movies and pretty much absent from Golden Age shows. But these shows figured out how to marry the bromance to the traditional musical theater template, and both are better for it.
Wicked
, which is a girl-girl buddy story, had a little more difficulty meeting the same challenge (though obviously, it more than succeeded in the end), but let’s leave that story for another day.

The show that broke the mold again, in early 2015, was
Hamilton
, which opened off Broadway at the Public Theater, site of the birth of
A Chorus Line
forty years earlier. Written by Lin-Manuel Miranda as a hip-hop-influenced retelling of the life of Alexander Hamilton, the show demanded an immediate Broadway transfer, as had
A Chorus Line
. As unusual (possibly insane) as both the subject and the style seemed for a Broadway musical,
Hamilton
discovered an almost shocking synergy between then and now. Its Revolutionary War heroes seemed completely contemporary, reimagined as smart, angry, unpredictably high-spirited rappers, and, indeed, within moments, it was almost impossible not to begin imagining the members of Public Enemy, or Jay-Z, Nas, and Ice Cube, as the natural offspring of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, internecine feuds and all. Revolution is revolution, whenever—and messy, too.

This ricochet effect created a palpable excitement in the theater, because it implicitly raised questions about how race, immigration (Hamilton was born on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean), political cowardice, and class have been burning American issues since before the beginning of the nation and have never gone away. It also provided a fascinating discovery that should have been obvious: rap is a great way to tell a theatrical story. Unlike in classic pop-rock, where the lyrics tend to be abstractly poetic, ruminative, repetitive, or simpleminded pleas for love and/or sex, the best of rap wants urgently to communicate something bigger—a personal and political creed and a contextualized view of the world as it really is. As a key component of the hip-hop life, it is always on the attack, trying to change things and call things by their right name. In a rich and varied score full of jazz and rock influences,
Hamilton
uses rap sparingly, but when it does, the urgency is palpable.

Unlike rock, rap is a narrative form by nature, and
Hamilton
has a huge story to tell with it, as the very first iteration of the American landscape is built right before our eyes. Clearly more influenced by
Les Misérables
than by Rodgers and Hammerstein, it nonetheless follows the American rules in a number of fascinating ways, and always to its advantage.

*   *   *

Miranda wrote all of
Hamilton
—book, music, and lyrics—by himself, but many of the greatest classic musicals were the result of famously fractious collaborations. One might look at the master collaborators—from Kern and Berlin to Rodgers and Hart and Loesser and Jule Styne and Jerome Robbins—and come to the conclusion that the history of the Broadway musical is the history of short Jewish men yelling at each other. But to understand how these shows really came to be, it’s important to know what they were yelling about: the form and function and how the pieces fit together. These are the things that Broadway writers and directors used to carry inside them. You can’t turn back the clock (the world only spins forward, as Tony Kushner reminds us in
Angels in America
), but there’s pleasure in understanding this unique form of American entertainment and how it worked in its heyday. In the bones of that disused machine, some writers in the twenty-first century have begun to find inspiration, although most of their shows sit side by side with others that are more inspired by theatrical rock concerts than by
Oklahoma! Hamilton
is a telling example, being a work that grows out of a tradition and grows radically away from it at the same time.

*   *   *

Within the story of how a Broadway show is built is an actual story as well—about several eras on Broadway, the characters who populated the street, the things they learned from each other, and the rivalries, partnerships, competitions, and collaborations that made the creative process as intriguing as the results are enduring; but also about the inexorable move forward, as each generation carried some of the past on its back while blazing trails into the future.

In form, this book somewhat resembles the “song plot” course that I teach at NYU. I’m going to examine the musical as it moves forward from opening number to first-act climax to finale, drawing examples from many shows that remain with us, and a few that have been lost over time. I’ve pulled examples from all directions, and left out a lot that could probably have served exactly as well as what I’ve chosen. You have to draw the line somewhere. I hope that by the time I get to the curtain call, readers will have a sense of how this work got done by the people who did it best, at a time when aspiring to do it well was the highest goal an American songwriter or librettist could set.

2. Curtain Up, Light the Lights

Opening Numbers

“When the curtain goes up,” the director Michael Blakemore once said, “the audience is in trouble.”

Blakemore, the much decorated director of classics and new plays, didn’t try his hand at a Broadway musical until he was in his sixties, and the show he picked,
City of Angels
, was enough to get anyone into trouble—especially audiences. Its dizzying plot involved a ’50s pulp novelist adapting his work for Hollywood, and the action swung between the novelist’s travails and those of his fictional detective hero, whose world was depicted in black and white. The detective tried to solve a murder while the novelist tried to prevent the studio from murdering his script. Keeping audiences engaged, laughing, and dazzled by all the complexity, rather than confused and defeated, was the task at hand. The book writer Larry Gelbart’s masterful ability to organize and control the material led the way, and Cy Coleman and David Zippel’s jazzy midcentury score pumped a heartbeat into the show. But despite the A-list team, Blakemore knew he had to be as sure-handed as possible: confusion was his enemy. Using his great skill, experience, and intelligence to lead the audience swiftly through the action, he demanded absolute clarity above all things. The meticulous attention to detail worked, and
City of Angels
was a surprise hit. But many less complex and less challenging shows have foundered at the very moment Blakemore pinpointed: they get in trouble as soon as the curtain goes up. That’s when confusion reigns—who is everybody onstage, how do we tell them apart, and what does each one want? Which characters are important and which ones are little more than window dressing? Where are we supposed to look?

“My job,” Blakemore explained, “is to get the audience out of trouble.”

How do you begin a show? How does a musical greet its audience at the door? How do creative artists introduce the characters, set the tone, communicate a point of view, create a sense of style, a milieu? Do you begin with the story, the subject, the community in which the story is set, the main characters? How much can audiences handle, and how quickly? Do you invite them to dip a toe in to test the water, or do you plunge them in up to their necks before they know what’s happening? There are no hard-and-fast answers to this litany of questions, and, frequently, even the experts don’t know the answers until the whole show is almost complete. That’s why opening numbers are often written last.

One thing is certain, however: opening numbers can make or break a show. They have turned flops into hits (
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
), and their conception can be a cause for completely rethinking and reworking everything that comes after them (
Fiddler on the Roof
). They can be fabulously elaborate (
A Chorus Line
,
Ragtime
) or breathtakingly simple (
Oklahoma!
), but whatever they are, they launch the enterprise. If they do what they’re supposed to, they hand Mr. Blakemore—or any capable director—the tools to do his job.

Overtures help, of course. They’ve become something of a rarity today, but they can be one of the real pleasures of a Broadway musical, and they should set the tone for what’s to come. Some are written and fussed over by the composer, or by the composer in collaboration with an orchestrator, while others have been left to the arrangers and orchestrators alone. In some cases they are thrown together from “utilities”—all-purpose orchestrations of songs from the show that are created to be used as scene-change music and as underscoring, and for any other need that arises while a show is working its way through a tryout. In this last situation, the lack of a well-thought-out overture is usually the result of a show going through so many changes in such a state of chaos that the overture gets continually pushed to the bottom of the work list and never gets properly dealt with. That situation is even more normal for entr’actes, those short musical interludes that precede the beginning of the second act. They’re often perfunctory, on the theory that they’re mostly used to cover the sound of audiences settling back down in their seats. Though on a couple of occasions I’ve heard masterful ones.

Overtures vary in quality, of course, but a good one—
South Pacific
’s or
Gypsy
’s or
Forum
’s—leaves no doubt as to what the tone of the evening will be, whether epic drama, period showbiz, or farce. It helps to have great tunes, since almost all overtures are medleys, but even some B-level shows—
Wildcat
and
Goldilocks
, for instance—have overtures that are such masterful demonstrations of the orchestrator’s art that they are worth hearing repeatedly. But good, bad, or indifferent, at the (usually) thunderous conclusion of the overture, the play begins, and that’s when the choices become critical.

There’s a lot to think about when creating an opening, but the first question is: What kind of show is it? A dark romantic fable, obviously, will want to begin differently from a knockabout farce. After paying top dollar for a ticket, most audience members will assume they’re in capable hands. Quite quickly, they’ll expect to earn their money back in entertainment value. And so it’s crucial to let every audience member in on what has been planned, somehow or other. This doesn’t mean that opening numbers have to attend to a laundry list of requirements. But it does suggest that we should live by one of the principles of the Hippocratic oath: first do no harm.