The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (40 page)

Hip-hop and rap have been with us for thirty-five years or more, but as usual, Broadway turned a deaf ear until an artist came along who could marry the two forms. Miranda, whose earlier musical
In the Heights
won the Tony but seemed in some ways like an ambitious warm-up for something else, is a young man with his feet in two different worlds. Born and raised in the Inwood section of Manhattan on the edge of Washington Heights (once heavily Irish but now dominated by Dominican and other Latino populations), he attended Wesleyan University and was captured on video singing “To Life” from
Fiddler on the Roof
to his bride at their wedding. It’s hardly surprising that he was drawn to Alexander Hamilton, a Caribbean immigrant who had to fight his way into early American society. Brash and politically insensitive, arrogant and brilliant, sometimes right but never in doubt, Hamilton made a great musical protagonist, part Harold Hill, part Madame Rose, and all American.

Hamilton
was not the first musical about the founding of the nation; it was at least the fourth. Rodgers and Hart’s
Dearest Enemy
dates back to 1925 and contained the pop hit “Here in My Arms,” which certainly didn’t sound like a Revolutionary War tune.
Arms and the Girl
in 1950 covered the same territory with less success, though it produced a song with the memorable title “A Cow and a Plough and a Frau,” which sounds like nothing so much as a ’50s show tune.
1776
, produced in 1969, was generally celebrated (it ran for years) as a fresh take on musical theater and heralded for its willingness to tell the story of the creation and signing of the Declaration of Independence in music while ignoring most of the conventions of the form. Much of its score sounds like an updated take on Gilbert and Sullivan and John Philip Sousa, but it clearly has no desire to echo the actual music of the late eighteenth century. Similarly,
Hamilton
tells the story of then in the musical language of now. And while
1776
concerned itself at least to some degree with issues of slavery and the evils of imperialism (it was produced during both the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War),
Hamilton
is preoccupied with issues of immigration, gun violence, race as a defining factor of outsider culture, and the question of who does and does not get to be president. In other words, it’s about today, just like all shows tend to be, no matter when they are set. In that sense, it’s a direct descendant of
Oklahoma!

It would probably be foolish to suggest that Broadway is now in for a series of hip-hop musicals. Like
Show Boat
back in 1927,
Hamilton
is unlikely to have many immediate imitators. But in a new way, the musical field is wide open on the street, and anything can happen.

At the moment, this has led to a bifurcated Broadway sound. On the one hand, there continues to be a “theater music” tradition, led by serious—sometimes overserious—composers like Jason Robert Brown, Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel, and others. They are composers in the classic sense, but by and large they haven’t achieved repeated or sustained popular success. On the other hand, there are the writers for whom rock, guitar-based and otherwise, is a natural language, if not their only one. Miranda, Alan Menken, Marc Shaiman, Robert Lopez, and their compatriots have created a new Broadway sound that owes less to the Golden Age than to the Top 40. They may not be pop songwriters themselves, but as often as not, pop music is the raw material from which they draw inspiration.

Disney’s animated features unit came back to life after a long and depressing dry spell when Menken and Howard Ashman, fresh from
Little Shop of Horrors
, turned out
The Little Mermaid
, structured like a classic Broadway show but sounding like a pop pastiche. Menken and Ashman followed it up with
Beauty and the Beast
, and when the
Times
theater critic Frank Rich described
Beauty
as the best musical of the season even though it was a movie, Disney decided to go into the theater business. The stage version of the film was hardly a critical success, but it ran for five and a half years, by which time Disney had bought and restored the derelict New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-second Street, which inaugurated the resurrection of Times Square. The premiere production at Disney’s new live theater headquarters was
The Lion King
, which Disney fitted out with Broadway talent instead of the theme park practitioners who had staged
Beauty
.
The Lion King
managed to deliver—thanks to its director, Julie Taymor—a level of imagination that overcame everyone, including the critics. It’s possible that
The Lion King
, a twenty-first-century show that relies on the most ancient of theatrical techniques—masks and myths—as well as the most technologically modern ones, will outlive everyone who worked on it and its entire original cast. Apparently, it’s here to stay, like the Empire State Building.

Much of the score was penned by Elton John—an actual rock icon, not a mere Broadway songwriter in the rock tradition. (To be fair, he’s a pianist, not a guitarist.) But his presence on Broadway has led to shows by Sting, Paul Simon, and Cyndi Lauper, who took home a Tony for her
Kinky Boots
score. We’ve come full circle. For the first half of the twentieth century, theater writers supplied the most potent popular hits. For the second half, rock and rollers supplanted them on the hit parade, while Broadway scores maintained their integrity, but rarely visited the record charts. And in the twenty-first century, the pop writers have invaded Broadway, and the lines have become blurred beyond recognition.

Credit an unwitting Woody Guthrie if you care to; he was a revolutionary in every sense.

*   *   *

All these new writers have led in some ways to a new musical theater. They’ve taken on the form without having spent time in the trenches, bringing a new energy and a kind of chaos to the process. Figuring out how to tell a meaningful story about compelling characters has not been easy for them, and in some cases it’s not even on their agenda. When successful, they’ve often been guided by veteran book writers, producers, and directors, and still the results are never easy to predict. And the veterans are aging, as veterans do.

Will the classic model for how a Broadway musical is built disappear? Probably not. Will there be more shows like
American Idiot
that ignore the model? Probably, though it’s worth noting that these relatively indiscriminately plotted and scored shows, no matter how popular their music, have mostly been commercial disappointments, while shows with rock scores but sturdier plots and characters, like
Spring Awakening
and
Kinky Boots
, have been successful. Even
Mamma Mia!
, which makes no real effort to integrate its book and score, somehow makes audiences care for its characters. Who knows what it all portends? In this relatively uncharted territory, Broadway keeps looking for answers, one energetic, if uncertain, step at a time.

And that’s the gazooka.

Notes

Tuning Up: or, How I Came to Write This Book

1. Overture

6. Bushwhacking 1: Second Couples

9. Adelaide’s Lament: Stars

17. I Thought You Did It for Me, Momma: The Next-to-Last Scene

18. You Can’t Stop the Beat: The End

19. Curtain Call: How Woody Guthrie—of All People—Changed Broadway Musicals Forever

Listening to Broadway

I was first introduced to Broadway by original cast albums—well before I saw
Peter Pan
at age almost-six, I could sing “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” in an adenoidal snuffle that was embarrassing enough for my thoughtful parents to record it on their primitive reel-to-reel tape recorder. Thankfully, after some period of entertaining their party guests with it after I was safely in bed, the tape disappeared. I’m deeply grateful.

Original cast albums—never confused with “soundtracks” back then—took up a good portion of the family record shelf, and many of them actually were albums: booklets with multiple cardboard sleeves, each containing a 78 rpm disc with a single song on each side. That’s how I first heard
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
, even though long-playing records were available beginning in 1948, the year before I was born.
Guys and Dolls
we had on an LP, with that strangely flat sound that seemed to be a hallmark of Decca’s early cast recordings.
Brigadoon
we had. And
Finian’s Rainbow.
Soon
The Pajama Game
was added, with its racy Peter Arno cover—intriguing even to a five-year-old like me, though I couldn’t have said exactly why.