The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (8 page)

Peter Stone, the Tony-winning book writer of
1776
and
The Will Rogers Follies
, once said, “If you want the audience to really hear something, don’t put it in a lyric.” He was, in some sense, protecting his turf as a book writer, but it’s not generally bad advice. The word “song” derives from the French
chanson
, which shares a root with “enchantment.” Melodies put our brains in a different place, where we are likely to be emotionally engaged and logically distracted. But “Rock Island” has no melody, so we’re better able to focus on the words. Willson’s lyric repeats Harold Hill’s last name nine times in a row, as if anticipating Stone’s advice. We pay attention. Somehow, in the course of this wonderful bit of doggerel, we hear just what we need to.

*   *   *

André Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater’s artistic director, began his career running Playwrights Horizons, which was dedicated to discovering and producing important new writers. Bishop said in an interview that every young playwright has a play in him that could be called
The House I Grew Up In.
In this sense,
The Music Man
, which could have been called
The Town I Grew Up In
, is a close cousin of works as diverse as
The Glass Menagerie
and
Ah, Wilderness!
Bishop went on to point out that a successful treatment of this subject didn’t necessarily mean that the writer in question had a great career ahead of him. That point would be proved—or not—only by the plays that followed, when the autobiographical traumas of childhood had already been harvested. In Meredith Willson’s case, his success with
The Music Man
was never to be repeated, or even approached. He was one of the infrequent one-hit wonders of the Broadway musical.

In contrast, Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein were well beyond
The House I Grew Up In
when they turned their attention to the Sholem Aleichem short stories that became
Fiddler on the Roof
. They’d matched inspiration to craftsmanship a number of times and were at the top of their games.
Fiddler
was more or less
The Village Our Grandparents Grew Up In
, and it was, like
The Music Man
, a labor of love about yet another world in transition. But it didn’t come together until a new opening number called “Tradition” gave it stature and made sense of the initial impulse to begin writing it in the first place.

Sheldon Harnick, who wrote the lyrics, tells of the frustration of early meetings with Jerome Robbins, who was slated to direct and choreograph.

“Jerry kept saying to us, ‘What’s it about? What’s it about?’ And Joe Stein would try to patiently explain that it was about a milkman with five daughters who needed to get married, and Jerry would stop us and say, ‘No! I mean what’s it
about
?’”

Robbins was talking about the show’s subject, and Stein was describing its plot, which was, at bottom, a domestic story about family life. They are entirely different things, though the latter must serve the former. Finally, as they worked through the possible reasons that the show should exist at all, they hit upon the underlying idea.
Fiddler
is about the destruction of a culture and its hoped-for transmutation to a new place. The “little village” of Anatevka is one of many shtetls, tiny, poor, but self-sufficient Jewish communities within the larger, largely hostile country Russia. And what happens in the course of the show is that Anatevka is dismantled piece by piece, despite the best efforts of its citizens to hold it together. Once again, the world is in transition, and our little corner of it is threatened with oblivion (although Anatevka and River City, Iowa, are about as different as two little self-sufficient worlds could be). But this was a favorite theme of Robbins’s—most of his serious shows in some way confront the clash of cultures and the cost of the outcome.
West Side Story
deals with the arrival of Puerto Rican immigrants on American soil and how the world shifts.
Gypsy
is concerned with the death of vaudeville as show business marches on. Even
The King and I
, which Robbins choreographed but didn’t direct, reaches the height of its powers when dealing with what it means that the British have arrived in Siam, bringing a threatening modern world to a settled ancient one.

Fiddler on the Roof
, which was to be Robbins’s last Broadway show, takes the theme to its logical conclusion. Anatevka is destroyed and the diaspora moves on, to Chicago, New York, and the beginnings of Israel, where the culture will flower in different ways, carrying its ideas on its back along with its conflicts and its traditions.

“Finally,” the show’s producer, Hal Prince, recalled, “when Jerry Robbins asked, ‘What’s it about?’ for the hundredth time, Sheldon snapped back, ‘It’s about tradition! What else can it be about?’ And Jerry said, ‘Okay—write a song called “Tradition.”’”

Tradition, in the end, was the best way that the authors could think of to express what kept the people of Anatevka secure enough to stay alive and define themselves for as long as they did. In the course of their show, traditions crumble from within, as Tevye’s daughters take marital decisions into their own hands. The first marries for love, rejecting the tradition of arranged matches. The second binds herself to political radicalism, leaving the village behind to be with her imprisoned husband and betraying the tradition of the nuclear family. The third falls in love with a non-Jew, tearing asunder the last bit of the fabric of homogeneity left in the community. And just as the internal traditions are breaking down, the larger world is moving in to wipe this little village off the map. The Russians begin systematically expelling the Jews, so that by the final curtain, the stage will be devoid of virtually everything. Where once there was a thriving community held together by the integrity of a carefully defined way of life, now there is only empty space.

This idea is so clear and so moving that it left the authors with a great challenge: how to give stature at the opening moment to a story that had once been a domestic comedy/drama but that had somehow morphed into a grand landscape of humanity confronting the end of an era. The answer came in two pieces. First, someone recalled Marc Chagall’s 1913 painting
The Fiddler
, which depicts a Jewish peasant with a violin perched insecurely on a rooftop. This seemed like a more than apt metaphor. The show’s long-debated title became
Fiddler on the Roof
. Second, Bock and Harnick distilled all the discussions that had brought them this far into the number Robbins asked for—“Tradition.” It is, in some ways, not so very different from “Comedy Tonight,” in that our leading player (again Zero Mostel) steps out onto an empty stage and tells us what kind of an evening it’s going to be. Then he sings. Then he introduces the various factions of this little society—papas, mamas, sons, daughters—and
they
sing. In a stroke of great theatricality, each has a different melody to sing, but all four melodies fit together so that they can be sung at once, which makes the music itself a metaphor: the strength to survive derives from the weave; all together, these simple strands make a beautiful, complex, and enduring sound, far stronger than any one of them might create alone. In its finished form, “Tradition” gives voice to virtually everyone in Anatevka: the beggar, the rabbi, the matchmaker, the businessman—it’s a community portrait. It describes good times and bad, harmony and dispute, but, like “Comedy Tonight,” it leaves the plot for later. It parts company with “Comedy Tonight” in one important way, however: Prologus, the narrator in
Forum
, tells us what to expect, and then the show delivers exactly as promised. Tevye explains the world of Anatevka and tells us what to expect, but he hasn’t the foresight to see the oncoming end of things. He is brought up short by it just as we are. At the beginning, he knows some things about fragility, but hardly everything.
Fiddler
has more up its sleeve than “Tradition” can describe, and the ensuing action plays
against
what the number tells us. Tradition is everything, it says. Then the show demonstrates that it’s not enough. But the number sets up such a clear and profound idea in such an exciting way that what was once domestic never seems less than epic. And Tevye, the beleaguered milkman with the nagging wife, becomes an iconic figure, who, like Chagall’s fiddler, will live forever.

The number also made it necessary for the rest of
Fiddler
to respect the size of the idea. It became of central importance to demonstrate and celebrate the traditions in question: the Friday-night Sabbath prayer, the bottle dance at the wedding ceremony, each an explicit expression of implicit strength and faith. The authors made sure that throughout the evening, even the most domestic events carried larger implications and fit within the weave. The opening number forced their hand.

*   *   *

Anatevka wasn’t the only world in transition on Broadway in 1964. The street itself was beginning to crack open as a new generation of theater-makers took matters into their own hands, responding to the end of postwar self-satisfaction and the beginning of a new age of anxiety—the ’60s.

Hal Prince, who produced
Fiddler
, had turned to directing, and after a few faltering steps, he helmed the innovatively experimental hit
Cabaret
in 1966. “Willkommen,” its iconic opening, owed a lot, structurally, at least, to “Tradition” and to “Comedy Tonight,” but the show—an exploration of Weimar Germany—had a kind of presentational, neo-Brechtian quality that made it an effective transition from the well-established musical play to a newer kind of concept musical. It was presented as a series of seedy cabaret acts, a more stark, sexualized, and theatrical version of what
Gypsy
had done with its vaudeville sketches.

Prince learned from the masters whose work he had previously produced, chiefly from Abbott and Robbins. Then he and Stephen Sondheim began turning out consistently fascinating, highly conceptualized collaborations, beginning with 1970’s
Company
. There’s plenty more to be said about these shows, which, more than any others since
Oklahoma
, revolutionized the form. But it’s worth a word or two here on
Company
’s opening, which combines both genres—giving voice to the full ensemble of the show as well as to its leading character as a soloist. The time is the present (that would be 1970); the place is New York, whose heartbeat, one character says, is “a busy signal”—this was before call-waiting was invented. And, indeed, the opening number pulses like a busy signal. We meet a series of married couples spouting social niceties like
“Bobby, come on over for dinner!”
and we come to quickly understand that all these couples are, for some reason, obsessively interested in the life of someone named Bobby, whom we haven’t met yet. When he bursts onto the scene, singing,
“Phone rings, door chimes, in comes company!”
we may be puzzled—he seems like an ordinary fellow, maybe an adman or a business executive, but that’s about it. And what he’s telling us is a big distance from “there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow,” though, interestingly enough, it’s just as redolent of his time and place. And that’s the point. He’s nobody special. He’s the focus of a lot of needy people who project their hopes, dreams, fears, and anxieties on a blank slate of a man who, whatever else he does, appreciates the attention.

The number is so propulsive, and it attacks the audience with so much nervous energy, that we also come to understand that this is a show about a Manhattan gripped by its careening—if sometimes pointless—pace. There’s no time to stop and think; there’s no time for anything except “come on over for dinner.” The show was audacious in many ways: it was virtually plotless, organized around an idea instead of a story, written so that the songs commented on the action but were not exactly a part of it. But its greatest contribution to the development of musical theater in America may simply have been that it was gimlet-eyed: it didn’t promise a happy ending. It had propulsive energy but no simple joys. It used musical theater conventions for ironic commentary, not simply to gin up the audience. It cast a jaundiced eye on urban Americans and found them wanting. There was no propaganda about our can-do, communitarian population. In many ways, it signaled the end of the Rodgers and Hammerstein ethos, though it was shot through with the kind of craftsmanship R&H most admired. And the opening number laid all this out by giving us the familiar huge buildup to the protagonist, but lacing it with irony and an energy that was more neurotic than positive. Then it dared to introduce its hero and hand him the floor, just for him to reveal that he was only Bobby, with nothing much to say. By the end of the evening, the hollow man found desire, and the audience found itself in shock, in a wonderful and new way.

The Sondheim-Prince musicals drove the decade artistically but not commercially. That was left to others with less upsetting ideas about life but just as much theatrical savvy. In 1975, the era turned, with the arrival of
A Chorus Line
, conceived and directed by Michael Bennett, who, as a choreographer, had been Prince and Sondheim’s junior partner on
Company
and served as codirector of
Follies
.
A Chorus Line
presented a fascinating challenge: a twenty-five-headed protagonist. The hero of this story of a Broadway audition is everyone who came to try out.

Given the impossibility of individually introducing each of the eager young applicants for a job in a Broadway chorus, Bennett chose to go in the opposite direction. He exploited the disorientation. The curtain went up on all of them, mid-audition, fighting to learn a dance combination as quickly as it was hurled at them by a taskmaster choreographer. The performers and the audience were in the same boat, trying to process information at a pace beyond the normal capabilities of the human brain. It was audacious. Bennett had everyone in trouble—on purpose. He seemed to have complete faith that kinetic energy alone, expertly deployed, would grip the attention of an audience even if no one could figure out exactly what was going on. On this occasion, he was right.