by Jack Viertel
The show begins with a charming number called “Love Is in the Air”—a sweet little soft shoe about how romance tends to drive people nuts. It’s a honey of a number. But it tells us nothing about where Forum is headed—its style, its knockabout point of view, its plot, or its characters. It tells us to prepare for charm, the one characteristic that this singularly bountiful musical doesn’t have much time for.
* * *
The show opened disastrously in New Haven: bad reviews and empty houses. In other hands, it would have shuttered right then and there, or limped into town and disappeared into the vortex of misbegotten Broadway dreams. But the producer, Hal Prince, and the director, George Abbott, had almost seventy years of experience in the business between them. Sondheim was coming off two straight hits—West Side Story and Gypsy—as a lyricist and was also very well connected on the street. So they called Jerome Robbins to come take a look. Stubbornly, they believed in this strangely intractable comedy that they’d created, and they were too far inside it to divine why it wasn’t working.
Robbins, who had once had an interest in directing Forum, spotted the problem at once. It was the opening. In that moment when the curtain went up and the audience was in trouble, Forum promised charm and delivered mayhem instead. It betrayed the audience’s trust. In the face of the light and adorable “Love Is in the Air,” the show itself seemed vulgar and coarse, not funny. Robbins laid out his analysis. Sondheim protested that he’d already written a number that did exactly what Robbins felt needed to be done, but Abbott had rejected it because he couldn’t hum it.
“Write him a number he can hum,” Robbins told him. “He’s the director.”
Robbins agreed to stage the new opening and advised Sondheim to write something “neutral” so that he—Robbins—could create a lot of vaudeville-style schtick while it was going on. “Don’t tell jokes,” Robbins said. “Just write a baggy-pants number and let me stage it.” He didn’t want anything brainy or wisecracking, but he did want to tell the audience exactly what it was in for: lowbrow slapstick carried out by iconic character types like the randy old man, the idiot lovers, the battle-axe mother, the wily slave, and assorted other familiar folks. Sondheim wrote “Comedy Tonight,” a neutral, bouncy tune that anyone, even Abbott, could hum. It allowed space not only for Robbins’s staging but also for sections of narration in which the world of the piece, the major characters, and the overall style could be shown to the audience. This included, among other things, an opportunity for Zero Mostel, who was playing the leading role, to address the audience directly and explain things, in dialogue that didn’t include jokes but promised funny and potentially overripe comic situations. One thing Sondheim was unable to be neutral about was his natural genius with a comic rhyme when, at the conclusion of the number, he described the elements of the upcoming evening as
Pantaloons and tunics,
Courtesans and eunuchs,
Funerals and chases,
Baritones and basses,
Panderers,
Philanderers,
Cupidity,
Timidity,
Mistakes,
Fakes,
Rhymes,
Crimes,
Tumblers,
Grumblers,
Bumblers,
Fumblers
He erased all doubt as to what kinds of things were going to happen next. The audience was securely in the show’s pocket. His skill extended to beginning with lines of six syllables and working his way down to four-, three-, two-, and one-syllable lines before putting a cap on the whole stack with “Tumblers, grumblers, bumblers, fumblers.” This created a sense of acceleration and excitement in the song without actually having to speed up the tempo. It also meant that every member of the company could have a line or a word to sing before the song’s conclusion. The audience met everybody and knew everything, except for the plot, which was satisfyingly worked out later. The number went in at the beginning of previews in New York, and the show was a smash. In its final form, Forum is among the most happily launched of all Broadway musicals.
Years later, when it was being revived in a production directed by Jerry Zaks starring Nathan Lane, a question was raised about who owned “Comedy Tonight.” Clearly the authors owned the song and the book material that was written down on paper. But did Jerome Robbins own some undefined bit of intellectual property? And what about the staging? The most famous bit in the number involved the show’s “proteans,” three comic male chorus dancers who played all the nonprincipal roles. In “Comedy Tonight,” they performed a dance behind a piece of drapery that covered their midsections, and it quickly became apparent that the three of them shared seven legs instead of six. A remarkable amount of comedy was wrung out of this seven-legged dance before Zero Mostel simply grabbed the extra leg and hurled it offstage, which got an even bigger laugh than the dance itself.
Robbins was represented by a Broadway legend, the attorney Floria Lasky, who was quite old and cranky by this time. And tough. And she, gravel throated and full of fight, argued that Robbins should be compensated for the use of the opening number. Zaks promised that he would completely restage it so that any implied rights that Robbins might have had would not be violated. There would be none of Robbins’s work visible in the number. The producers went over to negotiate with Lasky. Hearing this pledge, she glared at the men over her desk for a long time. Finally she said, “Okay. But if there’s a wooden leg in it, Robbins gets a royalty.”
The negotiations for the Forum revival also involved Sondheim’s agent, Flora Roberts, who was often seen as Tweedledee to Lasky’s Tweedledum. Both were stocky old women whose voices seemed to betray years of whiskey and cigarettes, both were fiercely protective of their clients, and both, while enormous negotiating challenges for producers, were almost universally beloved. In a meeting between Roberts and the Forum revival producers, Roberts was bemoaning the loss of Burt Shevelove, one of Forum’s two book writers, who’d died too young. The other writer, Larry Gelbart, had gone on to create the TV show M*A*S*H and write screenplays like Tootsie. The book writers, living and dead, were asking for a lot of money. And Roberts was laying it on thick.
“Burt,” she intoned grandly, “is in heaven. But Larry called just this morning to remind me that he’s very big in Hollywood.”
Scott Rudin, who was one of the revival’s producers and a hugely powerful movie mogul, shot back, “Actually Burt’s bigger in heaven than Larry is in Hollywood.”
* * *
The show was always funny.
* * *
“We learn more from the flops than we do from the hits,” a wise producer once said. Actually, every producer says it every time he mounts a flop. But the point is well taken. Some shows, like Forum, were unlikely to be hits but pulled the rabbit out of the hat. Others, like Mack and Mabel, seemed destined for easy success but somehow could never find the hat, much less the rabbit.
Mack and Mabel had everything going for it: a swell Jerry Herman score, the visionary director Gower Champion (Robbins’s only real rival for dominance in the late ’50s and the ’60s), and two big and wonderful stars in Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters playing the silent film magnate Mack Sennett and his great love and most famous female star, Mabel Normand. And it had a delightfully nostalgic, colorful milieu: the silent movie era in Hollywood. What in the world went wrong? Unsurprisingly, it starts on page one of the script and continues through the entire opening number, which, ironically, is a terrific song.
Mack and Mabel is a love story narrated by Mack Sennett at the end of his career. The curtain goes up on his old, bankrupt movie studio, abandoned except for a night watchman. Mack, still virile and full of fight, comes back for one last look at where it all began, and then he starts to talk. This is our first shot at what the evening is going to be, and here’s a little of what he says:
MACK
Aw, what do those jerks know about making movies, anyway?…
I’m Mack Sennett, I know
the difference. Oh, you’ll make money with the crap you grind out …
Go on, try all the tricks you can think of but it’s still not gonna be worth one reel of Birth of a Nation, not one frame of Chaplin, not one eighth of a quarter of an inch of my Mabel …
So what have we learned? Mack Sennett is angry, tough, bitter, unsentimental, down on his luck, and living in the past but with a big heart for film, The Birth of a Nation, and Charlie Chaplin. He believes in them, and he’s angry because that era of pure, silent cinema is being replaced by newfangled garbage. Art is being supplanted by garbage. That’s our first clue as to who he is. He may not be much fun to spend time with (always risky in a musical), but he has passion for something of value (always a good idea in a musical). Then he begins to sing, and here’s what he sings:
Swanson and Keaton and Dressler and William S. Hart
No one pretended that what we were doing was art
We had some guts and some luck
But we were just makin’ a buck
By now we’re on page three, and the game is already over. Why? Because after telling us in dialogue that his anger and bitterness are caused by art being supplanted by garbage, he’s just turned 180 degrees and sung to us that his career was not about making art after all, but about having the guts to make money instead. In the lyric, he describes himself as being the very thing he was attacking in the dialogue.
So which is it? What’s going on? Our narrator, upon whom we’re forced to rely, is unreliable. He can’t keep his own point of view straight; he’s suffering from multiple personality disorder, and so is Mack and Mabel. The problem may seem like a technical glitch, easily correctable, but it’s actually huge and insurmountable, because it leaves the audience in trouble—puzzled and fearful that they’ll never figure this one out. And they won’t, because the authors can’t decide for themselves. Is the show going to be about how wonderful the silent movies were, or about how venal and commercial? Is it nostalgic or angry? If the former, why the bilious and combative narrator? If the latter, why the misty-eyed tribute to Chaplin and D. W. Griffith? What’s the tone supposed to be? Is the point of view fundamentally dark or light? Bitter or celebratory? And will we ever be able to take anything Mack says at face value? Words are coming out of his mouth, but they don’t add up.
This is not to say that you can’t write a show about someone with personality disorders, as the surprise success of Next to Normal proved a few decades later. And, in fact, one can argue that silent movies were fantastically artful and the product of venal commercial interests. And you’d be right. But you can’t introduce the argument right at the start in a musical. The book and the song are taking opposite points of view. When you talk out of both sides of your mouth, it’s just too damn confusing. In fact, the hallmark of Mack and Mabel is that, for all its many assets, it remains stubbornly schizophrenic throughout—it never arrives at a clear view of what kind of experience it is supposed to be. This is partly the result of the limitations of the source material, the real Mack being something of a cold megalomaniac, and the real Mabel being something of a self-destructive drug addict. But it’s also important to understand that the show was created in the mid-’70s by artists who had done their best work in the mid-’60s, when musicals were still largely projecting blue skies and optimism. By 1976 there was a darker vision of America on display on Broadway. Mack and Mabel wants to have it both ways—it’s the awkward love child of Hello, Dolly! and Follies. The score, which contains a couple of terrific ballads, largely consists of upbeat, classic Jerry Herman tunes, while the book keeps getting darker and darker and darker until the lights just go out. But this bifurcated point of view is on display right from the moment the curtain goes up, and the audience never could find its way out of trouble.
* * *
Forum and Mack and Mabel, notwithstanding their varying degrees of success, illustrate the two most common forms of opening number. In the former, we get to meet and hear from everyone. In the latter, we are left in the hands of one protagonist, who sets the scene with no help from the rest of the cast. The first—the all-hands-on-deck number—has been serving musicals since their inception, although its function and style keep evolving. The second was more or less invented by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, with “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” back in the ’40s.
The invention was inspired, but also pragmatic. Both men had been writing shows (although not with each other) for a long time, and both knew the value of startling an audience. You could startle it with content, but you could also, if you had a good enough idea, do it with form. It was easy to startle with more noise but more interesting to do it with less.
Long before Hammerstein had begun writing operettas in the early ’20s, musicals usually began with lots of people onstage singing, often rows and rows of chorus girls. Ziegfeld’s Follies were famous for their parades of American beauties right at the opening curtain. The hall-of-fame set designer John Lee Beatty once said, with characteristic dryness, that an opening number was just an opportunity for the audience to take a good look at the company and decide whom they most wanted to sleep with. Once that problem had been gotten out of the way, the play could begin. He was only half kidding.
Having agreed to adapt a play set on an Oklahoma farm at the end of the nineteenth century, Rodgers and Hammerstein were left wondering what would happen if decades of theatrical tradition were given the heave-ho, and a Broadway musical began with a middle-aged woman churning butter in a barnyard while a handsome cowhand wandered on and sang a solo. It was a question born out of practicality—choruses of girls were hard to justify on an Oklahoma farm. It’s hard to have merry villagers when there’s no village. It’s also the way the play they were adapting, Green Grow the Lilacs, begins. So they took a chance, then took many more, and then revolutionized the form in the process.
They were mature writers as well as experienced showmen. Hammerstein wrote a lyric for the cowhand that, in only a couple of dozen lines, did a lot of the work that “Comedy Tonight” had in seven minutes. The song is short, but it’s long enough. Hammerstein knew he had to set the scene, create the language of the piece, get us to like this cowhand, create a point of view for the show (earnest, not satiric, romantic but of the earth, not fussy), and create a stake. By the end of this little number, we had to believe that the place the cowhand described was so splendid in its simple beauty and virtue that it was worth defending, with a gun if necessary: it was America. And in 1943, America was at war in Europe and the Pacific, protecting the values of democracy and liberty against the deadly incursions of tyranny and bigotry. The show was set at the turn of the century, but like all shows, it had to speak to the audiences of its own time.
This sounds like a tall order, and it required a mature artist to tackle it. But Hammerstein was a practical artist, too, and the first thing he did was to purloin the ideas of the opening stage direction of Lynne Riggs’s original play. The stage direction, in part, reads:
It is a radiant summer morning several years ago, the kind of morning which, enveloping the shapes of earth—men, cattle in a meadow, blades of the young corn, streams—makes them seem to exist now for the first time, their images giving off a visible golden emanation …
From that bit of purplish prose, the lyricist fashioned this much more singable vision:
There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow,
There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow,
The corn is as high as a elephant’s eye
An’ it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up to the sky.
Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,
Oh, what a beautiful day.
I got a beautiful feelin’,
Ev’rythin’s goin’ my way.
All the cattle are standin’ like statues,
All the cattle are standin’ like statues,
They don’t turn their heads as they see me ride by,
But a little brown mav’rick is winkin’ her
eye.
He dealt with flora first, then fauna. (Hammerstein dealt with a lot of fauna in his career. In a wonderful if slightly mad essay by the statistician Eric Thompson, 491 creatures are accounted for in Hammerstein’s lyrics—“75 sea creatures, 240 creatures of the land and 176 birds.”)
For two stanzas, the verses are purely descriptive, though it tells us a lot that the cowhand singing them is so vividly observant, and his passion for his surroundings begins to show in each chorus. But in the third stanza, the cowhand loosens up and tells us what he thinks about all of this:
All the sounds of the earth are like music—
All the sounds of the earth are like music
The breeze is so busy it don’t miss a tree
And a ol’ weepin’ willer is laughin’ at me.
Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,
Oh, what a beautiful day.
I got a beautiful feelin’,
Ev’rythin’s goin’ my way …
Oh, what a beautiful day.
We have moved from appreciative description to a more personal statement, and suddenly we’re in the hands of a cowhand who’s a self-deprecating poet and who loves his surroundings with a kind of plainly expressed passion that is as romantic as it is proud. He’s ardent but masculine. He speaks for all of us who love our country, and he speaks in a bit of a strange patois, which is American but remote from New York and Broadway. The simplicity is deceptive, and the song is so well known that it’s hard for us to hear it afresh. But it’s worth noting that it is structured like a folk song, with its repeating chorus, not like a standard thirty-two-bar theater song. And Hammerstein’s notion of repeating the first line of every verse twice is borrowed from the rural blues songs that grew out of field hollers at the turn of the century. In those ways, it’s nothing like a Broadway song. But it contains all the hallmarks of a great opening number, distilled down to their essence and appropriately formed for a rural “folk” setting. Hammerstein changed the form without ducking his responsibility to the content. Rodgers’s melody respects the simplicity of the ideas in the verse and celebrates the ardor that’s implicit in the chorus. So it isn’t just the idea of a solo that’s revolutionary—it’s the confident invention and expertise of its execution. (It’s also worth noting that this opening number, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first, is so clearly echoed in their last opening number, in which a rebellious nun named Maria points out that “the hills are alive with the sound of music.” Whenever Hammerstein went outdoors, the earth seemed to sing to him.)
