by Jack Viertel
Since that time, most Broadway musicals have begun one way or the other—a blowout for the entire company or a solo for the protagonist. But in their second collaboration, R&H tried something that was also new: an opening ballet. “The Carousel Waltz” replaced the more traditional overture in Carousel. In the course of this instrumental prelude, dancers and actors took the audience through the world of a traveling New England carnival somewhere on the coast of Maine. Taking his cue from the sound of a carousel’s calliope, Rodgers wrote a richly textured piece of music, and the choreographer Agnes de Mille, working from Hammerstein’s scenario, painted the landscape of a working seaside town, with its factory girls and fishermen squeezing a night’s entertainment on the midway out of a few nickels.
It was tremendously effective, but it’s only occasionally been imitated, most notably—in an entirely different tone—by Guys and Dolls in “Runyonland.” This opening presents a more familiar landscape—Broadway itself—and a wise-guy tone that is as far from Carousel as one could hope to stray. West Side Story adapted the idea of an opening ballet to yet another New York location but stitched dance to a classic ensemble-type number—the “Jet Song.” Each in its own way lays out the territory of the show it introduces with astonishing clarity, imagination, and confidence.
But opening ballets are the exception—wordlessness always runs the risk of further confusing an already wary audience at the opening curtain. Solo opening numbers are somewhat more common. Hammerstein used another in The King and I, a few years after creating the tiny little opening duet in South Pacific, in which two Eurasian children sing a bit of doggerel in French, “Dites-Moi,” which nonetheless underlies the largest themes and dilemmas in that epic show. “Tell me why,” they sing, “life is beautiful and happy? Is it because you love me?” The show then spends three hours trying to arrive at a place where life is beautiful and happy, and the hero and heroine finally allow themselves to love each other. The journey encompasses war, racial prejudice, sexual obsession, pandering, terrible economic disparity, and human disaster. It’s a monumental show, slyly begun by a pair of tots whose racial makeup and parentage turn out to be at the center of the argument. They ask a simple question in rhyme (in French, yet), but, for anyone listening, it’s the right question, and it allows the audience to slip comfortably into the evening in a beautifully exotic setting. Once seduced into this pleasant place, theatergoers belong to the writers, who are then free to put them through glorious hell.
* * *
There’s probably no such thing as a perfect musical, but when fanatics gather to compare notes, the most frequently mentioned candidate is undoubtedly Gypsy. Written with dispatch by Arthur Laurents (book), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), and Jule Styne (music), this examination of a show business family certainly comes as close as you can get. And in Madame Rose, the authors created the greatest show business monster-mother of all time.
Gypsy, first produced in 1959, is based on Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir of the same name. It’s the somewhat reinvented, or at least laundered, tale of Ms. Lee (née Rose Louise Hovick) growing up as a kid in vaudeville and her emergence as the famous stripper. Many of the eccentric details in the musical are drawn directly from the memoir, which gives the show a lot of texture and a remarkable feel for time and place. But the actual subject—the crushing damage that a parent can inflict on her children and the myriad consequences—is entirely the invention of the musical’s authors. It’s also one of the key reasons Gypsy has stood the test of time: this is a subject that never gets old. How we love, ignore, or smother our children, how we project our own dreams onto their unwitting psyches, how we may drive them away while living in terror of their abandoning us—these are profound concerns, and Gypsy takes them seriously. Yet for a musical that has a lot on its mind, it begins with a kind of charming innocuousness, and it plays like a house on fire. Two children sing an apparently trivial song, rather like in South Pacific. But while Rodgers and Hammerstein were digging into History with a capital “H,” Laurents, Sondheim, and Styne were writing a personal drama more indebted to Freud than to Herodotus. Still, the show is a musical, and it begins by behaving like a musical comedy.
The curtain goes up on the rehearsal for a kiddie-show amateur night in Seattle in the 1920s. This is made clear by a heroic feat of expositional writing by Arthur Laurents (the entire opening scene, including the song, takes up only four pages of the script). We’re introduced to Uncle Jocko, the seedy host of the contest, who, in the course of a very few lines, lets us know that the contest is fixed, that his biggest problem is not the kids who want to be in show business but the mothers who push them into it, and that the talent-free kids themselves are so bad that they will soon “kill vaudeville.” These are all important points: Gypsy concerns itself with a monstrously powerful mother figure who is absolutely determined that her children will be stars in vaudeville. The problems she faces are conjoined: the kids aren’t talented, and the business is going out of business. She’s in a race against time and doesn’t know it. By the time her children are grown, the form will have all but disappeared, a fact that audiences in 1959 were well aware of. Her challenge is insurmountable, but her will is indomitable.
This makes it interesting. Every good show, in some sense, is about a mountain that’s hard to scale. The bigger and more unpredictable the mountain, and the more determined the climber, the more engaged we’re likely to be. In this regard, Gypsy may be the all-time champion musical-as-athletic-contest.
We meet the kids before the mother. Uncle Jocko, after suffering through sixteen bars of “Arnold and His Accordion,” turns the stage over to “Baby June and Company”—“Company,” in this case, being the shy, thumb-sucking Louise, age eight. The two girls launch into a somewhat pathetic little number called “May We Entertain You.” This is Gypsy’s opening number, and it appears to be about nothing. But it tells us almost everything. The kids are lousy: June is overzealous and annoying, and Louise is lost. And as soon as we learn this much, their mother, Rose, bursts upon the scene midsong, making a great star entrance down the aisle of the theater, to try to fix the number, which is impossible to do. Jocko tries to get rid of her, the stage manager tries to get rid of her, even her own children tacitly wish her somewhere else, but she cannot be dispatched. She cajoles, she threatens, she extols her kids’ virtues and denigrates everyone else.
Here’s what she says, with ineffectual interruptions by Uncle Jocko, who is quickly losing control of his own domain:
ROSE
Louise, dear, if you don’t count—
JOCKO
Madam, do you realize you are absolutely—
ROSE
I do, Uncle Jocko, but I want to save your very valuable time for you.
JOCKO
In that case—
ROSE
When I saw your sensitive face at the Odd Fellows Hall—my first husband was an Odd Fellow—
JOCKO
I am not an Odd Fellow!
ROSE
I meant a Knight of Pythias. My second husband was—
JOCKO
I’m not a Knight of Pythias!
ROSE
Then where did you catch our act?
JOCKO
At the Elks.
ROSE
My father is an Elk! I have his tooth here someplace. (She dumps the dog into Jocko’s arms as she rummages in her handbag) If you’ll just hold Chowsie for me—that’s short for chow mein. (Baby talk) Mommy just loves chow mein, doesn’t she, Chowsie Wowsie? Stop sucking your thumb, Louise. (To the conductor) Professor, I just marvel how you can make a performer into an artist.
JOCKO
(Following her as she gads about)
What is going on here??
ROSE
Now if you could help my little girls by giving them a good loud la da da de da da da—(To Jocko, whom she delicately shoves back as he moves to intervene) God helps him who helps himself. (To the drummer) Mr. Zipser—when the girls
do their specialty would you please ad lick it? Show him, girls.
JOCKO
Is this really happening?!
ROSE
Oh, Gus? Gus, would you please slap Baby June with something pink? She’s the star. Smile, Baby dear!
JOCKO
I have seen all kinds of mothers—
ROSE
Do you know of a really good agent—don’t hang on the baby, Louise, you’re rumpling her dress—who could book a professional act like ours?
We may be horrified by her performance, but unlike Mack Sennett at the top of Mack and Mabel, we do sort of want to spend the rest of the evening with her. For one thing, she’s fixing things rather than complaining about them. She lacks any trace of self-consciousness or self-pity. And despite all her frightening gall, she’s knowledgeable, resourceful, funny, and shocking, and in some demented way, she even seems to love her kids—though she’s continually demeaning one and protecting the other. She’s instantaneously memorable, which is always a good idea in a musical. Musicals—the great ones—are rarely about ordinary life plodding by. They’re about the outsize romance that can’t be controlled, the special world we’d love to live in for a while, the faraway time and place we’re waiting to be seduced by, the larger-than-life force of nature we so rarely encounter in real life. That’s Madame Rose.
She’s the most powerful person onstage as Gypsy begins, and it’s made blindingly clear that the least powerful is not Uncle Jocko, whom she berates, but poor, pathetic Louise, so paralyzed by fear that she can barely move to hide behind her sister. The trajectory of Gypsy is such that by the evening’s end, the two characters will have exactly switched places. Louise will be in charge of everything, and her mother will be reduced to wearing a borrowed fur over her frumpy dress while begging to come to a showbiz party in Louise’s honor. Precisely how this dramatically perfect power exchange happens is the challenge the authors handed themselves. Gypsy has clarity of purpose. It also has an announced stake.
* * *
“Don’t you laugh!” Rose barks at Uncle Jocko. “Don’t you dare laugh!… That child is going to be a star!”
From that moment on, the word “star” peppers the text of Gypsy with increasing frequency, to the point where it seems peculiar that no one ever notices how many times it’s spoken. Stardom is the stake in Gypsy, and stake is a great and powerful way to organize the story: Rose is determined to make her daughter a star, and the world is conspiring to make sure it never happens. Everything is about this stake. It’s like the flag in a game of capture the flag—it may not be interesting on its own, but every show should have one, and only one. It’s the thing everyone fights over, and wants, and most often it’s a physical thing or a person: Sweeney’s daughter, Johanna, in Sweeney Todd; the verdict in Chicago. Anything that’s not related to it in some way can probably be written out. And probably should be. Sometimes the stake is puzzlingly irrelevant to what’s good about a show: the stake in Guys and Dolls is the Save-a-Soul Mission itself. It’s not a humorous or flavorful place or a location that anyone who sees the show really even talks about. But the fact that it is threatened with being shut down is the gas that powers the engine that drives the joy machine. Great shows have clear stakes.
With the stake established quickly and with utter clarity, Gypsy confronted an unusual structural challenge. Most shows unfold over a few weeks or months. Gypsy covers more than a decade. Holding it together, keeping it, and the audience, focused, is hard work. But the show takes an innovative route to meeting that challenge, and it involves the opening number.
First, it uses the opening to set up the typical old-time vaudeville show as a storytelling device. Every scene thereafter resembles, in some ways, an act in a vaudeville show. And each is announced by a title card propped on an easel on either side of the stage, just as would have been the case in a real vaudeville house. So there’s a concept that justifies the episodic structure and helps set the style of the evening. Second, the authors use the opening melody as one of a series of musical and lyric motifs that evolve but always remain recognizable. They recur just often enough to keep us in thrall to the story. Without realizing it, we come to depend upon them to reinforce time, place, and emotion. These include a powerfully dark, driving piece of music that is accompanied by Rose’s assertion, “I had a dream,” the self-motivating, self-deluding reminder that she must, at all costs, stay in pursuit. It also includes the terrible corny vaudeville act that Madame Rose keeps trying to redress and reinvent without ever really changing it significantly—a mishmash of patriotism, sentimentality, and showbiz. At the center of that number is the piece of music that serves as Gypsy’s opening, “May We Entertain You,” which later becomes “Let Me Entertain You.” Its simplicity is deceptive; the phrase “Let me entertain you” holds no special cleverness on its own but means one thing when sung by an overeager child of seven and something else entirely when worked over by a dazzling stripper in her twenties. The show is now so famous that it’s hard to appreciate the shock that must have rippled through the audience late in the second act when Louise, now Gypsy Rose Lee, cannibalizes her baby sister’s idiotic theme song and turns it into an irresistible siren’s call of sex and sin.
As opening numbers go, Gypsy’s does the most with the least. The song, fully integrated into the scene that surrounds it, sets up a vanished world, introduces us to the key relationships in the piece, sets up a stake, hints at the themes of neurotic family ties and their consequences, makes clear the storytelling concept of a vaudeville show, and brings onstage a hugely larger-than-life character whose possibly insane ambitions will power the evening. Five minutes into it, we’re dying to know everything that will happen next. And, indeed, what happens next is demonstrated by the song itself, which keeps morphing into something stranger and more powerful as the evening works its way home.
* * *
Sondheim and Laurents had their first hit with West Side Story, which opened in 1957. Gypsy followed in 1959. Meredith Willson’s The Music Man opened right after the former, and it was still running when the latter closed. West Side and Gypsy made people think and empathize. The Music Man just made them feel good; quite naturally, it ran longer than the two Laurents-Sondheim shows combined. But let’s not be smug about its popularity. It’s a terrific piece of work and has a brilliant, unique opening number.
Most every musical theater fan thinks this opening number, named “Rock Island” for the railroad on which it takes place, is about a train. And in one way, it is. Meredith Willson, who had been a piccolo player in John Philip Sousa’s famous marching band, wanted to write a knowing but nostalgic love letter to the lost world of his youth in small-town Iowa. As befits a former marching band musician, his writing gifts had a lot to do with rhythm. His music starts with percussion, and his show starts with a percussive idea: the curtain goes up on a railroad car sitting on the tracks one stop away from River City, as a conductor announces its imminent departure. There is no music, just the accelerating rhythm of the passengers’ voices jabbering as the train lurches forward from a stop and gradually reaches cruising speed, powered by the chuffing steam locomotive. Right away we are located, happy to be in the presence of this postcard world, and delighted by a conversation that sounds perilously close to nonsensical. The word “cash” serves all the necessary purposes of sounding like a train, with its click-clack beginning and sh at the end that gives us the steam escaping.
The car is populated by salesmen whom we’ll never see again, and the conceit of the number is that simply by eavesdropping on their gossip—small-minded, self-interested bickering—we will learn everything we need to know about what this show is going to be. In some senses, the number is just an exercise in onomatopoeia. The opening lines go like this:
Cash for the merchandise, cash for the button hooks
Cash for the cotton goods, cash for the hard goods
This gets the train going, and then it speeds up to the rattling tempo of a skep
tical salesman asking
Look, whatayatalk. Whatayatalk, whatayatalk, whatayatalk, whatayatalk?
But the salesmen in question aren’t just rhythm; they’re philosophy and politics in motion. As the number progresses, quickening in tempo and delighting in its own ability to make meaning out of sound, we learn a lot. These men are frightened: frightened of change and frightened of time passing them by. We’re in a world that is lurching scarily toward modernity, away from safe, old-fashioned values into a new America of mass production and homogeneity. Like Gypsy, The Music Man is about a world in transition and the instability that ensues.
Why it’s the Model T Ford made the trouble,
Made the people wanna go, wanna get, wanna get up and go …
Who’s gonna patronize a little bitty two by four kinda store anymore?
The salesmen are virtually in mourning for the passing of their own time and place:
Gone with the hogshead cask and demijohn, gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan, gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce
By this time we’re getting quite a picture. The early twentieth-century imagery of Norman Rockwell’s America is everywhere. (Even in 1957, when the show opened, it’s doubtful that anyone on Broadway could have told you what a tierce was—it’s a wine cask holding forty-two gallons.) But audiences, most of whom had never seen a Model T or a cracker barrel in their lives, were feeling quite stricken by the loss, and quite charmed. This was going to be a wonderful evening. The world of the show was as attractive as an old magazine cover, at least from a distance; its rhythmic technique was irresistible. Best of all, modern theatergoers didn’t really share the salesmen’s concerns. The automobile, not to mention the Uneeda Biscuit, which also comes in for a skeptical going-over in the number, were by now fixtures of our daily existence; they made things better, not worse. It just gave us pleasure to visit a place where old-fashioned people found such everyday things threatening to their very way of life. And it told us, without saying so explicitly, that The Music Man was going to be about conservative small-town life challenged by newer, less reliable values. We didn’t know exactly how that was going to happen, but we sensed it, and the number was only 70 percent done. In the last 30 percent, Willson takes care of the rest of the job:
