The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

  Not surprisingly, we’re in the hands of some insecure people—this is the theater, after all. The question we’re being asked is: Do we see them as individuals or, as the title suggests, as a chorus line? And that’s the question the show keeps trying to dig deeper into—that’s the subject. The stake is the job. The plot, such as it is, is about whether one of the older auditionees can get back into the chorus after having briefly been a headliner. It’s the weakest element of the evening, especially tied, as it is, to her former relationship with the dictatorial director. And, as is typical, it isn’t hinted at in the opening. Instead, Bennett keeps after the general sense of ego, anxiety, and economic precariousness of the whole line. After a third combination, the dancers have changed their minds about their performances:

  God, I think I’ve got it.

  I think I’ve got it.

  I knew he liked me all the time …

  I’ve got to get this job!

  In other words, we’re listening to a stream-of-consciousness internal monologue, musicalized—people berating themselves, then pumping themselves up, internal vulnerability masked by external self-confidence. And, of course, that’s what makes them irresistible characters, even if we don’t know much about them individually. Bennett drives the number to a fever pitch in a way that suggests a huge climax, but then, as the audience is cheering, he pulls the rug out from under it in a wonderful way. To a series of repeating stings, each dancer places an eight-by-ten glossy in front of his or her face. Now we’re looking at the sales tool, not the person. And then, one performer slowly pulls it away, shows his face, and, as the music turns soft and slow for the first time, asks:

  Who am I anyway?

  Am I my résumé?

  That is a picture

  Of a person I don’t know …

  Oh, God, I need this show.

  And, suddenly, we know we’re going to get to know them.

  * * *

  Because the number is flashy and comes at the audience in a torrent of sound and fury, the ideas in it need to be simple, clear, and telling. And they are. A group of hungry young dancers has shown up to audition for a musical, and they won’t all be hired. We in the audience have never stopped to consider who they might be, how hard they must work, how insecure their lives are both economically and emotionally, and tonight we are going to be shown what they pay for our pleasure. So do we want to stay and learn? You bet we do.

  The number is in four sections, each with only a single purpose: the work, the need for the job, the brave insecurity of showing oneself to the world, and the introspective question: Who am I, and what should I try to be? It’s almost impossible not to be touched by Bennett’s larger question, because he himself had been an individual dancer in the line, giving up his individuality to a choreographer’s vision. Only after that did he graduate to being the man who shapes the line, who expresses his vision by removing the individuality of others.

  It’s striking that in discussing A Chorus Line, virtually everyone describes it as Michael Bennett’s show. There was, after all, a composer, a lyricist, and a book writer: Marvin Hamlisch, Edward Kleban, and James Kirkwood. And all of them did capable jobs. But this show, more than any other, ratified a fact of life on Broadway: the creative control center had moved from the authors to the directors. And in some ways the center has never really moved back (although one could argue that it should). Robbins and Abbott and Gower Champion undoubtedly influenced the shows they worked on as much as any directors ever have. But by the mid-’70s, even Broadway was being infected by the auteur theory, and directors—Bennett, Hal Prince, and Tommy Tune—became very glamorous. Only Stephen Sondheim matched their allure, until the 1980s, that is, when the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the director Trevor Nunn, and the producer Cameron Mackintosh collaborated on a series of British megamusicals and each of their names became its own brand.

  A Chorus Line marked the passage of time in another way that suggests Bennett uniquely understood audiences’ minds in the mid-’70s. Traditionally, shows began with opening numbers, after which they introduced the principal desire of the hero in something industry people call the “I Want” song—a solo number in which the protagonist tells the audience what’s driving her or him. That spot, usually the second song in the show, is the subject of the next chapter of this book. But A Chorus Line couldn’t wait. Its opening number is its I Want song. And it also announces the plot. It triples the usual pace of things and gets us right to the point: these are the heroes and heroines of our evening. They’re at an audition. They want—nay, must—have this job. Ready, set, go.

  The movement-driven concept musical had replaced the musical play, and the song plot of a typical Broadway show had begun to telescope inward as the audience—nourished on a new kind of music, armed with new high-speed receptors, and living in a brave new world—demanded unabated acceleration. Speed, pulse, action, and texture were all layered together, testing the limits of sensory overload. It was a new kind of opening number, and musicals will always need to begin somewhere. But just like that, with one supercharged musical smash, the Golden Age of classic Broadway had vanished into the mist, like Brigadoon itself.

  3. The Wizard and I

  The “I Want” Song

  “All I want,” explains the wet, bedraggled, all but homeless Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle, “is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air.”

  It’s a simple enough desire, touching in its clarity and modesty, but apparently unachievable. And to whom does Eliza turn for these simple creature comforts? To a bilious, obnoxiously witty upper-class bachelor who has his own desires—such powerful ones that they have left him permanently on edge.

  “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?!” he bellows after hearing her mewling on the curb. Eliza, of course, can’t speak proper English, and Henry Higgins isn’t likely to provide for her simple creature comforts until she learns, and maybe not even then. Her “want” seems warm, human, and tender. His seems arbitrary, snobbish, and intolerant. But, of course, it’s not that simple. Higgins, the linguist, disdains the lower-class butchers of language as barbarians. In his own semi-blind, hopelessly elitist way, he is seeking a civilized, respectful society. Eliza wants a couple of chocolates before a good night’s sleep in a warm bed. In some ways that’s also the mark of a civilized, respectful society, but expressed from such an opposite point of view that there seems no real likelihood that the two of them will ever see things the same way—a way that might lead to, say, kissing. How they manage to get together, then, is likely to be a pretty good story. Why? Not simply because their desires are the same while appearing to be opposite, but because they are so clearly expressed. Considering its deliberate pace and elegant, stately approach, My Fair Lady has a surprising amount of energy, because both of its protagonists are driven by a wild passion to get something they don’t have, something that seems perpetually out of reach.

  * * *

  There are no inviolable rules for the creation of enduring, popular musicals, possibly except this one. The hero has to want something that’s hard to get, and go after it come what may. The sooner the audience understands this, the better. The I Want song is the mark of an active hero. It may seem obvious, and it may actually be obvious. A lot of these songs come right out and say it: “I want to be a producer,” “All I need is one good break,” “I’m the greatest star, but no one knows it,” “On the other side of the tracks, that’s where I’m longing to be.” Subtlety has never been a hallmark of the American musical. And, to be fair, in some exceptional cases it’s not a song at all but a dialogue scene. Still, the I Want song is a convention. In the case of My Fair Lady, Eliza’s “want” is obvious, and Higgins’s, for all his bluster, is subtler; he never actually says, “This is what I want,” he merely complains that he doesn’t have it, while making us laugh at his furious, blind belief in its value. But his meaning is clear, and that’s half the battle. The other half is this: for
a show to be worth our time and money, we probably have to hope our heroes get what they want, and it has to be damned hard to get. Is the goal something we care about? Or is it too trivial, selfish, or muddled for us to get involved? Is the protagonist up to the task? Is it too easily achieved? If the hero doesn’t have to work very hard, we won’t care very much. In the case of My Fair Lady, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe had the assistance of George Bernard Shaw, who, in the original play, Pygmalion, draws the characters and the conflict with brilliant clarity. But Lerner and Loewe managed to crystallize the play musically and transform it from a comedy of ideas with a bit of an implied romance into a glamorous romance with a number of provocative ideas. It was a titanic hit.

  Four years later, they tried again with Camelot, and, despite the pedigree of the source material (T. H. White’s novel The Once and Future King) and virtually the same creative team, they stumbled badly. Camelot managed to become a hit in its day despite itself, in part through its identification with the idealism of the all-too-brief JFK era, but it isn’t well remembered. One of the principal reasons is that it gets off on the wrong two feet. Its matched pair of I Want songs is even cleverer in some ways than the pair in My Fair Lady. They’re well written, witty, even memorable. But together, they work principally to alienate the audience from the people singing them.

  When the curtain goes up on King Arthur, he is a young, callow man waiting for his bride to arrive in Camelot, a bride he’s never met and doesn’t want to. While he waits, he frets. In “I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight,” he lets us know what he wants—to be left alone. To not get married. To avoid facing the inevitability of kingship, or even responsible adulthood. It’s kind of charming in a way that a king is so terrified, and the lyric is clever and funny. But do we really find this man worth our time? While we’re wondering, who should appear but the prospective bride, the elegant, overbred, and deeply entitled Guinevere. “Where are the simple joys of maidenhood?” she wonders, as she’s about to be married off. She doesn’t want to get married any more than Arthur. She wants to be admired and pampered, and she wants men to fall not simply at her feet but also into their graves, on her behalf. It’s not that “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood” is a bad song, exactly. It’s just a song that reveals a character we don’t want to spend time with. If the future queen Guinevere’s greatest desire in life is expressed when she asks, petulantly, “Shall kith not kill their kin for me? Oh where are the simple joys of maidenhood?” we’re pretty much distanced from her point of view. The song is clever but ultimately poisonous. Unlike with Eliza and Higgins, we don’t care if these people get what they want. They want to be left alone, and our instinct is to oblige them and go get a drink. We’re worried they’re going to bore us with their clever narcissism, and on that point they deliver.

  The impulse behind these songs was undoubtedly a good one: take two immature young people with too much power and too little knowledge of the world, satirize their shallowness, and then, in the play itself, chronicle their coming of age, their understanding of the world as they inexorably experience it. As they acquire the scars of living, and strive—once again, as in My Fair Lady—to civilize the world, we’ll come to appreciate how far they’ve traveled, how noble their ultimate desires really are. Camelot has a great subject. It chronicles the mythical attempt by a young royal family to create a civil society in a world that has so far been dominated by killing, conquest, lust, and greed. It’s no wonder that the young President Kennedy and his spectacular first lady were enchanted by it. It spoke to everything in the president’s program that was directed at humanizing American society, from the civil rights movement at home to the quest for democracy abroad. It was easy to fall in love with the show’s ideas but harder to like the show itself. To make it work, the audience had to get attached at the beginning. You have to get on the ride when the ride starts. In the case of Camelot, Lerner and Loewe depended on cleverness, not on our actual sympathy. The audience almost reattaches when Arthur sings to Guinevere of Camelot itself, in the charming second number of the show—the title song. But in some sense, it’s already too late. And that is Camelot’s curse—it keeps wobbling back and forth between sin and redemption. Audiences admired its brains and ambition, and the loftiness of its goals, but it made them irritable, impressed, and drowsy by turns.

  * * *

  Why do we need these I Want songs at all? Not all forms of storytelling require this early expression of passionate desire. Lots of successful movies and novels concern themselves with protagonists who think they’re perfectly happy the way they are. It may take them a very long time to comprehend their discontent. Clueless, the blockbuster 1995 movie based on Jane Austen’s 1815 novel Emma, underwent a number of attempts to convert it into a musical. To one producer after another, it seemed like a natural. But every incarnation was ultimately doomed by this problem: the heroine starts out happy. Her ignorance of the world is so comically complete that she’s utterly content in her upper-class Beverly Hills world. This wasn’t a problem for the film, which had energetic fun satirizing the morals and mores of overprivileged teens living in an ultracomfortable, technologically miraculous, but emotionally empty bubble. And the novel has stood the test of time, heaven knows. But the musical simply couldn’t be brought to life.

  Self-satisfied protagonists aren’t the only challenge. There is a whole other class of stories that stubbornly resist adaptation. These concern the Everyman thrust into a situation he’s not equipped to handle—a nice enough fellow who makes an inadvertent wrong turn into adventureland. I struggled mightily and futilely for ten years on one of these—Jack Finney’s wonderful time-travel novel Time and Again. In it, a vaguely discontented but unmotivated adman is thrust back into the nineteenth century, where he finally engages with the world in an era a hundred years before his own. The novel is a fascinating mystery-romance full of period detail and surprising plot developments. The front end of it is kept alive by the common device of having the protagonist, Simon Morley, narrating it and continually promising magical events to come. His constant unpreparedness for what is about to happen to him is entertainment enough, because he’s the one describing it to us. But without his narrative voice, we were sunk. No matter what my collaborators and I did (I was the book writer), and despite a wonderful, sophisticated score, we couldn’t interest anyone in the first half hour, and by then it was much too late. Watching an average Joe wander around New York worrying vaguely about whether he’s wasting his life designing soap ads just doesn’t motivate an audience on Broadway, and why should it?

  In the first volume of his complete lyrics, Stephen Sondheim suggests a reason for this peculiar structural requirement that seems to drive—and be a necessity of—successful shows. “Farces are express trains,” he writes. “Musicals are locals.” They keep stopping for songs, dances, and set changes. If they’re not powered energetically right from the start, the distractions take over completely, and the story gets lost, along with the audience. Novels can often survive on the strength of the author’s voice alone, if it’s strong enough. And we can read at whatever pace we choose, savoring the poetic, breezing through the expositional, taking control of the prose. In the theater, however, the show comes at the audience at the pace of the spoken (or sung) word. Someone has to be gathering up the audience to take them on the journey, right from the start. Hence, the I Want.

  Of course, anything that comes this close to being a basic minimum requirement runs the risk of also becoming a cliché, and audiences are inevitably bored if they think they’ve heard it all before. What keeps these songs fresh? Unique characters, striking situations, and vividly drawn worlds.

  Madame Rose in Gypsy wants to get her two little girls out of Seattle and into the big time—onto the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. Her father wants her to settle down and find a (fourth) husband. Rose isn’t having any of that. In Gypsy’s second scene, she lets him have it:

  Some people can be content,

&
nbsp; Playing bingo and paying rent—

  That’s peachy for some people,

  For some

  Hum—

  Drum

  People to be,

  But some people ain’t me!

  I had a dream,

  A wonderful dream, Poppa,

  All about June and the Orpheum Circuit—

  Gimme a chance and I know I can

  Work it.

  I had a dream,

  Just as real as can be, Poppa.

  There I was in Mr. Orpheum’s office,

  And he was saying to me:

  “Rose!

  Get yourself some new orchestrations,

  New routines and red velvet curtains,

  Get a feathered hat for the baby,

  Photographs in front of the theatre,

  Get an agent—and in jig time

  You’ll be being booked in the big time!”

  There’s nothing generic about Rose. Her specific description of vaudeville defines her and teaches us some things we might not know. You can hear this woman’s passion, her strange combination of savvy and naïveté about show business (she really believes there is a “Mr. Orpheum”), her thirst for life, and her contempt for everyday drudgery. You can also, subtly, hear the era in which she lives—feathered hats, bingo, words like “peachy” and “jig time.”

  * * *

  Rose is impossible to miss, and that’s part of the point of an I Want song. The stage may be full of people singing and dancing, but the I Want song tells the audience, “Watch this one. This is the important one. This is the one with the superhuman passion.” We want our heroes to be somehow heroic.

  At the beginning of West Side Story, we’re introduced to two street gangs of young men—bristling with anger, hostility, clan loyalty, and the danger that goes with those things. They’re the world of the play—an unending gang war for turf that has no real value—and we spend enough time with them to see how that world, defined by poverty, racism, and a grim lack of opportunity, is likely to crush their unbridled energy. They are youth, testosterone, and possibility, but with no outlet for it all, it’s a toxic cocktail.