The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

  After the slap, he exits, leaving her to contemplate what has just happened.

  “I won’t take a chance,” she sings, insisting on her original vision. But we all know what’s going on when people start talking to themselves about not taking chances. Round one has been a technical draw, but Sarah’s bewilderment gives the advantage to Sky. And from the dramatist’s point of view, an awful lot has been accomplished in one conditional love song.

  * * *

  Mike Ockrent, director of Crazy for You and Me and My Girl, among others, developed a number of shows and always insisted that the key to romance in a musical is the inappropriateness of the couple. “If you believe they belong together because they have the same background, the same ideas about life, the same tastes, what’s the point of the show?” he asked. “If you think they have no real chance of getting together, that they’re entirely mismatched, then there’s something to watch. Of course, you know they’ll end up together—it’s a musical—but the question is, how will the story accomplish it? If it’s easy and obvious at the beginning, the audience won’t be there at the end.”

  For Sky and Sarah, the likelihood of a united outcome seems remote, especially because one of them would have to give up everything—a way of life that is complete, ingrained, and seemingly unshakable. Which is pretty much what happens. Like Higgins and Eliza, or, for that matter, Tracy Turnblad and Link Larkin, an ocean of difference has to be crossed before the lovers can become lovers. That’s a journey we believe in—at least for other people—and we want to watch it.

  Frank Loesser was a restless writer who never repeated himself. Having done the essential mug show in Guys and Dolls, he turned his attention to a pastoral operatic romance, The Most Happy Fella. After stumbling with the folktale Greenwillow, he returned with an urban satire of American enterprise, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, for which he won a Pulitzer. Each of these shows contains an original conditional love song idea, and two more of them (let’s leave Greenwillow’s grave undisturbed) are worth at least a brief look.

  In Happy Fella, Tony, an aging immigrant Napa Valley grape grower, tricks a young San Francisco waitress into becoming his mail-order bride by sending her a picture of his handsome, rugged ranch hand, Joe. On the night of her arrival in Napa, an anxious Tony gets drunk and gets in a near-fatal car accident. Not surprisingly, Rosabella, as Tony calls her, ends up in the arms of Joe. That’s Act 1, so the conditional love song between Tony and Rosabella doesn’t occur until Act 2, by which time Tony is in a wheelchair and Rosabella is pregnant by Joe, though married to Tony. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, and the two of them barely know each other.

  Loesser constructs an ingenious musical scene for them in three little acts, in which Rosabella tries to improve Tony’s English. “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance” begins as a simple obligation—Rosabella is nursing the husband she wishes she hadn’t agreed to marry. But before the song is done, Tony has proved his humanity; he’s brought Rosabella’s best friend from San Francisco up to Napa to stave off his young wife’s loneliness, and this gesture, unasked for and unexpected (the friend arrives in the middle of the song), completely changes the temperature. By the time the number has concluded, we’ve gone from feeling that the relationship is hopeless to feeling that it’s somehow fated. Tony’s English hasn’t gotten any better, and it never will. But the two of them have somehow preserved at least the possibility of a happy ending for themselves and the audience.

  The song features something that gives these moments a chance to be fresh: a subject other than love. Rosabella is giving an English lesson. That’s the raw material that makes the emotional connection possible. Other songs in other shows have been written about everything from disputes over horoscopes to baptism rites—as long as the combatants have differing attitudes toward the subject, it hardly matters what the subject actually is. There’s something to talk about.

  In How to Succeed, Loesser again tried something new: he turned the conditional love song into a trio. Observing the grebe-like natural shyness of first approaches, he positioned his young would-be lovers in the elevator of a tall office building and gave them a kind of fairy godmother—the boss’s secretary—who introduces their romantic intentions to the audience as they try to find ways to flirt, while remaining virtually tongue-tied. The song is called “Been a Long Day,” and that cliché serves as its chorus, while the verses are full of the usual comic stumbling and fumbling that presages nest building. In the course of one elevator ride, the deed gets done, though without the narrator, we would have no idea what just happened. It’s a small invention, but it gives great pleasure.

  * * *

  Invention is key to keeping these songs, and the moment they dramatize, fresh. Since it’s a well-worn situation in life as well as in the theater, it’s likely to seem overfamiliar, and freshening it with wit and a different point of view tests a songwriter’s mettle. Stephen Sondheim wrote a terrific conditional love song using a different kind of invention from Loesser: “Your Eyes Are Blue,” which was cut from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. In this case, it’s not just a matter of shyness or communication skills—the lovers themselves have extraordinarily limited brain power. They are, in fact, archetypes from Roman comedy, innocent kids with hormones raging and IQs lagging far behind. Hero, the boy, tries to make Philia, the girl, understand what’s going on between them, but he’s bashful. So he makes up a story. To disguise the identity of his beloved and himself, he puts them in the third person—or tries to—and charmingly fails.

  He sings:

  Once upon a time,

  It happened

  It happened there lived a boy

  Who loved a girl …

  Your eyes are blue …

  And every single night

  He’d see her across the way.

  I’d want to say—

  He’d want to say,

  “Your eyes are blue

  And I love you!”

  But never had they spoken,

  Never had he dared.

  Beautiful as she was,

  I was—he was—

  Scared.

  Hero’s inability to keep himself out of the story is matched by Philia’s difficulties in keeping the story straight at all. She can’t even remember what color the girl’s eyes are—and she’s the girl. In the end, as in Guys and Dolls, but with sweetness instead of tart hostility, the two sing a line together and kiss. But Sondheim constructed the kiss as a missing line in the lyric:

  PHILIA

  When suddenly one day

  She met him.

  He looked so tall.

  HERO

  He felt so small.

  PHILIA

  What did he do

  To break the wall?

  BOTH

  What could he do

  To break the wall?

  (They kiss.)

  And that was all.

  The number was replaced by “Lovely,” an almost equally charming if less clever song, largely because it made a hilarious second-act reprise when sung by Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford, the latter clad in a diaphanous white gown and pretending to be dead (don’t ask). But “Your Eyes Are Blue” is as admirable as it is rarely heard. It’s a textbook example of the kind of thing that Hammerstein crystallized in the bench scene but, at the same time, a complete original.

  * * *

  There is a subset of the conditional love song, which might be called an “aftermath song.” In shows where, for one reason or another, the couple in question never get their crested grebe moment, or don’t have it onstage, we may catch up with them after the first date, or the first encounter, or whatever it is that’s drawn them together. One of them, left alone to contemplate what’s just happened, has our full attention, and an unquiet mind to explore. What happened? What is this I’m feeling? What’s going on in this brain and body that I’ve trusted for so long?

  Because of its multiple plots (four of Grimm’s fai
ry tales and an invented fifth one all woven together by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim), Into the Woods leapfrogs through much of what we think of as traditional structure, seeking inventive solutions, and getting in and out of trouble. Its audacity more than makes up for its occasional murkiness, however, and it is never less than clear thematically. It deals principally with parents and children and the gulf that accompanies the love between them.

  There is, however, time for romantic love as well. Cinderella, returning from her first encounter with the Prince in Into the Woods, comes to a dead halt somewhere on the path back home to ponder her fate. She’s been to the ball, but we haven’t, so she needs to tell us what happened—or at least what’s happening to her.

  Has she lost her shoe, or left it behind on purpose? And if the latter, why? Well, the Prince is from another world, and Cinderella doesn’t think she could ever be a part of that world. But maybe she could. Certainly he could never join hers. So now what? The ambivalence in the song is very much cut from the cloth of conditional love songs—the hope, the anxiety, and the self-doubt are all there, but the form is different. It’s just her and us. And she begins to explain:

  You think, what do you want?

  You think, make a decision.

  Why not stay and be caught?

  You think, well, it’s a thought,

  What would be his response?

  But then what if he knew

  Who you were when you know

  That you’re not what he thinks

  That he wants?

  Cinderella’s mind is racing, but in circles, which is usually what happens when one is smitten. And it’s all happening too fast. Nothing can really be figured out under these conditions. Unlike Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow, who succumb to nature in the moment, Cinderella has dodged that bullet, only to wonder whether she regrets giving the Prince the slip. She’s more like Nellie Forbush, keeping her defenses up until she knows a little more. But she doesn’t know how she’ll learn it. Or what she’ll do when she learns it. So she settles on what seems like the best course of action, which is, of all things, inaction.

  Then from out of the blue,

  And without any guide,

  You know what your decision is,

  Which is not to decide.

  But justifying indecision requires some significant explanation to oneself, making sure not to leave room for self-doubt through reflection or second-guessing. Cinderella has to project certainty and wisdom in a situation where she may actually possess neither. And Sondheim accomplishes this through a dizzying set of rhymes that make her sound emphatic. And what a set of rhymes!

  You’ll just leave him a clue:

  For example, a shoe.

  And then see what he’ll do.

  Now it’s he and not you

  Who is stuck with a shoe,

  In a stew, in the goo,

  And you’ve learned something, too,

  Something you never knew,

  On the steps of the palace.

  As a character, Cinderella shares a lot with Eliza Doolittle. They’re a pair of waifs, each trying to improve her lot and escape her destiny and her family. They’re both headed to a ball, and they find unlikely matches in an upper-class prig and an upper-class prince. But Eliza’s first taste of romantic possibility (it’s barely that) leads not to ambivalence but to uncontrolled—if unrequited—ecstasy. She falls, and hard. “I Could Have Danced All Night” can hardly be justified as a conditional love song, but it’s a not-so-distant cousin.

  Eliza, you may recall, has endured a spirit-crushing tutorial: Henry Higgins’s “instruction” in proper English speech. She’s not the only one to suffer. In one of the most accomplished of all sequences in a musical, Higgins has explored all the various ways he can think of to get her to use “h” and “ai” in their proper pronunciations. He’s had her blowing “h” words at a Bunsen burner, and he’s stuffed her mouth with stones. He’s harangued her; deprived her of sleep, food, and drink; and generally insulted and tortured her for days. His staff is ready to quit, and his friend Colonel Pickering is about to end the friendship. Then, in a final, exhausted attempt, at three in the morning, he switches gears and transforms himself, just for a moment, from brutal tyrant to tender poet-confessor.

  “Think of what you are trying to accomplish,” he says. “The majesty and grandeur of the English language. It’s the greatest possession we have. That’s what you’ve set yourself to conquer.”

  He gives her credit. He makes what she’s doing important to her, instead of simply a means to a better job in a flower shop. He elevates her instead of trying to crush her.

  Like Sarah Brown’s declaration that her lover will never be a gambler, Henry Higgins’s one moment of noble tenderness is a trip wire. For no other apparent reason, the words suddenly come out of Eliza’s mouth as directed, as if she’d been holding out on him all along, waiting to see his heart instead of his lash: “The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain,” she says. And a reckless celebration explodes on the stage. It’s one of those moments of letting go that audiences remember for decades. The buildup has been meticulous and excruciating, and the release is orgiastic. Higgins, in the midst of it, takes Eliza in his arms and does a bit of a gavotte—nothing more than that. But the die is cast. Left alone at the end of the scene, she can’t sit still, can’t calm down, can’t let go of the memory of it. It’s almost four in the morning. She’s supposed to go to bed, and she might be eager to; but not to sleep.

  “I could have danced all night,” she sings blissfully, “and still have begged for more.” The word “begged” is perhaps innocently chosen by Alan Jay Lerner, but it reminds us that there is something intriguingly sadomasochistic about the relationship between Eliza and Higgins. They don’t ever, in the course of My Fair Lady, seem to have an actual sex life, but the give-and-take, the power exchanges that fuel the relationship, the fantasies of beheadings, firing squads, starvation, and beatings that pepper their conversation and their lyrics create something more dangerous that replaces a vanilla romance. They’re suited to each other in a way that neither expected, and they continue to discover and savor it, even at their most antagonistic. In the world of well-mannered Mayfair, there’s something unsettlingly erotic going on between them that never quite gets stated. And looked at through that lens, the final, thrilling high G that concludes “I Could Have Danced All Night” serves as an unforgettable autoerotic orgasm in song. There’s rarely been a sexual moment in a musical that is as simultaneously raw and decorous. It’s not for nothing that the show never becomes irrelevant.

  * * *

  My Fair Lady, in 1956, may have been speaking in code. But as the Golden Age faded and the sexual revolution took hold, the conditional love song’s traditional sense of public decency began to collapse. All that fancy dancing gets less credible in a world where people are having sex first and asking questions in the morning. And musical theater had to learn how to cope, which it started to do when, in 1970’s Company, the hero Bobby wakes up to discover the flight attendant he’s spent the night with is already up and dressing. “Where you going?” he sings plaintively.

  “Barcelona,” she replies.

  He tries to dissuade her but doesn’t have much ammunition:

  BOBBY

  Look, you’re a very special girl,

  Not just overnight.

  No, you’re a very special girl,

  And not because you’re bright—

  Not just because you’re bright.

  You’re just a very special girl, June

  APRIL

  April …

  Oh, well. One thing they didn’t do was dance all night.

  * * *

  In some cases, innuendo replaced the confusions of first encounters. Sex, rather than the possibility of lifelong romance, was the first subject to come up. In City of Angels, the detective Stone is retained by a beautiful but mysterious woman named Alaura and finds himself trying to resist her charms,
but not really. Students of detective fiction, particularly Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, will recognize the situation immediately: Alaura, glamorous and apparently helpless, is up to no good, and Stone will be cautious before taking her into his arms—but not cautious enough.

  In the classic Warner Bros. film of The Big Sleep, Humphrey Bogart played the detective opposite Lauren Bacall’s glamorous heiress. After a tepid sneak preview (this was back in 1946), the director, Howard Hawks, was prevailed upon to go back and shoot more scenes with Bogart and Bacall, who sizzled together and would go on doing so personally and professionally for years. One of the new scenes was an encounter in a restaurant, where the two of them spar ostensibly over the subject of horse racing, while the actual subject hardly stays beneath the surface.

  “Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself,” Bacall says. “But I like to see them work out a little first. See if they’re front runners or come from behind.”

  After assuring Bogie that she sees him as quick out of the gate, it’s his turn to rate her.

  “You’ve got a touch of class,” he says, “but I don’t know how far you can go.”

  “A lot depends on who’s in the saddle,” she shoots back.

  * * *

  The lyricist of City of Angels, David Zippel, who knew a good thing when he heard one, took his inspiration where he found it, changed the subject from thoroughbreds to tennis, and created “The Tennis Song,” a similar match for his detective and client.

  STONE

  You seem at home on the court

  ALAURA

  Let’s say that I’ve played around …

  And then …

  STONE

  I’ll bet you’re a real good sport

  ALAURA

  Shall we say the ball is in your court?

  STONE

  I’ll bet you like to play rough

  ALAURA

  I like to work up a sweat

  STONE

  And you just can’t get enough

  ALAURA

  I’m good for more than one set …