The Secret Life of the American Musical

by Jack Viertel

  Brooks labored on a couple of new songs and new spots to put them, but they seemed relatively tame and inconsequential. And a reprise on its own wouldn’t cut it. This had to be something new and big. A big new idea. And no one had one. Instead, they created a number that recycled the story so far and repurposed snippets of songs and dialogue that had already occurred. You couldn’t call it a reprise, because it reprised not one number, but the entire show. It required very little in the way of new scenery—Max got hauled off to jail after the unexpected success of his musical revealed the fraud of how it had been financed, and Leo, who should also have been in jail, has run off to Rio with Ulla.

  Alone and depressed, Max receives a cheerful postcard from Leo, which enrages him and sets off “Betrayed,” a tour de force for a comic. Lane got to play, briefly, almost all the important characters in the show, play little scenes with himself, use multiple voices and vocal ranges, and generally create mayhem for five minutes. And the audience adored him. Problem solved. “Betrayed” also created a seemingly unmendable break between the two partners, the mending of which gave the show its satisfying conclusion.

  The number was a nightly challenge, and Lane gave it his all, eventually wearing down his vocal cords. And it’s not a number just anyone can make work, which makes the show tricky to remount. But it fulfilled the musical’s destiny in an original way, helped make it famous, and got the show to its next-to-last scene.

  * * *

  Like The Producers, Gypsy is about a nonromantic relationship between two characters—mother and daughter, in this case—and faces a similar challenge in its second act. Gypsy needed to save Ethel Merman’s final blast for the 11 o’clock spot, practically at the final curtain. Gypsy had an additional challenge; daughter Louise doesn’t become an important character until almost the end of Act 1. Her sudden rise to power in Act 2 needs its own moment of glory. And if mother and daughter are ever going to meet face-to-face and have it out with each other, we need to see Louise actually become Gypsy Rose Lee.

  The show had already done a brilliant time-lapse sequence in Act 1 using a strobe-light-flickering imitation of a silent movie to have the children in Madame Rose’s troupe replaced, invisibly, but in front of the audience’s eyes, with the older actors who would play them in late adolescence. Now the authors and director had to pull another rabbit out of the hat to get Louise from fledgling—and terrified—stripper in a tenth-rate midwestern burlesque house to queen of the striptease at the world-famous Minsky’s in New York. They saw it as an opportunity for the main event, and, as with The Producers decades later, they retrofitted material that had already been heard in the show. They used “Let Me Entertain You” in an entirely new and shocking way. This, after all, had been Baby June’s number, the kind of song a little kid sings when she’s dragged out to entertain the relatives at Thanksgiving:

  And if you’re real good

  I’ll make you feel good

  I want your spirits to climb

  So let me entertain you

  And we’ll have a real good time.

  We’ve been hearing it all night but never imagined what it might mean if sung by a gorgeous young woman who is shedding her clothes in front of us. The joke’s on us, but it’s a sick joke, and worthy of Madame Rose’s psychopathic tendencies.

  The writers and the director-choreographer, Jerome Robbins, fashioned a montage that takes the audience across the country as Louise learns her craft, gains confidence, begins to inject a sense of humor into the act, and perfects the art of taking over the stage with body language and attitude. In a final burst of cheesy glory, we’re presented with Gypsy Rose Lee at Minsky’s, paying tribute to Eve in the Garden of Eden, complete with a chorus of semiclad showgirls hurling apples at the audience so that we might all take a bite, so to speak.

  When the number begins, Louise is a kid who stumbles onto the stage, in a pinned-up dress and borrowed silk gloves that were supposed to be used at her mother’s aborted wedding. By the number’s conclusion, she has earned everything she has gotten—an astronomical salary, a mink or two, a photo story in Vogue, and an ornate dressing room, complete with private maid and obsequious press agent. And she waits in that dressing room, ready for the inevitable fight with her mother—for a next-to-last scene that will quickly deteriorate into possibly the most memorable shouting match in any musical.

  The main event, remember, isn’t the main event. It’s a walloping preamble that gets us down to brass tacks.

  * * *

  Guys and Dolls, that tossed-together masterpiece, has perhaps the most irrelevant main event of all, and yet it satisfies more than most. It’s a song that could easily have been snipped from the score and no one would have ever known—but what a loss to humanity that would be. “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” has absolutely no business in the show’s plot—either of its plots. It’s sung by a lovable but tertiary character, and its purpose is purely to entertain—to top, if possible, “Luck Be a Lady.” This is one of the rare occasions in which both big noises in Act 2 are production numbers.

  The setup is as arbitrary as can be. Sky Masterson has won his bet on a single roll of the dice at the conclusion of “Luck Be a Lady,” and after Nathan Detroit has been appropriately upbraided by Miss Adelaide in the comedy number “Sue Me,” we find ourselves at the Save-a-Soul Mission. All the gamblers from the sewer come trooping in for a soul-saving session—Sky’s bet to save Sarah’s reputation was that they’d have to report if he rolled a winner. Their presence is supposed to prove the viability of the mission itself, and the mission is the show’s stake. If so many gamblers are interested in salvation, how can the sourpuss General Cartwright possibly justify closing the place? And as long as the place stays open, Sarah will be a heroine, have a reason to be grateful to Sky—and keep her job.

  The problem is that someone—anyone—has to appear actually to be contrite. But the only thing these crapshooters are feeling bad about is that they lost this particular roll of the dice. So who, to save Sky’s relationship with Sarah, is going to make something up on the spot? After a couple of failed attempts, it falls to Nicely-Nicely Johnson to think on his feet and give out with his glorious tenor voice. In the original production the rotund and irresistible Stubby Kaye played Nicely, and he got the call.

  “It happened to me kinda funny … like a dream,” he says, stalling for time. And then inspiration strikes. “That’s it—a dream!”

  I dreamed last night I got on the boat to heaven

  And by some chance I had brought my dice along …

  And that’s all you really need to know, because a man on his way to heaven with a pair of (probably loaded) dice in his pocket is going to have a lot to answer for, especially if he’s traveling with a boatload of the blessed. Nicely-Nicely tells the story of how he tried to gamble with these folks, and to get them drunk in the process, and how the little boat foundered in the waves and he was tossed out of it, certain to drown. And that’s when he came to his own salvation.

  And I said to myself sit down

  Sit down, you’re rockin’ the boat

  And the devil will drag you under

  With a soul so heavy

  You’ll never float

  Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down

  Sit down, you’re rockin’ the boat!

  By now the gamblers are up on their feet rocking and swaying and harmonizing on the thrillingly stormy sea of Frank Loesser’s music and lyrics, and an aura of pure joy has descended upon the audience. (Insiders are welcome to kvell over the internal masculine rhyme of “heavy” and “never,” though it’s probably unintentional.)

  The story of Guys and Dolls is hardly resolved, or even pushed along in any meaningful way. And the credibility of the moment does not bear close scrutiny. When the gamblers all take their seats at the end of the number, the plot is exactly where it was when Nicely-Nicely first stood up. But who cares? “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” remains one of the glories
of the American musical’s ability to lift a thousand people out of their troubles and their seats at the same time in a way that no other art form does it. It’s a kind of salvation all by itself.

  It’s rare that a show can get away with this kind of an irrelevant moment this late in the evening. Like horses, who begin to accelerate as they approach the barn that serves as their home after a long ride, the audience is now eager for things to speed up and move in a straight line. If your subplots aren’t packed up by now, God help you. It’s time to cut to the chase, as movies literally do in this spot. But somehow “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” defies this truism; sometimes it even earns an encore.

  * * *

  No show has had more fun creating a main event than The Book of Mormon, because it is a gleeful rip-off, unhidden but unacknowledged, of The King and I.

  Strangely, but no doubt intentionally, these disparate shows, separated by more than half a century, have a lot in common, though one is a sometimes somber drama and the other a generally profane burlesque. One is from the Golden Age, the other distinctly postmodern, created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who invented South Park, and the songwriter Robert Lopez, of Avenue Q (and, later, Frozen). On the surface the shows are polar opposites in style and temperament, yet they share many of the same concerns, and in the end both profess an optimism based on faith. Both are about strangers in a strange land, and both deal with a culture clash beyond the ability of their characters to comprehend. Both trade in stereotypes, though the ones in The King and I are unintentional and went unnoticed back in 1951. Both are about white do-gooders in non-white worlds, trying their best to improve the natives without knowing much about how. The King and I boasts a certain confidence that the white people actually know best, however, while The Book of Mormon is equally certain that they don’t have a clue. This is completely appropriate for the differing eras in which they were created, Hammerstein’s confidence in enlightenment having been replaced over the years by an abiding sense of skepticism and irony about American values, not to mention American foreign policy from Vietnam forward. And yet things work out pretty much the same way in both shows.

  The King and I concerns the efforts of an English schoolteacher, Anna Leonowens, to bring modern Western civilization to Siam in the 1860s. Anna has been summoned by the King, who recognizes that his country has to join the modern world but doesn’t know how to accomplish the task. Once he finds out what it means to be modern, he doesn’t like it—it threatens his authority and his methods of enforcing it. Anna is supposed to be teaching his many wives and children how to enter a new world, but the King fears that in this march toward progress, he’s likely to be left behind. Anna and the King spar for most of the evening about Anna’s demands for a house of her own, but the real argument is about what it means to be civilized, to live in a world of laws, justice, and human compassion.

  Despite these ambitious subjects, the plot is often about the house. There has to be some kind of announced stake for their debate, and while the real stake is the soul of Siam, it’s too abstract and pretentious to argue about. So the house keeps them tussling. Toward the end of the evening, in order to impress the King and show him what it means to escape from a world of slavery and oppression, Anna devises a dance theater entertainment based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The nominal author of the piece is Tuptim, a young woman who has been given to the King as a wife but who is secretly in love with the scholar Lun Tha—they’re the subplot couple.

  This set piece—choreographed by Jerome Robbins—has been retitled “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” (there’s that house again) and is performed by Anna’s students, based on their somewhat eccentric reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. In the plot of The King and I, it serves multiple purposes, including an attempt to impress a delegation of English visitors and a cover for Tuptim and Lun Tha to flee—escape also being the subject of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is a brilliant conceit, weaving the themes of The King and I through the story of Stowe’s novel and staging a uniquely Western tale with uniquely Eastern theater and dance techniques, at least as understood by a Western choreographer. It’s hugely ambitious, utterly successful, and justly famous. But its entertainment purpose is simply to be the main event.

  Full of simple, elegant theatrical gestures, it’s a fully realized minidrama of its own, sweetly funny, touching, and stunningly beautiful to look at and listen to. But it doesn’t meet with the approval of the King, for whom it is performed, because even draped in beauty and wit, its revolutionary bones are all too easily revealed. And when Tuptim’s attempted escape is discovered, we know there will be an awful price to pay, and everyone will finally have to come face-to-face with the conflict of cultures and characters. Anna and the King will have to stare each other down in a final confrontation, and it won’t be about a house.

  It’s hard to overestimate the achievement of “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” and yet, structurally, it is no more or less than true to form. The main event leads to the essence of the conflict. And since the essence is likely to be plainspoken and unadorned, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” like “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” takes on the responsibility of providing some pre-essence excitement.

  * * *

  The King and I opened on March 29, 1951. Flash forward sixty years, practically to the day. On March 24, 2011, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” returned to Broadway in recognizable but thoroughly fractured form as “Joseph Smith American Moses,” the main event of The Book of Mormon.

  Mormon concerns a couple of young Mormon missionaries, Elder Price and Elder Cunningham, who have been sent to Uganda, much as Miss Anna is sent to Siam. And the two of them, in various ways, have made a lot of assumptions about the life and people, all of them wildly off target. Elder Price is shallow and narcissistic; Elder Cunningham is frumpy and antisocial, and given to solving problems by making stuff up. When Elder Price deserts the mission in disgust, Elder Cunningham is left on his own to cope with a population and a set of problems he knows nothing about. But he’s too eager to please, and in an attempt to be liked, he begins to invent passages from the Book of Mormon that will actually speak to the Ugandans about their own problems. In Cunningham’s version of the Book, there are passages about AIDS, about tribal superstitions that it can be cured by having sex with newborns or frogs, about chronic diarrhea, and about superhuman figures who can help—all of them stolen from Star Wars and Star Trek. Suddenly the people, who have thus far found the intrusion of the Mormons an annoyance and an insult, start to take interest. Perhaps Mormonism is useful in their lives after all.

  Eventually they become converts, but to what, exactly? Elder Cunningham’s teachings are a wild and unlikely grab bag of ideas pulled from sci-fi movies, TV shows, comics, and whatever else he can remember about the detritus he wasted his youth consuming. It all comes in handy, the Ugandans never having heard of Yoda or the starship Enterprise. Soon he finds himself with a lovely Ugandan girlfriend and a flock of followers. The Mormon leadership back home is so impressed by the reports of progress in Uganda that they deem it necessary to pay a visit. And to entertain them, a play is created, detailing the life of the Mormon founder Joseph Smith and incorporating Mormon teachings—entirely invented, in this case, not by Joseph Smith but by Elder Cunningham himself, borrowing heavily from multiple sources.

  The idea of doing a play within a play is hardly new, of course. It dates back well before The King and I, at least to the late 1500s and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and is a major feature of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But Mormon’s creators didn’t want to just do a play within a play—they wanted to wreak a little extra havoc while they were at it. In the style of South Park and The Simpsons, Mormon takes delight in creating spot-on parodies of the pop culture that surrounds it, and takes down a number of Broadway musicals just for fun, including Wicked, The Music Man, and, vividly, The Lion King. When it came time to create the main event, “The Small House of Uncle
Thomas” was a sitting duck.

  The play’s codirector and choreographer, Casey Nicholaw, is himself a man with a bent for parody—he once incorporated a small but unmistakable chunk of Swan Lake into a dance number in Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle. And the opportunity to “do” Jerome Robbins was too ripe to pass up. He lifted some specifics involving sheets of China silk, onstage percussion instruments, and a set design that was a thatched hut version of its beautiful Siamese forebear, but had the greatest fun simply staging everything that Elder Cunningham had taught. Like the version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in “Small House,” “Joseph Smith” was gleefully distorted, but this time twice: once through the lens of the local population’s understanding and a second time by the fact that the Mormon story itself had been entirely exploded and reinvented by the man who taught it. (At least Anna had the good grace to try to get Uncle Tom’s story right.)

  In Cunningham’s version of the story, Joseph Smith introduces himself by announcing that he has AIDS and is going to “fuck this baby” to be cured.

  At this moment, God appears and commands: “Joseph Smith! Don’t fuck a baby. I will cure your AIDS if you fuck this frog.” God offers Joseph a stuffed frog, and we’re off and running—downhill, needless to say. The Mormon authorities are appropriately appalled, but the performance continues into a vortex of profanity, sacrilege, and scatology. In about six minutes (“Small House” runs thirteen, not that it matters), the entire Mormon story is torn to shreds and replaced by one that, while it reaches an all-time high in vulgarity, is no more or less likely to be true than any other religious myth. And that, of course, is the entire point of the show itself. Elder Cunningham has invented a self-sufficient cosmology, full of chaotically assembled borrowings from other cosmologies and contemporary cultures and mores, as most religions are. He has inadvertently become Moses himself, with his own set of somewhat shocking tablets.