by Jack Viertel
One form of post-show-tune music spent decades waiting in the shadows for the theater to realize its value.
By employing rap instead of earlier rock forms, Hamilton solved the narrative challenge far more elegantly than most previous rock musicals. It was no doubt an enormous challenge to tell the story of the Founding Fathers and the birth of the United States partially in a form that is built out of contemporary street language (Lin-Manuel Miranda spent six years writing it), but at least it’s a form steeped in an assertive need to communicate events and attitudes, not just emotions. Lyrically, rap is in some ways more closely tied to the protest songs of Guthrie and Dylan than it is to conventional rock. It wants to talk about life in America as it really is lived on the margins of society and chronicle the struggle to move toward the center of power. And in the United States, “the melting pot where nothing melted,” according to the Rabbi in Angels in America, that story has always been ours to tell.
Hip-hop and rap have been with us for thirty-five years or more, but as usual, Broadway turned a deaf ear until an artist came along who could marry the two forms. Miranda, whose earlier musical In the Heights won the Tony but seemed in some ways like an ambitious warm-up for something else, is a young man with his feet in two different worlds. Born and raised in the Inwood section of Manhattan on the edge of Washington Heights (once heavily Irish but now dominated by Dominican and other Latino populations), he attended Wesleyan University and was captured on video singing “To Life” from Fiddler on the Roof to his bride at their wedding. It’s hardly surprising that he was drawn to Alexander Hamilton, a Caribbean immigrant who had to fight his way into early American society. Brash and politically insensitive, arrogant and brilliant, sometimes right but never in doubt, Hamilton made a great musical protagonist, part Harold Hill, part Madame Rose, and all American.
Hamilton was not the first musical about the founding of the nation; it was at least the fourth. Rodgers and Hart’s Dearest Enemy dates back to 1925 and contained the pop hit “Here in My Arms,” which certainly didn’t sound like a Revolutionary War tune. Arms and the Girl in 1950 covered the same territory with less success, though it produced a song with the memorable title “A Cow and a Plough and a Frau,” which sounds like nothing so much as a ’50s show tune. 1776, produced in 1969, was generally celebrated (it ran for years) as a fresh take on musical theater and heralded for its willingness to tell the story of the creation and signing of the Declaration of Independence in music while ignoring most of the conventions of the form. Much of its score sounds like an updated take on Gilbert and Sullivan and John Philip Sousa, but it clearly has no desire to echo the actual music of the late eighteenth century. Similarly, Hamilton tells the story of then in the musical language of now. And while 1776 concerned itself at least to some degree with issues of slavery and the evils of imperialism (it was produced during both the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War), Hamilton is preoccupied with issues of immigration, gun violence, race as a defining factor of outsider culture, and the question of who does and does not get to be president. In other words, it’s about today, just like all shows tend to be, no matter when they are set. In that sense, it’s a direct descendant of Oklahoma!
It would probably be foolish to suggest that Broadway is now in for a series of hip-hop musicals. Like Show Boat back in 1927, Hamilton is unlikely to have many immediate imitators. But in a new way, the musical field is wide open on the street, and anything can happen.
At the moment, this has led to a bifurcated Broadway sound. On the one hand, there continues to be a “theater music” tradition, led by serious—sometimes overserious—composers like Jason Robert Brown, Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel, and others. They are composers in the classic sense, but by and large they haven’t achieved repeated or sustained popular success. On the other hand, there are the writers for whom rock, guitar-based and otherwise, is a natural language, if not their only one. Miranda, Alan Menken, Marc Shaiman, Robert Lopez, and their compatriots have created a new Broadway sound that owes less to the Golden Age than to the Top 40. They may not be pop songwriters themselves, but as often as not, pop music is the raw material from which they draw inspiration.
Disney’s animated features unit came back to life after a long and depressing dry spell when Menken and Howard Ashman, fresh from Little Shop of Horrors, turned out The Little Mermaid, structured like a classic Broadway show but sounding like a pop pastiche. Menken and Ashman followed it up with Beauty and the Beast, and when the Times theater critic Frank Rich described Beauty as the best musical of the season even though it was a movie, Disney decided to go into the theater business. The stage version of the film was hardly a critical success, but it ran for five and a half years, by which time Disney had bought and restored the derelict New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-second Street, which inaugurated the resurrection of Times Square. The premiere production at Disney’s new live theater headquarters was The Lion King, which Disney fitted out with Broadway talent instead of the theme park practitioners who had staged Beauty. The Lion King managed to deliver—thanks to its director, Julie Taymor—a level of imagination that overcame everyone, including the critics. It’s possible that The Lion King, a twenty-first-century show that relies on the most ancient of theatrical techniques—masks and myths—as well as the most technologically modern ones, will outlive everyone who worked on it and its entire original cast. Apparently, it’s here to stay, like the Empire State Building.
Much of the score was penned by Elton John—an actual rock icon, not a mere Broadway songwriter in the rock tradition. (To be fair, he’s a pianist, not a guitarist.) But his presence on Broadway has led to shows by Sting, Paul Simon, and Cyndi Lauper, who took home a Tony for her Kinky Boots score. We’ve come full circle. For the first half of the twentieth century, theater writers supplied the most potent popular hits. For the second half, rock and rollers supplanted them on the hit parade, while Broadway scores maintained their integrity, but rarely visited the record charts. And in the twenty-first century, the pop writers have invaded Broadway, and the lines have become blurred beyond recognition.
Credit an unwitting Woody Guthrie if you care to; he was a revolutionary in every sense.
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All these new writers have led in some ways to a new musical theater. They’ve taken on the form without having spent time in the trenches, bringing a new energy and a kind of chaos to the process. Figuring out how to tell a meaningful story about compelling characters has not been easy for them, and in some cases it’s not even on their agenda. When successful, they’ve often been guided by veteran book writers, producers, and directors, and still the results are never easy to predict. And the veterans are aging, as veterans do.
Will the classic model for how a Broadway musical is built disappear? Probably not. Will there be more shows like American Idiot that ignore the model? Probably, though it’s worth noting that these relatively indiscriminately plotted and scored shows, no matter how popular their music, have mostly been commercial disappointments, while shows with rock scores but sturdier plots and characters, like Spring Awakening and Kinky Boots, have been successful. Even Mamma Mia!, which makes no real effort to integrate its book and score, somehow makes audiences care for its characters. Who knows what it all portends? In this relatively uncharted territory, Broadway keeps looking for answers, one energetic, if uncertain, step at a time.
And that’s the gazooka.
Notes
Tuning Up: or, How I Came to Write This Book
1. I acknowledge poetic realism, and the greatness of O’Neill, Wilder, Williams, Miller, Albee, Tony Kushner, and August Wilson, of course—that’s our other national theater.
1. Overture
1. Patrick Gilmore, Alessandro Liberatti, Patrick Conway, Giuseppe Creatore, W. C. Handy, and John Philip Sousa were all popular bandleaders at the turn of the century. Liberatti and Creatore were Italian immigrants, Gilmore and Conway were Irish, Handy was African Americ
an (and unlikely to have been welcomed at such an event, had it actually taken place), and Sousa was not only an early employer of The Music Man’s author but was also the inventor of a marching band tuba, which is worn around the waist and, unsurprisingly, is called the sousaphone. You can see them during any worthy halftime show even today.
2. It seems to be a classic American theme that the zany, unconventional family is to be treasured and is inevitably under assault from the staid and the stuffy. Plots built around an impending marriage between a dull outsider and a waffling descendant of a wild and unique family include not only You Can’t Take It with You but also The Royal Family, Arsenic and Old Lace, and others. The related but somewhat broader notion that the inmates are saner than the asylum keepers fueled both Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle and the almost equally short-lived musical King of Hearts. In La Cage aux Folles, the idea was adapted for political purposes: the “unconventional” family consisted of two gay men, and the “stuffy” outsiders were bigoted homophobes. But the plot was the same.
6. Bushwhacking 1: Second Couples
1. To be fair, Hammerstein had been thinking about this since the latter part of his operetta career. In 1927’s Show Boat, his earliest attempt to treat a serious subject in a musical, there are actually four couples. Magnolia and Gaylord Ravenal take the romantic leads, while Frank and Ellie, a specialty act on the show boat, fill out the soubrette/comedian responsibilities. Joe and Queenie, the African American couple, carry both entertainment and thematic work. But there is also the dissembling interracial couple—Julie and Steve, who personify the theme of racial disharmony and the dangers of challenging it. These are the real ancestors of Liat and Lieutenant Cable.
2. There is a practical consideration at work in The King and I as well. Neither Gertrude Lawrence nor Yul Brynner, who played the leads, was a particularly strong singer. In flipping the tone, if not the purpose, of the second couple, R&H could provide some lovely, and beautifully sung, ballads for the show instead of comic ditties.
9. Adelaide’s Lament: Stars
1. There weren’t a lot of Mermans, although Pearl Bailey had the same proclivities. In the short-lived House of Flowers she managed to sweep up a couple of songs intended for other performers and get them for herself. But, unlike Merman, she was a dominant force on Broadway only once—when she took over the leading role in Hello, Dolly!
17. I Thought You Did It for Me, Momma: The Next-to-Last Scene
1. My first dramaturgical note, at age sixteen, was delivered, unasked for, to Al Selden, the producer of Man of La Mancha. His daughter and my sister were roommates at boarding school, and he invited our whole family up to see the show’s tryout at the Goodspeed Opera House. When he asked how I liked the show, I advised him to cut “The Impossible Dream.” I still think the world might be better for this, but it was a bad note as far as the show’s success was concerned. And the song has sold millions, of course.
18. You Can’t Stop the Beat: The End
1. Among the most effective quiet ones, I’d count Jelly’s Last Jam and Caroline, or Change, both brought to life through the imagination of the director George C. Wolfe. Lin-Manuel Miranda has acknowledged that it was Caroline’s last moment that inspired Hamilton’s—an unexpected left turn in which Hamilton’s wife takes center stage after her husband’s death, to conclude the evening in an unforgettable hush.
19. Curtain Call: How Woody Guthrie—of All People—Changed Broadway Musicals Forever
1. He’s best known these days as the lyricist of the Judy Garland movie The Wizard of Oz, and its most famous song, “Over the Rainbow.” Less well known is that he ghostwrote the movie’s glorious next-to-last scene, in which the Wizard gives the Scarecrow his brain (a diploma), the Tin Man his heart (a ticking plastic toy), and the Cowardly Lion his courage (a certificate of bravery). And then he gives Dorothy the message: “There’s no place like home.” It’s a doozy.
2. The real Woody Guthrie’s guitar bore the hand-painted legend “This Machine Kills Fascists” across its soundboard.
3. To be fair, this explosion in popular vernacular American music didn’t happen by itself. It was to a great degree made possible by music promoters and publishers like the legendary A&R man and publishing executive Ralph Peer, who had been working to expose—and profit from—this hidden American treasure trove since the late 1920s.
Listening to Broadway
I was first introduced to Broadway by original cast albums—well before I saw Peter Pan at age almost-six, I could sing “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” in an adenoidal snuffle that was embarrassing enough for my thoughtful parents to record it on their primitive reel-to-reel tape recorder. Thankfully, after some period of entertaining their party guests with it after I was safely in bed, the tape disappeared. I’m deeply grateful.
Original cast albums—never confused with “soundtracks” back then—took up a good portion of the family record shelf, and many of them actually were albums: booklets with multiple cardboard sleeves, each containing a 78 rpm disc with a single song on each side. That’s how I first heard Oklahoma! and Carousel, even though long-playing records were available beginning in 1948, the year before I was born. Guys and Dolls we had on an LP, with that strangely flat sound that seemed to be a hallmark of Decca’s early cast recordings. Brigadoon we had. And Finian’s Rainbow. Soon The Pajama Game was added, with its racy Peter Arno cover—intriguing even to a five-year-old like me, though I couldn’t have said exactly why.
I loved the records. I loved the look of the labels and the cover design almost as much as I loved the songs themselves. They were full of promise. But all of that was a long time ago. What remains today is the music, now available on CD or, more likely, as a download direct to whatever device you play music on. And for Broadway scores, the choices can be bewildering. You can hear Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, which makes a certain amount of sense, but also in Japanese, which I suppose makes perfect sense if you are Japanese. Since I’ve referenced and quoted from so many theater songs in this book, I thought there might be some value in listing the recordings that have given me particular pleasure, and a few that have been disappointments. So some thoughts—personal and by no means encyclopedic—about what to listen to seemed a worthwhile addendum. For the most part, as the reader will note, I prefer the original cast album, which tends to capture a show at its freshest. Not all these recordings are in print at the moment, but most can be found—dealers in used recordings abound on the Internet.
I put the shows in the order in which I refer to them in the book, rather like the cast members in the playbill who are listed “in order of appearance.” And I began by listing only the shows that I had quoted from, on the theory that you have to draw the line somewhere. The resulting list had a pleasant jumbledness to it—it’s neither alphabetical nor chronological and, without the preceding pages as a reference point, would seem to have been made by pulling titles out of a hat. And what’s wrong with that? But at the end of the day I had to confront certain realities. I’ve not quoted a lyric from South Pacific, but I have quoted one from The Wedding Singer. How can you have a list of cast albums denoting anything useful that includes the latter but not the former? Why Flora the Red Menace but not Bye Bye Birdie? Why Annie but not Annie Get Your Gun? So at the end of the list is a second one, including the most obvious shows that are missing from the first. I hope that goes some distance to repairing the whimsical—not to say chaotic—nature of what follows.
1. Overture
The Music Man
Sometimes casting is the paramount consideration in which album to choose, and with The Music Man the combination of Robert Preston and Barbara Cook makes the original Broadway cast album the only real choice. A British cast album has some demo tracks performed by the songwriter, Meredith Willson, but if you’re going to choose only one, it’s Preston and Cook, backed by a host of terrific Broadway second bananas, i
ncluding David Burns and Pert Kelton. Preston, in particular, was born to make music out of Willson’s percussive style, and it’s almost impossible to hear the songs in your head without hearing his voice. In fact, it’s almost impossible to hear his voice in your head without hearing the rhythmic alarm about trouble in River City. Watch him in an old Western and see if you can keep the sound of The Music Man from pleasantly intruding.
Originally recorded by Capitol, a label that never captured the spirit of an overall show, as well as by Columbia (where the producer Goddard Lieberson and, later, Thomas Z. Shepard, understood exactly how to make you feel you were attending the actual show), it nonetheless is indispensable.
