The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (26 page)

It begins when Desiree Armfeldt asks permission of her cantankerous wealthy mother to invite some people down to the mother’s country house for the weekend. It’s not an innocent move. Desiree invites her former lover, Fredrik Egerman, and his young, virgin bride, Anne, with the clear intention of creating an intriguing contrast between Anne’s annoying innocence and her own appealing experience. This sets in motion, among other things, the downbeat of the number. The virgin bride, suspecting the earlier affair, is horrified, while her husband is flattered and intrigued. Anne seeks the counsel of her friend Charlotte, who advises her to be bold—youth will win out. Charlotte then gleefully reveals the plot to her husband, a caddish military man and Desiree’s
current
lover. He, of course, insists on crashing the party. Finally, Egerman’s son, studying for the priesthood, also joins in, talking himself into going along “to observe” the spectacle of human folly, though it’s clear to everyone but him that he’s in love with his stepmother, the virgin bride.

So there’s a lot to look forward to, and Sondheim has a field day, piling expectation on anxiety on expectation as Egerman Sr., Egerman Jr., Charlotte and her husband, Anne, and even Petra, the housemaid, all make preparations to meet their romantic fates, weaving their points of view together at breakneck speed—though it’s never hard to understand the lyrics. In six minutes, Sondheim creates an entire
agitato
playlet, revving up the audience for what might or might not be the door-slamming, secret-passageway, meet-me-in-the-library outcome of such a weekend. In the end, the ensemble joins in, carrying bag and baggage to the cars as the number comes to a surprisingly civilized if very
tutti
conclusion; the curtain falls on a virtual orgy of expectation and suspense.

This is plenty to get you through intermission and back to your seat. As another Sondheim hero marvels in another circumstance, “so many possibilities!”

*   *   *

In a significantly less elegant but more raucous fashion,
The Producers
takes the same tack. The show concerns the efforts of Max Bialystock and his newfound partner, Leo Bloom, to produce the biggest Broadway flop in history, raise much more money than they need, and keep whatever’s left after the show opens and quickly closes. After all, with a flop, investors assume all the money is lost. The entire first act (once they come up with this scheme) involves assembling the elements of the show and raising the aforesaid money from unsuspecting lonely, rich, randy widows from “Little Old Lady Land,” as Max calls it. He means the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan. The closing number celebrates this accomplishment, with nary a word of concern about the obvious likelihood that the results will go horribly wrong, which seems inevitable to the rest of us.

In “A Weekend in the Country,” the characters are filled with anxiety as well as anticipation as they set off for what they know will be an unpredictable and complicated fate. In
The Producers
, the participants are completely innocent of any possibility of mishap—they’re delusionally enthusiastic about the terrible idea they’ve had and feel impervious to failure. In other words, they work in the theater.

The Producers
hearkens back to the era of
How to Succeed
, so perhaps it makes sense that the finale is also a classic
finaletto
(though it’s
not
called that in the playbill), comprising elements of songs that have peppered the first act. This makes sense from a dramaturgical point of view as well as being in period. Since the first act consists of Max and Leo assembling a script, a director, a design team, a spectacularly busty Swedish assistant, and myriad elderly backers, and since each new element has had its own musical number, we should be reminded of how the whole motley team was put together by hearing each one’s music again. And that’s just what happens. The cracks in the plaster are clear to the audience when we observe just how terrible every element of the show actually is going to be, but, of course, that’s exactly what Max and Leo are hoping for. That it may go wrong in a different way—a way none of them can foresee—occurs to nobody but, perhaps, us. So we don’t need a crisis, because the anticipation of one is deliciously ripe in the air and plenty to sustain us.

*   *   *

If
Gypsy
,
West Side Story
,
A Little Night Music,
and even
The Producers
are classically structured shows (well,
The Producers
sort of), Jonathan Larson’s
Rent
, while based on a classic opera, was anything but. Larson worked for many years on what was to become his only significant contribution to the canon (he died at thirty-five just before it began previews) and had a difficult time taming the beast. Though it began as a collaboration with a playwright named Billy Aronson, Larson soon took over the project himself, writing book, music, and lyrics, and often getting tangled in the complexities of a story that was as much about a time and a place—the world of hipster artists on the Lower East Side at the height of the AIDS crisis—as it was about one specific character’s dilemma. Reluctant to give up any of the many tributary story lines that he had created and/or adapted from Puccini’s
La Bohème
, Larson needed help yet resisted offers to reshape the show into a conventional musical. It was, after all, about downtown bohemians living in ambitious, sometimes uncontrolled chaos. If form follows function, why not have a chaotic, uncontrolled evening of ambitious rock-operatic drama? Larson’s reasoning made sense, but the show, in its earliest incarnations, was long and confusing, despite the obvious merits of his vision and his score. Its framing conflict, about the attempts of a community of artists, would-be artists, activists, and would-be activists to resist the takeover of their building by an ambitious former friend who has gentrification on his mind, meandered. But it served as a device for an examination of the lives of determined outsiders, most living with HIV, on borrowed time.

The off-Broadway New York Theatre Workshop developed the piece and eventually presented the premiere, which had been trimmed and rethought—if not always elegantly—to the point where it was wildly exciting to audiences and critics, both despite and because of its flirtations with indirection and even incoherence. Structurally, the show seemed to almost exactly mirror the state of mind of its various oddly connected, sometimes even disconnected characters. And since its story stubbornly resisted a simple description, Larson cleverly created a first-act curtain that encapsulated the underlying emotion of virtually every character in it: defiance in the face of certain defeat.

“La Vie Bohème” paid tribute to
La Bohème
, but more directly to the spirit that sustains outsider communities, dreamers, slackers, and those who would rather be lost in a dangerous world than found in a conventional one. The number invites the entire ensemble to plead the case, beginning with a statement that what they love and aspire to is already gone:

Bohemia? Bohemia’s

A fallacy in your head

This is Calcutta

Bohemia is dead

What follows is a kind of list song, which owes a nod to both Sondheim’s “A Little Priest” from
Sweeney Todd
and, strangely enough, James Rado and Gerome Ragni’s “Ain’t Got No” and “I Got Life” from
Hair.
Its gleeful death mask and its rhyme orgy are Sweeney’s and its catalog of revolutionary values is straight from that other downtown musical.

To loving tension, no pension, to more than one dimension

To starving for attention, hating convention,

hating pretension

Not to mention of course hating dear old mom and dad

What makes “La Vie Bohème” an appropriate curtain moment, in addition to its energy and drive, is the sense of doom driving the heartbeat of it. Like every self-proclaimed creative outpost, the world of
Rent
portends plenty of heartbreak, illness, failure, and death, which somehow always seems to call for a celebration. “La Vie Bohème” is that celebration, made all the more poignant (as was noted continually in the months and years following the show’s transfer to Broadway) by its creator’s sudden demise in the midst of the process. We don’t know how Act 2 will play out, but we’re left with the sense that the entire structure of the community we’ve come to know and care about is on a precipice and not about to stop moving forward. Whether it will go completely over a cliff remains to be seen as the lights snap off onstage and come up on the audience—and that’s plenty.

12. Intermission

When I was first taken to the theater, in 1955, intermission refreshments were limited to a watery form of orange drink served in a waxed cardboard carton. I have never understood why this should have been so. The theater owners, not above figuring out new and different ways to pick up a little extra something from a captive audience, could certainly have done better—heaven knows the movies were already selling a variety of products at inflated prices. But the Broadway theater, as it so often has, stubbornly resisted. The audience, made up almost entirely of New Yorkers who were inured to this pathetic reality, made do with orange drink and, slightly later, a similarly packaged (and similarly watered-down) version of lemonade. In an early—thus far unrepeated—act of petty crime, I stole one of these drinks from the refrigerator that stood across from the men’s room door in the basement of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre during a matinee of
A Thousand Clowns
in 1961.

Jason Robards made me do it. In
A Thousand Clowns
he played Murray Burns, the writer of an awful kiddie TV show called
Chuckles the Chipmunk.
Murray has just quit his job and is spending his unemployed days making fun of the conventional workforce; shouting at the world from his window; seducing an adorable social worker who has come to threaten him with the removal to a foster home of Nick, the nephew he is raising; and generally imparting his unconventional values to the boy, who was exactly my age. Murray’s message seemed to be that the world was wrong and he was right, and if he felt like doing something, he just did it, without apology.

I took the bait. I had seen the refrigerator before taking my seat at the beginning of the play, and I was seated on an aisle in the rear of the theater—perfectly positioned to be the first one down the stairs when the first-act curtain fell.

It was a revolutionary act: I thought the theater should be doing better with concessions, and charging less, and that its failure to do either entitled me to express my dissatisfaction in an act of sticky-fingered protest. And I was thirsty. Capitalism was a bad thing anyhow, though not as bad as the orange drink, which, I admit, tasted a little better when you had boosted it with lightning stealth.

I now work as senior vice president at Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, and a trip down to the basement-level restroom is always tinged with a little nostalgia for that free carton of orange drink. This, apparently, is what persistence in a career amounts to.

The career would not have happened at all without the gambler’s instinct of my first New York boss, Rocco Landesman.

In 1987, I was working as the dramaturg at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and had begun to understand what it meant to tell a story onstage. In hindsight, it’s amazing that, as a daily theater critic in the early and mid-’80s, I had written about the subject with such authority from a perspective of almost complete ignorance. Thanks to the patience of the Taper’s artistic director, Gordon Davidson—one of the legends of the not-for-profit arts movement—I eventually came to understand that theater is not the written word, it’s the word made flesh. Sometimes a light cue can make you cry. Sometimes an actor turning toward or away from another actor can tell more of the story than all the words a playwright could think up. Onstage, the emotional ride is a moving target made up of countless words and deeds, of lights and scenery and costume color choices (they tell you where to look, and a lot about who’s wearing them), pacing, cuing, and the sheer virtuosity of an actor clearing the emotional hurdles that a great role presents. I had to learn as much as I could, making as few mistakes as possible. And I had to come to accept that in the theater, the script is only the blueprint on which the theater makers depend. It was a little daunting. But at the end of it all, I still believed that, absent a credible blueprint, you almost couldn’t build a house that would stand.

One other thing I began to learn at the Taper: how to relate to artists, particularly writers. Previously, I thought it perfectly acceptable to be cutting, sarcastic, even downright mean. In print. Critics rarely confront their targets face-to-face. Dramaturgs do. Sitting across from the great, underappreciated playwright Lanford Wilson in an L.A. bar, I got my first real lesson in dramaturgy. He taught it with a characteristic mix of gentleness and anger, masking hurt with pride and wit. And he did it, as he so often did back in the ’80s, with a drink in his hand.

He was working on rewrites for his play
Burn This
, which was in previews at the Mark Taper. I was expounding, pretentiously, no doubt, on some line of dialogue in his play, and he was staring at me with a look that I later came to recognize as veiled incredulity. Finally I must have overstepped my bounds. He drained all but the last swallow of a margarita and then reared back and aimed the glass at my head.

He didn’t throw it. He just held it in place like a man who was considering his options. Then he said, rather gently, “When speaking to a playwright whose work you care about, find a word other than ‘cliché.’” Then he drained the last swallow and put the glass down on the table and we moved on.

Point taken.

*   *   *