The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (27 page)

One morning I read in
The New York Times
that Rocco Landesman was assuming the presidency of Jujamcyn Theaters, a company that owned five Broadway theaters. I knew who he was—a sort of legendary iconoclast who had sold his racehorses to produce the musical
Big River
, which, back in my days at the
Herald Examiner
, I had torn to pieces in a not very nice way during its tryout in La Jolla. Rocco was, and is, a Roger Miller fanatic, and his favorite American novel is
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. He married one to the other and created a Broadway hit despite my dissenting opinion. (The way he did it is a story in itself. As Roger Miller later said, “Rocco Landesman made me an offer I couldn’t understand.”)

Rocco had gotten a Ph.D. in dramaturgy and criticism at Yale Drama School and run a small hedge fund. Despite his first name, he is Jewish, and from St. Louis, and has nothing to do with the Mafia. He claimed to keep $10,000 in his pocket at all times in case something interesting came up. He seemed an odd choice for this corporate position.

I went out to lunch with a friend at the Taper, and when I returned to the office I found a phone message in my in-box from Rocco Landesman.

“He’s offering you a job,” this friend of mine said to me as I stared uncomprehendingly at the message. That seemed unlikely, but it turned out to be true.

“I just took this job, running this company,” he said on the phone. “We have five theaters and the only way we’re ever going to fill them is to produce our own shows. Come to New York and produce shows.”

Why me? I wanted to know.

“Well,” he said, “you panned the hell out of
Big River
and a lot of what you said was pretty smart. I used your review to beat up the creatives and help fix the show. I think you’re good at this.”

Rocco, it turned out, is a hunch player when it comes to people, and a master of seduction. Being around him is like being in the center of a small lightning storm. He is creative, decisive, open to any idea that walks in the room, and an excellent judge of what is ingenious and what is foolish. He likes taking risks more than almost anything else, but he is canny in deciding which ones to take, especially in the theater. He is loyal, sometimes to a fault, and he is generous. He believes no meeting needs to be more than half an hour and keeps a parking meter in his office. As far as I know, he never had a meeting at Jujamcyn without keeping one eye on the stock ticker. But having even 70 percent of his attention is plenty. It was impossible not to come to New York and work for this man.

We sealed the deal over breakfast at the Carnegie Deli. This was in the summer of 1987, when there were still phone booths and no cell phones. As we walked out of the Carnegie, I headed for one of a pair of booths.

“I’d better call my wife,” I said, slipping into one.

“I have to call my bookie,” he said, slipping into the other.

*   *   *

Rocco, it turned out, made a habit of hiring people who panned him. A few years after I got to Jujamcyn, Paul Libin, the producing director of the legendary Circle in the Square Theatre, wrote a scathing letter to the
Times
attacking Rocco for some things he had written in an
Arts and Leisure
essay about Lincoln Center. Rocco’s response was simple and decisive: he hired him. And so the modern-day incarnation of Jujamcyn was born—three guys from the not-for-profit world (Yale, the Taper, and the Circle) plunging into the shark tank of Broadway.

Back in 1987, Broadway had run into a deep ditch. Many theaters were empty, some of them for months, even years, at a time. The only shows that were making an impact were the British megamusicals. Times Square was a seedy, vaguely dangerous, and certainly unwelcoming neighborhood dotted with strip joints and porno theaters and littered with crack vials and used condoms. I loved it, actually, but it was hard to know whether the moment had come to write its obituary or dig in and work to revive its glory. We did neither. We started to do modestly the one thing we were able to do: produce shows.

*   *   *

When the Walt Disney Company bought and refurbished the New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-second Street, even the most optimistic business interests could not have foreseen the resulting boom.
All
Forty-second Street followed suit. Peepland disappeared and McDonald’s took over. Soon the blocks immediately to the north began to brighten. A Gap store appeared, and then a Swatch store. Within a few short years, Times Square had been utterly transformed. The M&M Store and the Hershey Store battled for dominance across the street from each other on two corners that had once featured entirely different kinds of candy purveyors. True, it was in some respects more like a midwestern mall than the unique showplace it had been in its heyday, or the tenderloin it had followed, but it was clean and well lit, commercial and safe. And the tourists began to come. Thanks to the relatively new (for the theater) field of market research, Broadway business folks learned that, for tourists, a Broadway show was the most highly prized destination and that
they didn’t know which one they wanted to see.
This astonishing bit of news encouraged the industry to market itself as a brand of its own: not
Phantom
or
Beauty and the Beast
, but simply
BROADWAY
. Everyone could get a piece. Like the physical landscape, the show business landscape was renewed. And like the physical landscape, it became more generic and less eccentric, less unusual, less New York. Suddenly, we were genuinely in a national and international business, for better and worse. For shows like
The Lion King
, it spelled infinite life. For others like
The Producers
, which Jujamcyn hosted at the St. James Theatre, it meant that once the New Yorkers had roared at its urban, Jewish wit, its days were numbered.

Rocco’s days at Jujamcyn were numbered too, it turned out. When Barack Obama was elected president, Rocco decided that he needed to become the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts so he could shake things up in a larger arena, and he is a very determined man. He worked tirelessly to get the job and said goodbye, selling the company to Jordan Roth, a young producer with a wide-ranging interest in the theater business as a whole, not just in individual productions.

For a moment, it felt odd working for a man who was a little more than half my age, but not for long. Jordan had vision born of another generation, which he managed to make refreshing rather than intimidating. He also did two things for which I’ll be forever grateful, both of them completely unexpected. The first was to gently but firmly separate me from a growing reluctance to embrace the next generation of theater makers and their sense of what a Broadway musical could be. My natural artistic tendencies are conservative, and subconsciously I was beginning to wonder whether the era of shows I grew up with was the only one I could take real pleasure in. It was Jordan’s passionate enthusiasm for productions like
Fela!
,
Spring Awakening
, and
American Idiot
that made me look again. If the Jujamcyn of the late ’80s and ’90s had pushed the envelope with
Jelly’s Last Jam
,
M. Butterfly
,
The Producers
, and
Angels in America
, why should we assume that that was as far as it could be pushed? We were young again—well, Jordan was—and I could rejoin the cavalry, which I happily did.

Jordan’s other prime interest when he took the reins at Jujamcyn was the industry’s public image. We were a famously rude business. We were kind of delighted by our cranky box office personnel, our loud and vaguely exasperated ushers, our indifferent ticket takers. They were part of our New York profile—like the wise-ass Lindy’s waiters or the know-it-all cabdrivers regularly parodied in the movies of the ’40s. They were part of New York’s gruff, unfeeling big-city lovability—back then. And our audiences were also a crowd of gruff, impermeable New Yorkers—back then. Jordan, coming of age much later than the rest of us, understood just how much things had changed. He had watched carefully how the hotel industry and particularly the restaurant business—largely inspired by the restaurateur Danny Meyer—had revolutionized the way they treated their staff and customers, and determined that Broadway needed to get with the program. The audience was now a national and international one. They were under no obligation to be charmed by this uniquely surly part of the New York Experience. He instituted a top-down and bottom-up rethinking of how Jujamcyn would train and monitor its employees, with a commitment to making the entire experience a happier one for ourselves, theatergoers, and theater makers. It was a grand adventure. The industry as a whole was initially skeptical, which delighted us all even more. There’s hardly a happier feeling than waiting for others to catch up. Eventually, they came along, which was fun to watch from our imagined perch. All of this created a strong sense that Broadway was moving dynamically, and why in the world would anyone want to miss that? My passions were rekindled, and I’ll always be grateful.

Of course, with the new, improved Broadway, the concessions available at intermission—already long since upgraded from crappy orange drink and lemonade—expanded markedly once again, though the prices, to be fair, do remain shocking.

Still, you can now buy a Courvoisier in a cup with a lid, and you can bring it back to your seat and enjoy it during Act 2, surrounded, as you will be, not merely by New Yorkers, but by theatergoers from all over the world. It’s often a wise purchase, may I say—as the lights begin to dim and the entr’acte begins.

13. Clambake

Curtain Up: Act 2

Cole Porter reportedly said that for his new show, 1929’s
Fifty Million Frenchmen
, he was putting the two best songs in the first fifteen minutes. Why? Because he was so irritated with his society friends coming to see his work “fashionably late” that he wanted to make sure they’d miss them and be damn sorry they did.

“You Do Something to Me” and “You’ve Got That Thing” became standards, apparently without the endorsement of Porter’s friends (though the rest of
Fifty Million Frenchmen
has rarely been heard from since). But does anyone come to theater “fashionably late” anymore? Does anyone “linger in the lobby” before Act 2, as the title of a 1925 Gershwin song from
Lady, Be Good!
suggests they might?

The habit dates from another time, when the theater had a different audience, and when understanding the plot and characters of a musical show was hardly the point. Broadway was, for many society types, just another night on the town, and the play was often somewhat incidental to the overall experience, which might include a cocktail party and dinner before, or cocktails before and dinner after, with dancing, and a midnight floor show. And a visit to a speakeasy that might last until dawn. Those days are long over, and yet one aspect of writing for the theater has barely changed since the flapper era. As if we were still lingering in the lobby, most second acts begin with something virtually expendable: the song that has nothing to do with anything. Also, in case you are there to hear it, it’s usually light and entertaining.

The reasons for the light and entertaining part of the tradition are easy to justify. First acts tend to end with a crisis and are often a downer. The two lovers have discovered they have betrayed or been betrayed, and will never have another word to say to each other. Or the protesters outside a local TV station have been beaten with truncheons and arrested. Or the hero is broke and needy, and has decided to commit a robbery that we know will ruin his life. It’s all very grim and unpleasant, at least by musical theater standards. So the authors feel an obligation to welcome you back in for Act 2 in a way that suggests the worst is, perhaps, over—“Welcome back, dear audience,” they seem to be saying. “We’re really here to entertain you after all. We’re glad you stayed, and we hope you are too.” Theater makers today tend to refer to this moment as “one for nothing”—a gift to the audience, and, in some cases, to the songwriters as well.

Hence “Take Back Your Mink” at the beginning of Act 2 of
Guys and Dolls
, “Big Dollhouse” from
Hairspray
, and “This Was a Real Nice Clambake” from
Carousel
, among others.

A lot of good songs have occupied this spot, though it’s unlikely they were placed there for spite, as Porter may have done with the opening numbers in
Fifty Million Frenchmen
. Instead, the slot seems to have given songwriters a certain kind of freedom, a recess from the demands of storytelling and character exploration. There’s a high pleasure quotient in many of these numbers, as if the writers, like the audience, had been refreshed by intermission (no orange drink for them, one can assume). As a particularly classic example, give a listen to “Together, Wherever We Go” from
Gypsy
. It’s the only tension-free moment in the entire show, even though the characters bicker as they sing. (It’s not really the first number in the act; that’s a variation on the tired vaudeville routine that appears throughout the show. But it
feels
like the first number.)

Frank Loesser seems to have had particular fun with “Take Back Your Mink,” which is a disposable nightclub number from
Guys and Dolls
. After Sky Masterson’s Cuban adventure with Sarah Brown has ended in disaster at the end of Act 1, the Act 2 curtain rises on Miss Adelaide and the Hot Box girls doing a mild strip to a song that is all about handing back shiny gifts to a sugar daddy who actually expected to trade them for sex. The removal of the items constitutes the strip. The likelihood that the outraged Hot Box girls have never before encountered such a proposition from a sugar daddy is absolutely nil, which makes their expression of shock and horror a good joke, if somewhat politically incorrect by today’s standards. The Hot Box girls, in fact, seem to know enough about fur coats and how they should be treated to conclude the number with the lyric