The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (29 page)

Sometimes second-act trouble is really first-act trouble—too much of the vocabulary has already been on display before intermission, or something that might be useful right about now has not been set up, and the audience gets confused. Or too many subplots have been unpacked in Act 1, and they are cumbersome and time-consuming to pack back up again. But today’s shows, which have many technological advantages over the classic era of Broadway, lack one candy that used to reliably be present: a visit with the star.

In revues like
The Ziegfeld Follies
, there used to be a spot in the playbill that simply said “A Few Minutes with Beatrice Lillie” or “A Few Minutes with Bert Lahr.” The notation encouraged the audience to imagine that the star they had come to see was going to simply improvise, or chat, or in some other way supply an intimate experience that would be unique. In truth, these “few minutes” events were largely scripted—an early version of a stand-up routine—but whether they were or weren’t, they gave the crowd what it came for: a seemingly once-in-a-lifetime audience with theater royalty. The star could string together old bits of monologue, sing songs, or tell jokes, and no one would interrupt. There was no one onstage but the star.

As shows progressed from the pre-
Oklahoma!
era to the postwar period, these moments became integrated into the story and were no longer spontaneous or irrelevant, but in some sense they still functioned in the same way: they provided an opportunity for the audience to celebrate the star. And audiences were hungry for the opportunity. Whether it was Ezio Pinza singing “This Nearly Was Mine” in
South Pacific
or Zero Mostel relaxing from the anxiety of life in Anatevka long enough to share the comic duet “Do You Love Me?” with his costar Maria Karnilova, or Angela Lansbury doing the same thing with Bea Arthur in “Bosom Buddies” in
Mame
, these were a powerful element in why audiences came to the theater: they loved to spend time with the star, especially if the star let her hair down or opened her heart. And the moment usually came in the second slot in Act 2.

Barbara Cook, though not a superstar even at the height of her career as a leading lady, had such a moment singing “Ice Cream” in this spot in
She Loves Me.
All alone onstage, she got a chance to show off her spectacular Broadway soprano, go through the character’s inner monologue as she discovers that she’s fallen in love, and hit a great high note at the end. In the largely forgotten musical
It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman
, the title character, played by a complete nonstar named Bob Holiday, all alone onstage, had a big comic solo called “The Strongest Man in the World.” Looking at the show today, you would think the part had been played by somebody important. And Mandy Patinkin, who was a star on the rise, took the slot in
Sunday in the Park with George
to display his Danny Kaye–like ability with the satirical tongue-twister “Putting It Together”—all alone onstage except for some cardboard cutouts of the people he was supposed to be dealing with. All these moments are designed to be especially delicious, and the more modern ones advance the plot, or at least the subject.

Sometimes, the show itself celebrated the star in this slot. Most famously, in “Hello, Dolly!,” virtually everyone in the cast joined in to let the customers know that Carol Channing was the greatest, most adorable, most eccentric, and most important person who had ever walked down a staircase. The producer-director Hal Prince, according to William Goldman’s
The Season
, turned down the opportunity to direct
Hello, Dolly!
in part because he couldn’t figure out what the number was doing in the show. Dolly Levi, after all, wasn’t someone who was likely to be celebrated by the entire staff of the Harmonia Gardens restaurant—she was a small-time shanty-Irish matchmaker from Yonkers. But Prince was thinking of the character. Jerry Herman, Gower Champion (who did direct and choreograph), and David Merrick (who produced) were focused on the star. And they gave the audience the (admittedly irrational) thrill of a lifetime in one of the greatest numbers ever wrapped around a title song. Who cared whether Dolly Levi was famous or obscure, rich or poor, welcome or unwelcome in a fashionable New York eatery? Carol Channing was famous, rich, and welcome on the stage of the St. James Theatre. The damn thing worked so well that Herman repeated it in
Mame
two years later, though he moved it to the end of Act 1. And again in
Mack and Mabel
(apparently against his better judgment) with “When Mabel Comes in the Room,” which occupied the opening slot in Act 2. Why make the customers work when you can provide their ecstasy for them? They’re sure to join in.

But these Jerry Herman shows were inadvertently making a larger point. What if the show had to celebrate the star because the star wasn’t actually that big a star? Carol Channing was a damned big star, but was she Beatrice Lillie? Lillie was an international celebrity in the ’20s and ’30s. Elizabeth Taylor was the audience’s idea of a star in 1964. The Beatles were
stars
. Carol Channing was a star only live on Broadway. Angela Lansbury? Same thing. And Bernadette Peters’s Mabel Normand in
Mack and Mabel
could hardly compete with Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles in the film of
Cabaret
. There had been a time when Broadway stars were bona fide superstars, celebrated with big pictorial profiles in magazines like
Life
and
Look.
But Broadway stars were dimming in the face of Hollywood’s increasingly larger share of the market. (The magazines were going out of business, too.) TV had given us Lucy and Desi, and Archie Bunker was yet to come. And rock stars, beginning with Elvis, were the biggest stars of all. No Broadway performer could compete. Broadway royalty ruled a shrinking fiefdom, and producers were taking notice.

Coincidentally, a practical problem cropped up at exactly the same moment. Back in Bea Lillie’s day, a star played a show for a season, the show was a success, and everyone moved on. But by the mid-’60s (and it’s only gotten worse), shows were having a hard time recouping their costs in a single season, and stars weren’t willing to stick around forever. The economics of Broadway made it harder and harder for a producer to depend upon a star to create a hit. Shows had to find ways to survive the departure of their original stars.
Fiddler
did it ingeniously, by letting Mostel go quickly, replacing him with a series of credible Tevyes, and making the show the star.
Dolly!
did it with a series of stunt replacements; by the time it had run its almost seven-year course on Broadway, the role had been played by everyone from Mary Martin and Ethel Merman to Betty Grable and Phyllis Diller, with a hugely successful interval in which Pearl Bailey and an entirely African American cast came in and retooled the whole enterprise. But all this ingenious casting and producing couldn’t completely conceal the problem: Broadway stars were becoming a thing of the past in musicals, and musicals needed to be able to survive their departure, after a season, in order to be financially sustainable. The lesson was learned again when
The Producers
became instantaneously legendary in part because of the teaming of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. The two left the show, business faltered, and they were invited back, for astronomical salaries, to pump up the grosses. Then they left again. The show was a substantial hit, but its run was a bit of a disappointment, given that it had opened in a blaze of glory.

The English superproducer Cameron Mackintosh solved the problem. He introduced a new kind of musical with a mechanical star. Beginning with
Cats
, in 1982 (1981 in London), Mackintosh produced a series of musicals—
Les Misérables
,
Phantom of the Opera
, and
Miss Saigon
—in which the spectacle of the production—a chandelier that crashed down from above, a helicopter that actually lifted off and flew away—utilized modern technology and theater craft to become the heart of the attraction. True, some of these shows had stars, or semistars, but the stars were never the point. The soft-core operatic scores and the special effects were the draw, and they easily survived the departure of the leading players. The productions were actually reminiscent in some ways of the operettas that had preceded the arrival of the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter back in the ’20s. It was almost as if the ghosts of Sigmund Romberg, Rudolf Friml, and the young Oscar Hammerstein had returned with their exotic, overripe tales of derring-do romance and their ballad-heavy “light classical” (now mixed with light rock) sound. The techniques for delivering battle, fire, and flood had changed, but the objectives had not—to put on a live spectacle that would deliver machine-driven thrills eight times a week no matter who was doing the singing and acting. It was a stroke of genius, and it has survived for decades now in megahits like
The Lion King
and megaflops like
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
Foolproof it is not, but when it works, there are fortunes to be made and thrills to be discovered without an identifiable human star anywhere in sight.

*   *   *

Star turns, of course, were never the only option for this slot, and today, with fewer and fewer real stars, they have become impractical. Finding a new flavor that the show hasn’t already exploited, however, remains a prime motivation. Audiences would stick with things if they believed that the theater makers still had new tricks up their sleeve. No show proves this more definitively than
Gypsy
—a show that actually did have a real star in Ethel Merman. But by the time Act 2, Scene 2, came along, we’d had a lot of Merman: “Some People,” “Small World,” “You’ll Never Get Away from Me,” “Mr. Goldstone,” and “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” The creators knew they had only one more shot with that particular cannon, and they needed to save it for the end. Enter three new characters—over-the-hill strippers who are going to take over for a bit. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, it turns out the creators have been saving something for a rainy day.

The by-now-overgrown troupe of child vaudevillians has been booked by mistake into a burlesque house instead of a vaudeville house, which explains the presence of Tessie Tura, Mazeppa, and Electra, three broads who’ve seen better days. They encounter Louise, with whom Tessie has been forced to share a dressing room, and decide to give her a lesson in show business because she seems so naïve. In the process, the three of them demonstrate their strip technique in a riotous trio called “You Gotta Get a Gimmick,” which, in any good production, stops the show in its tracks. The reasons are various—it’s funny, it’s telling, the lyrics are witty and vernacular, and it’s tuneful. But one of the major reasons it works so well is simply this: it’s completely new. New characters, new tone (raunchy), new subject (audience manipulation). It’s incredibly refreshing.

And it turns the show around. Madame Rose, Merman’s character, is nowhere to be found. Louise, who has just begun to assert herself, listens quietly, but she’s an eager student. These women are actually giving her all the fuel she’s going to need to efficiently take over—take over her mother, take over the show, and take control of her own life. Before the number, she’s a child-woman. After it, she’s all but prepped to become a sex goddess. And all she does is listen. This is one of those tricks that musical theater can play because it has unplugged a few of the most rational channels in the brains of theatergoers. They make the leap with ease. Music, lyrics, and movement create a story bridge.

Sometimes it’s a new emotion from a familiar character that makes its appearance here. The question is, What hasn’t the character shown us yet? What will be fresh? In
Hairspray
, Act 2 was cruising along, but something was missing as the show played its debut engagement at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle. Someone remembered a mostly forgotten moment in
Guys and Dolls
called “Adelaide’s Second Lament,” in which the tough nightclub cutie sits in a chair and reprises her big comedy number from Act 1, but in a completely different, heartbroken tone. No longer frustrated, angry, and assertive, Miss Adelaide has come face-to-face with the likelihood that Nathan will never marry her, and she is just plain resigned and sad. Although the reprise finishes with a really good joke, the body of it is quiet and reflective, and not at all what you’d expect from this brassy character. And it gives the lighter-than-air show a moment of gravitas.

In spite of everything
Hairspray
’s heroine, Tracy Turnblad, had done up to this moment in Act 2, it became clear that the one thing she had never admitted was vulnerability. Audiences rooted for her because she was audacious, inventive, and unwilling to acknowledge that her heft made her an outcast. She was going to win no matter what. But even the toughest characters are entitled to show us their melancholy and insecurity for a minute—and the truth is, we want to see it. Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman fashioned a short reprise of the show’s opening number, “Good Morning Baltimore,” that revealed Tracy’s longing and her fear that perhaps she was not invincible after all. And the audience stopped admiring her and fell in love with her. In a show that embraces the style of a cartoon, it was a welcome surprise, and it turned a corner, just like “Adelaide’s Second Lament.”

Sometimes characters need a push to show us what they haven’t been willing to show us. That’s when it comes in handy to have a character lurking in the background who can force the issue in the nicest possible way. Every protagonist, particularly the toughest, can use a few minutes with Yoda to force them to look inward.

This makes for a nice change of pace not only for the character but also for the audience. No one expected a tender ballad like “More I Cannot Wish You” to turn up in
Guys and Dolls
, but that’s the reason Sarah Brown has a grandfather—so he can give her a little grandfatherly advice in the form of a lilting Irish waltz. In the knockabout and noisy cartoon musical
Li’l Abner
, Marryin’ Sam is called upon to comfort Daisy Mae about her advancing age and declining marriageability (she’s just turned seventeen) and does so in a charming soft-shoe duet called “Past My Prime.” Yoda comes in all shapes and sizes. There’s the salty rehearsal pianist Jeanette Burmeister in
The Full Monty
, who doesn’t even show up until late in Act 1, and Henry Higgins’s mother, who’s also a late arrival and doesn’t sing. All these characters have the honor of unlocking something in the protagonist, usually in a tone we haven’t heard before.
Hairspray
has Motormouth Maybelle, who is the show’s guiding moral force and who succeeds largely for the reason that all Yoda-like characters do: she combines wisdom with a need to speak truth to power, or at least to characters who are more important in the story than she is.