The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (33 page)

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.

He has also brought the world down around his shoulders by letting this new cosmology out into the open, where it can only be rejected and vilified by those in charge, who fear the power of a myth that speaks to the people more effectively than their own. In this neatest trick in
Mormon
’s entire bag of tricks, we actually see how a religion gets created—more or less by mistake. “Joseph Smith American Moses” handles its main event chores dazzlingly, including the obligation to entertain and energize us while creating the greatest possible jeopardy for the characters we care most about. It tweaks one of the icons of the Golden Age and leaves the audience sated but still in suspense. The piper, as always in a well-constructed story, has yet to be paid, and it is time for the next-to-last scene.

17. I Thought You Did It for Me, Momma

The Next-to-Last Scene

In his great theatrical memoir
Act One
, Moss Hart tells the—somewhat self-created—story of his entrance into the world of Broadway in the 1920s, and spends the last part of the book describing the shaping of his first hit collaboration with George S. Kaufman,
Once in a Lifetime
. This was back in the day when Broadway shows tried out in places like Atlantic City and Philadelphia, and wholesale changes were made overnight in an atmosphere that was both exciting and chaotic. The entire enterprise amounted to a roll of the dice. If the show was in trouble and inspiration struck, it might be fixed. If the muses stubbornly refused to appear, another promising show ended up on the ash heap of theater history. The overall results were probably about the same as they are today, when plays are typically first developed and presented by regional theaters around the country, and Broadway producers shop for them by going and having a look. But the old-time tryout was much more romantic, at least in theory, if not in practice. As Larry Gelbart famously said during the disastrous and tortured tryout of
The Conquering Hero
, “If Hitler’s alive, I hope he’s out of town with a musical.”

Once in a Lifetime
was not a musical but a particularly promising comedy, dogged by third-act trouble. Days before it decamped from Philly to face audiences and critics on Forty-fifth Street, Hart came up with the scene that saved it, and his story is instructive and entertaining. As Hart tells it, the play’s producer, the formidable Sam Harris, took Hart out for a drink a few nights before the end of the out-of-town run, got drunk, and told Hart, “I wish, kid, that this weren’t such a noisy play. Just think about it. Except for those two minutes at the beginning of the first act, there isn’t another spot in this whole play where two people sit down and talk quietly to each other.”

Hart puzzled over this assessment—it could hardly be called an analysis—and made a bold move. He took the scene that he and Kaufman were proudest of having created—a rambunctious Hollywood farrago in a night spot called the Pigeon’s Egg—and tossed it out the window. It was the biggest and most ambitious scene in the play, but also the noisiest, and it was late in the act. He threw out the most impressive, wittiest, and biggest set in the play—the set itself got laughs—and replaced it with an unprepossessing pair of seats on an eastbound Pullman car. The hugely populous Pigeon’s Egg started out funny but gradually exhausted the audience, and the play had no real emotional payoff. Hart replaced it with two characters the audience actually cared about, who had a simple conversation. An attempt to top everything that had come before was replaced with something that didn’t resemble anything else in the play—a heart-to-heart talk. And suddenly the play worked; it still works today, eighty-five years later. The young Moss Hart had inadvertently written a classic next-to-last scene.

*   *   *

Act One
was a seminal book for me, as it was for a lot of theater people in my generation. But I never thought of it as an instruction manual until I got the chance to work on my first Broadway play,
M. Butterfly
. I had brought the play to New York in my suitcase when I moved east from Los Angeles to take the job at Jujamcyn, and I was eager to get involved in it—I admired its author, David Hwang, enormously and had been trying to get the play under way at the Mark Taper Forum when I suddenly changed jobs.

Based on a true incident,
M. Butterfly
had been commissioned by an independent, idiosyncratic producer named Stuart Ostrow, and he wanted to do the play directly on Broadway, not at a regional theater. In other words, he wanted to try it out like
Once in a Lifetime
, although this route of march was already becoming unfashionable and unaffordable. But Ostrow had a vision for the piece that involved a lot of expensive production values, and he didn’t think he’d get a first-class production from the Taper or any other regional theater, so he raised all the money for Broadway, booked a tryout at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., and agreed to play Jujamcyn’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre in return for a significant investment.

John Lithgow signed to star in the show as a French diplomat in China who falls hopelessly in love with a Peking Opera diva. In the course of the play, the diva becomes his lover and confidante, and listens to him pour out not only his heart but also a number of state secrets. And shockingly, the diva turns out to be not only a spy but a man. He/she was played by an amazing young actor named B. D. Wong.

The play opened in Washington to respectful mixed reviews and spotty business, but Ostrow was undaunted. He knew he had a hit on his hands—or behaved as if he did. He was an old-time impresario, with a strong stomach for risk and a lot of bravado. He was small of stature but had an ego that more than compensated, and he was great fun to be around.

During the third week of a four-week engagement in Washington, Ostrow called me on the phone.

“There’s an emotional gap in the next-to-last scene,” he said. “Can you look and listen?”

I hopped on a train and, during the ride down, remembered that section of
Act One
. Hart threw out a multilayered scene for a simpler, two-person one and saved the day. The problem I was pondering was this: David Hwang already had written a two-person scene in that very spot, so I couldn’t see how Hart’s lesson would be of any use. Still, I was trying to remain alert to the fact that these next-to-last scenes are best when kept simple and when they answer questions for the audience in a direct way.

As I watched the play that night, I thought I detected a parallel between Hart’s problem and Hwang’s.
Once in a Lifetime
had tried to use that penultimate moment to top everything that came before it—more scenery, costumes, characters, and gags than in any other spot in the show. Hwang had written a scene that
looked
simpler and, indeed, featured only two characters. But the language and ideas were dizzyingly complex, a pileup of political and philosophical notions that raced forward at an alarming pace—like Kaufman and Hart, he was trying to top himself. And audiences simply gave up on it in frustration. They were focused on something much simpler.

Over drinks after the show I gently and, I think, shyly (I was in awe of David Hwang; I still am) said I was puzzled by the audience’s drift. He was too. Maybe, I said, the problem was that the scene was answering complicated thematic questions while the audience was wondering about a simple and literal one: How could a “sophisticated” French diplomat have fallen hopelessly in love with a Peking Opera diva and lived with her in the same bed for years without knowing she was a man? In the most literal terms: What made it credible, at least in the context of the play? Was there a way to answer this big metaphorical, apparently unanswerable question in a simple, human way that would set the audience’s mind at rest and give it the release it was seeking and the opportunity to embrace the play’s larger questions? I understood the whole play to be about how the West mistakes what the East is in the most fundamental way, but could this moment just be about two people instead? Could we settle the big dumb question before attacking the smart, complex ones?

“I can do that,” David said casually. But he didn’t say how.

He didn’t throw out the scene, but he wrote a simple and startling line in the middle of it. The opera star has been revealed as a man—designer suit and all—and the diplomat is pressed to explain how this confusion could have continued for so many years. Was it deception, self-deception, or what? The diva needles him: How could it have been love? How could the lie have lived so long? How could a man, even an awkward, emotionally clumsy man, have clung to a fantasy so obviously implausible? How could a man love a woman so devoid of actual womanhood? The audience was right with him—that’s what it was wondering too, so a spokesperson was up onstage who wasn’t going to give up until the diplomat supplied the answer.

The diplomat, finally pressed to the wall, says without affect, “I’m a man who loved a woman created by a man. Everything else—simply falls short.”

That line brought an audible sigh from the audience. Sitting in the dark, everyone got it. Whether the line bears close examination in terms of plausibility in the cold light of day isn’t the point. The play had cast a spell and the audience was in the throes of it. It provided what all theatergoers want: an answer. It was the first time I ever saw what a dramaturg really does, and it was all about asking questions, not making suggestions.
1

One other significant change occurred in between the D.C. tryout and the Broadway run, and it involved, of all things, the curtain call.

The play ends with the diplomat lying facedown on the stage floor, overwhelmed and destroyed by events, his face painted clown white in the style of the Peking Opera diva he loved. He is, in effect, a man unmanned, a shell. In the original staging, the lights went out, and when they came up for the curtain call, the ensemble took its bow, followed by the major characters in ascending order of importance, who finally brought the star, John Lithgow, his face cleansed, onstage for a well-deserved ovation. But the director, John Dexter, had a better, more unconventional idea—a cunning theater trick.

In New York, Lithgow collapsed into his swoon, fell to the floor, and remained motionless, as in D.C. But when the lights came back up for the bows, he was still there. Then he rose slowly, in a daze, apparently in character—or somewhere in between the character and the actor, a man very much exhausted by the journey he had just taken—his white makeup now smeared and smudged. He looked bedazzled and exhausted. And the audience, as one, rose to its feet.