The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (34 page)

The dramaturgy helped. But never count show business out of the equation.

Nonetheless, it’s essential that the audience has its moment with the Gordian knot of the play and the way it is untangled. A couple of characters need to come face-to-face and thrash it all out in simple language, and preferably quickly, at least in a musical. The evening is getting late, and we’re ready to know the outcome of the story’s central conflict. In classic playwriting, this is called “the obligatory scene,” but that’s too pretentious for musicals. In musicals we settle for “next-to-last scene,” and it’s not always—or even often—done in song. The main event earns the writers the opportunity to speak plainly for a few minutes.

But time is of the essence. No audience comes to musicals to listen to dialogue, though they understand there’s likely to be a certain amount of it. Still, if everything is going to stop cold for a book scene at this point, it had better be good or short, preferably both. Contrarily, this is where
Gypsy
, as original as it is iconoclastic, places its longest scene between mother and daughter. Daring, but it works. Rose and Louise really have it out, in one of the more entertaining verbal battles in all of American playwriting. The subject is love and abandonment—how we project our failed dreams onto our children and how we tragically confuse their needs with our own.

Louise, now rechristened Gypsy Rose Lee, is in charge of her world, of her stardom, and of herself for the first time. Rose, who was once the boss, can’t even get Louise to let her help put the costumes away. Louise is having a life beyond her wildest dreams, and for her mother it’s a nightmare. She’s been put out to pasture, and she knows it. And Louise is actually enjoying it—it’s payback time. In constant combat, Rose and Louise review the tangled conflicts of their lives in corrosive detail. Finally, having lost the battle and the war, Rose shoots off one last salvo:

ROSE

All right, miss. But just one thing I want to know: All the working and pushing and fenagling, all the scheming and scrimping and lying awake nights figuring: How do we get from one town to the next? How do we all eat on a buck? How do I make an act out of
nothing
! What’d I do it for? You say I fought my whole life. I fought
your
whole life. So now tell me: What’d I do it for?

LOUISE

I thought you did it for me, Momma.

That’s it. That’s what the play is about. In one simple—if wordy—question and one terse answer, the entire evening is thrown into high relief, in a way that anyone can appreciate and be moved by.

When a playwright can nail a moment like that, two things are happening. First, the playwright is letting the audience know that he understands and is in complete control of his work, his subject, his reason for writing the play. That in itself is satisfying to an audience. Second, we are given the opportunity to rack back through the entire evening and see how it fits together. It’s deeply pleasurable. We understand why we came to church.

And at its best—in plays and musicals—it often comes in the form of a question and an answer.

In
Fiddler on the Roof
, the question-and-answer moment is in the hands of two minor characters, the Rabbi and a young villager. During the course of the evening, the little village of Anatevka has been defined as being held together by tradition, and the traditions have crumbled from within, as Tevye’s three adult daughters have taken their love lives into their own hands and made bolder and bolder choices about whom to love—the third of them breaking the final taboo by marrying outside the faith.

But there is equal pressure on Anatevka from without; the Russians have taken more and more from the Jews and finally seize their land and purge them. There is an edict from the authorities, and just like that, Anatevka is no more. Everyone gets out the wagons and donkeys and packs up what little they have and prepares to leave a town that will instantly disappear. A place they’ve called home for generations is now vanishing before our eyes. They are about to begin their wandering—off to America, to Europe, to Palestine—when a young villager turns to the Rabbi.

MENDEL

Rabbi, we’ve been waiting for the Messiah all our lives. Wouldn’t this be a good time for him to come?

RABBI

We’ll have to wait for him someplace else.

This is the point—the question-and-answer moment—where the 899 other Jews I first saw the show with in 1964 began to understand the scope of
Fiddler
’s subject. It’s a song cue, but it makes you inhale sharply. Because “someplace else” means “everywhere” to these villagers—the entire diaspora, the world of Jews who had lost and found and kept in touch with each other since the day they packed their candlesticks and prayer shawls into carpetbags and trudged off to discover a new life. Again.

I was completely startled by this moment when I first heard it, though I had been brought up in suburban Stamford, Connecticut, and really had very little idea what it meant to be Jewish—my family was more zealous about assimilation than about Judaism itself. My father was also deeply affected, but he was a great needler and didn’t trust sentiment. He pulled himself together quickly, and on the car ride home he said, “I don’t understand the ending of that show. All those Jews standing in the aisles crying their eyes out. Every one of them the grandchild of someone who left Anatevka so sadly—they all came to the United States, became successful, and their grandchildren can afford to sit in orchestra seats at the biggest hit in town. What the hell are they crying about?!”

But he knew. His father had fled Minsk in 1895 at age five.

There was a deeper resonance to “someplace else.” The line was being spoken by a simple man of God who had no idea of its implications—assimilation in the United States, a Holocaust in Europe, an unending struggle in what became Israel. There was more than a century of happy endings and tragic endings, and no real ending at all, in those two simple words. And that’s one of the reasons
Fiddler
remains immortal.

*   *   *

The exchanges are not so simple in Meredith Willson’s
The Music Man
, which can be read as a kind of country cousin to
Guys and Dolls
. Willson’s Iowa townsfolk are flimflammed by Professor Harold Hill, a slick salesman with an apparent heart of tin, who vaguely resembles Sky Masterson in his firm belief that women are for momentary amusement, not for life commitment. His opposite number, Marian the librarian, is a kind of rural Sarah Brown, committed to keeping dangerous men at bay while she pursues her higher ideals, which include bringing culture to the benighted citizens of River City.

They’re a perfect match for a musical or any romantic comedy—two people who can’t possibly end up together but somehow do. That’s the myth we love to believe in.

Under their armor, Marian is a pure romantic, and Harold is simply waiting for someone to awaken his true heart. But the armor is thick. The agent of the awakening is not Marian but her troubled, shy little brother, Winthrop, who is afraid to talk because he has a pronounced lisp.

Harold genuinely takes to Winthrop and feels for him, so he enlists him as the cornet player in the band that he’s promoting—a band that will earn him some quick money in sales commissions but will never actually materialize, since Harold knows nothing about music. This is a fatal turn in Harold’s life because his fondness for Winthrop is real, but the dream he sells the boy is a phony. Marian knows it—she’s done her research on the professor’s nonexistent credentials—but she loves him anyhow, because he has saved Winthrop. The question is: What will happen when the flimflam is revealed? How will Winthrop survive it, and what will Marian do with the love she’s invested in this disreputable man?

The answer is interesting and comes not in a single question and answer but in a series of them with a surprising final punch. As Professor Hill is about to be hauled off and tarred and feathered by the local citizenry, Winthrop tries to run away, and Harold grabs him and holds him. Here’s what happens:

WINTHROP

I won’t listen! You won’t tell the truth anyhow!

HAROLD

I would too. Tell you anything you want to know.

WINTHROP

Can you lead a band?

HAROLD

No.

WINTHROP

Are you a big liar?

HAROLD

Yes.

WINTHROP

Are you a dirty rotten crook?

HAROLD

Yes.

WINTHROP

Let me go, you big liar!

HAROLD

What’s the matter? You wanted the truth, didn’t you? Now, I’m bigger’n you and you’re going to stand here and get it all so you might as well quit wiggling.

(Winthrop finally stops, exhausted.)

There are two things you’re entitled to know. One, you’re a wonderful kid. I thought so from the first. That’s why I wanted you in the band, so you’d quit mopin’ around feeling sorry for yourself.

WINTHROP

(sarcastically)

What band?

HAROLD

Kid, I always think there’s a band.

And therein lies our ability not only to forgive Harold Hill but also to admire and celebrate him. He may be, in one sense, a snake-oil salesman. But in another sense, he believes it all himself, like any true salesman, or any true child. He believes there’s a band. He believes a sullen, frightened ten-year-old boy can be saved, even though there’s no evidence that it’s true and no one else believes it. He believes it’s worth doing, and he never questions why. In the process, he proves himself worthy. And, naturally, he and Marian fall in love, which is the real kicker. Because love is the one thing he’s never believed in. “
There were bells on the hill
,” he sings to her in the show’s final reprise, “
but I never heard them ringing.
”

And so, in a small, close-minded Iowa town, three souls have been saved by each other, in a next-to-last scene that is full of promise for the new, more enlightened America that
The Music Man
believes in. No wonder it outran
Gypsy.

Famously, two of the show’s best-known songs, “Seventy-six Trombones” and “Goodnight, My Someone,” have the same melody, and Willson saw fit to show
how
Harold and Marian have fallen in love by intertwining them, each at its own tempo, and then switching off who sings what. So eventually Marian finds herself singing about a marching band while Harold is singing about love, and in that moment, both of them discover a world they never knew existed. In a show that features a simple, hometown approach, it’s as neat and clean a turn as anyone could ask for.

*   *   *

Love, of course, is what a lot of these scenes are about, but since they are not the finale, they usually conclude with lovers parting, only to be reunited one scene later, having realized that the knowledge they’ve gained actually grants them permission to love. But sometimes the scenes don’t even involve the romantic couple. After all, in the modest scene Moss Hart wrote for
Once in a Lifetime
, one of the characters was a relatively minor one, a playwright who was driven to a nervous breakdown in Hollywood by underwork (good joke) and is on his way back to New York. He was originally played by George S. Kaufman himself. Like Winthrop, he was more catalytic than anything else. It really doesn’t matter how the audience gets the news, as long as it gets it loud and clear from someone, and that usually requires dialogue—but not always.

In
Guys and Dolls
, also directed by Kaufman many years later, the two leading ladies take on the task. Kaufman was personally mortified by sentiment, and the book writer, Abe Burrows, didn’t have much time for it either. The songwriter, Frank Loesser, had a huge capacity for it, but he didn’t discover it until his next show,
The Most Happy Fella
. In
Guys and Dolls
, the authors and director were sticking with a wisecracking tone and a masculine belief that honest emotion was more likely to cause trouble than not. That made for a bit of a conundrum when it came to the next-to-last scene. Usually, the idea is to speak plainly and from the heart—not a place these three were comfortable accessing. So they send Miss Adelaide out to a park bench at dawn to mourn the loss of Nathan Detroit, and there she encounters Sarah Brown, carrying a torch for Sky Masterson. And in another masculine joke that felt completely at home in the ’50s, the women get to decide everything and set the trap that any man is likely to fall into. In the end, the gamblers and gangsters are going to be domesticated—that’s what a 1949 audience expected. And in a sense that’s what the show is about to begin with: the allure of 4:00 a.m. New York versus the practical life that gets lived out in the daytime.
Guys and Dolls
shows off all the color and flash and danger of the Broadway underworld, while keeping the audience, in reality, completely out of harm’s way.

Adelaide and Sarah bemoan their fate and the impossibility of expecting their men to ever change into the sensitive, caring partners they’d like them to be. The very idea seems preposterous. And then it strikes them both virtually simultaneously that there is only one way to achieve what they’re looking for, and it requires—of all things—placing a bet.

ADELAIDE

You simply gotta gamble

SARAH

You get no guarantee

ADELAIDE

Now doesn’t that kind of apply to you and I?

SARAH

You and me!

ADELAIDE

Why not?

SARAH

Why not what?

ADELAIDE

Marry the man today

Trouble though he may be

Much as he likes to play