The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (35 page)

Crazy and wild and free

SARAH AND ADELAIDE

Marry the man today,

rather than sigh in sorrow

ADELAIDE

Marry the man today

and change his ways tomorrow!

Loesser could be funny and clear at the same time, and he handled the next-to-last-scene chores with relish. You might think that there is a missing scene in the show—the one where the two couples actually reconcile. But after “Marry the Man Today,” it’s entirely unnecessary. The women’s conviction is all we need to know about. The men will be helpless to resist the tidal wave that’s coming at them. We’re headed to a double wedding, and to hear about how each couple finally agreed to forgive and forget would only bore us. We can picture it all too clearly and don’t need to witness it to believe it.

*   *   *

One of the shifts—some might say losses—in craftsmanship between the Golden Age shows and the more modern ones has taken place in the next-to-last-scene slot, and it’s easy to see why. The really good traditional ones are a matter of formal rigor and craft as much as inspiration—and formal rigor and craft are virtues that have faded in most of American pop culture since the 1960s. An equally valid virtue, inspired improvisatory spontaneity, has replaced them. And, to be fair, the post-’60s audience doesn’t expect the kind of tidiness that used to be an unquestioned virtue in theatrical writing. The well-made play has been long since eclipsed by the descendants of Beckett, Albee, Pinter, and Sam Shepard, and the same thing has happened with musicals. Even the most meticulous composer-lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, has most often found himself involved in experimental shows meant to push the form into the unknown, rather than to build the neatest house on the block. Reaching beyond Sondheim, writers like Jonathan Larson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jeanine Tesori, the team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and all their various collaborators have most often found themselves solving dramatic problems without the kind of structural rigidity that was common a few decades earlier—or with only a nod to it.

In
Hairspray
, for instance, Shaiman and Wittman took the next-to-last scene out of the hands of the principals altogether and did something that almost felt like reparations for the stain of racism itself. They gave the most important thematic moment in the show to an African American subplot character. At the end of the day,
Hairspray
is about the struggle for acceptance, and although the show is a campy comedy, “struggle” is the operative word. Tracy Turnblad needs to be accepted for who she is—a plus-size heroine. Her mother is played by a man in a dress because in the original film, John Waters needed to include gender liberation as an element in a story that didn’t really ever touch on the subject. But within the confines of the plot, it is African American acceptance that is driving things. Tracy lends her considerable heft in the push to integrate the Corny Collins dance show on TV. In the penultimate moment of the show, when Tracy has escaped from prison and taken refuge in the record store owned by Motormouth Maybelle, it is Motormouth who gets to tell us why we’ve been watching the show for two hours.
Hairspray
takes a hard left turn so that this subsidiary character can gather the theme to her ample bosom and give voice to the pain of being the eternal outsider. The moment is unusual in a number of ways: it’s musical, not spoken; it becomes an ensemble number instead of a confrontation between two characters; and it radically shifts the tone of what has been, up to this point, an outlandish, jokey show. Things come to a completely serious full stop.

The song she sings, “I Know Where I’ve Been,” could have been an anthem in a civil rights gospel concert, but here it stands, at the end of
Hairspray
. It confronts the problem the show has been teasing from the start: bigotry in all its manifestations. It’s not so much a summation of an argument between protagonist and antagonist as it is a clear statement of the subject matter: this, it says, is what we’ve been fighting for all night long, and now we’re going to go get it. It doesn’t wink for a moment. And as soon as it concludes, the show goes right back where it’s been—an intentionally tacky joy machine, but with a clear point. That one moment of removing the mask of comedy pulls the audience in, lets it know why the story is being told in the first place, and what it’s really about. It’s an unheralded key to the show’s success.

I will freely admit, however, that it was a bone of contention in the show’s construction, and that I fought like a dog to keep it out of the show. (I also tried to boo Bob Dylan off the stage at Newport in 1965. For shame.) The creative team believed in the moment, but the producers did not, at least not initially. The number replaced the militant, upbeat “Step On Up” with something much more somber. In part, it scared everyone who hadn’t been involved in creating it. But the
Hairspray
team could afford the luxury of arguing about this. The show had been so popular from its first industry exposure—a reading of the first act—that it felt like a hit no matter what. In those rare cases, it’s fun to have a debate. That the authors actually won it was a lucky outcome, and, in hindsight, I was fortunate to be wrong. As Rocco Landesman is fond of saying, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart.

*   *   *

If
Hairspray
was a plea to embrace diversity cloaked in transgressive comedy, Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s
Caroline, or Change
treated some of the same issues in a different way and is one of the real under-recognized masterpieces of the post–Golden Age. Shaped by the director George C. Wolfe into an inspired theatrical whole that included a singing washer and dryer and a bus played by an actor who tolled out JFK’s assasination like a church bell, it concerns a great doomed love between a middle-aged black maid in Louisiana and a ten-year-old Jewish boy whose mother has died, leaving him lonely and isolated. It’s a parent-child love affair, but that doesn’t make it any less impassioned than a romantic one, just a lot harder for the participants to articulate. Caroline, the maid, has to behave in a certain way. And Noah, the boy, only knows how to behave like a kid. They have no language to communicate the possibility that they are each other’s saviors, so they settle for little moments of connection, as when Noah ritually lights Caroline’s cigarettes.

It’s a heartbreaking situation, fueled by Kushner’s personal memories of growing up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where Jim Crow intolerance and a tacit anti-Semitism drove all the social interactions, and economic inequalities informed every kind of behavior. In the world where Caroline is paid to take care of Noah, but lacks the time or financial wherewithal to see to her own three children, bad things are bound to happen.

The plot turns on a simple, seemingly trivial rule in Noah’s house. Whatever money he leaves in his pants pocket belongs to Caroline if she finds it when she’s doing the laundry. This is supposed to teach Noah to take more responsibility for his allowance. Quarters and dimes are supposed to change hands, but Caroline can never bring herself to take the money, even though change, for her, could change things. Then, after a Hanukkah party in which Noah has been given a twenty-dollar bill by his grandfather, the bottom falls out of Noah’s life. He leaves the twenty in his pocket, and this kind of money Caroline cannot resist. It speaks to everything in her—the inequality she lives with every day, Noah’s heedless carelessness with money, the upper-middle-class atmosphere of her workplace, the basement to which she’s largely confined while doing the laundry, the poverty of her own neighborhood, the needs of her own children. It’s all suddenly intolerable, and she takes the bill, which, according to the rules, belongs to her.

As much as any romantic betrayal, this is a breaking point for two people who love and need each other but whose worlds are so utterly unalike that there is no way to bridge them back to each other. Besides, they don’t even know they need each other until they are suddenly without. But Noah wants his money back, and he cracks. The son of progressive Jews in Louisiana who officially believe in the civil rights movement, he lashes out at the only parent figure he’s ever felt connected to, using language he’s no doubt heard on the street and in school:

I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!

There’s a bomb!

President Johnson has built a bomb

special made to kill all Negroes!

I hate you, hate you, kill all Negroes! Really! For true!

I hope he drops his bomb on you!

Noah is a little boy, of course, and Caroline knows it. But this is simply beyond what she can bear. She replies:

Noah, hell is like this basement,

only hotter than this, hotter than August,

with the washer and the dryer and the boiler

full blast, hell’s hotter than goose fat,

much hotter than that.

Hell’s so hot it makes flesh fry.

And hell’s where Jews go when they die.

Take your twenty dollars, baby.

So long, Noah, good-bye.

It’s a shocking moment of anger that exposes the rot of bigotry infecting the community across all social boundaries. It tears Caroline’s world asunder, and Noah’s too. This happens about two-thirds of the way through the act, and the remaining third deals with the consequences. Noah’s stepmother has lost Caroline as a maid; worse, all her attempts to build a more positive relationship with this black servant than her neighbors would have done are proved worthless. Her already strained relationship with her Communist father is brought to the breaking point. Meanwhile, Caroline cuts herself off from her neighbors in shame over what she’s done and, in an earlyish 11 o’clock number, pours her heart out to God. The number, called “Lot’s Wife,” is a gem of a performance piece but in some ways hard to understand, as Caroline attacks herself and—to the best of her ability—the economic norms in America that have brought her to such an uncontrollable state of anger and helplessness. Tesori’s music ranges over a spectrum of emotions from deep anger to deep sorrow, and both music and lyrics end in pathos, with a plea.

“Lot’s Wife” inevitably stopped
Caroline
,
or Change
in its tracks, but if you had asked the audience members who were giving the actress Tonya Pinkins a well-earned ovation exactly what the number was saying, some would have had a hard time doing so, at least in any detail. Kushner writes densely, and sometimes his work feels more like poetry than lyric writing. Nonetheless, the ending is crystal clear, as Caroline cries out:

Caroline. Caroline.

From the evil she done, Lord,

set her free

set her free.

set me free.

Don’t let my sorrow

make evil of me.

This bloodletting doesn’t cleanse Caroline, but it allows her to begin to rebuild her life. And Noah, who is as deeply ashamed as she is but better protected by socioeconomic circumstance, also begins to function again within his shattered family. Which brings us to the next-to-last scene. Here, Noah and Caroline are allowed to talk to each other, though they are in different spaces—Noah in his bedroom, Caroline at home. Each carries the other in his or her head. And unsurprisingly, perhaps, it is time for questions and answers. Not one big one—these two are so separated by history and circumstance that it is impossible for either to fully articulate the subject of a deep connection broken. Instead, there is a scattering of information that the audience must patch together. Noah apologizes to Caroline for hiding from her on her first day back at work, and she responds.

CAROLINE

Someday you won’t.

Someday we’ll talk again.

Just gotta wait.

NOAH

Will we be friends then?

CAROLINE

Weren’t never friends.

That’s the first question and answer. And later in the same sequence:

CAROLINE

Noah,

Someday we’ll talk again

but they’s things we’ll never say.

That sorrow deep inside you,

it’s inside me too,

and it never go away.

You be OK.

You’ll learn how to lose things …

After a brief sung rumination on the peace of death, where there’s no money and no sorrow left, Caroline admits that with that peace, you will miss things, miss connections, like the cigarette-lighting ritual. Then Noah asks his final question: “Do you miss sharing a cigarette?”

And Caroline replies, “You bet I do, Noah.”

It’s a long way from
Gypsy
or
The Music Man
. It’s oblique, as it must be, because Caroline and Noah don’t know how to use the same language or approach an issue directly. They’re saying as much as they can to each other, and that’s the tragedy, because they’re trying to say “I love you” but never will. Still, at heart it is the same technique for making the same kind of a point as every question-and-answer sequence. In an exact reversal of
The Music Man
, in fact, neither of the souls is saved, and life simply sweeps by. It’s an exchange between two people who will soon have nothing of each other but memories. At least Kushner remembered whatever parts of it are autobiographical deeply enough to write it down, and immortalize Caroline.

*   *   *

There is probably no better encapsulation of where the musical theater has been, and what it has come to, than the seemingly absurd contrast between
The Music Man
and
Caroline, or Change
. Both involve a young boy and an older parent figure, but the conclusions drawn by each are exactly opposite. Harold Hill’s faith in dreams saves Winthrop, Marian, and himself. That’s the world we once believed in and treasured. Caroline’s admission that we have to “learn how to lose things” reflects a very different America, where dreams have all but vanished, where we admit out loud that struggle is constant and slow, and people—especially outsiders—are ground down by it.