The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (36 page)

In
The Season
, William Goldman’s 1968 survey of how Broadway worked back then, the author claims that there are really three theaters operating side by side on Broadway: the musical, the play that tells you a myth you want to believe, and the play that tells you the truth you don’t want to hear. In 1968, the musical was set aside—it was largely sunny and mythical. By now it’s clear that Goldman’s model has been reduced to two, because the musical theater has embraced both the optimistic myth and the darker truth, and
Hairspray
and
Caroline
can both set up shop virtually next door to each other. We sing about it all.

*   *   *

The most famous question-and-answer moment is worth noting simply for its eloquence, though it doesn’t come from a musical at all—it’s the second-to-last moment in Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
, which pretends to represent daily life in a small New Hampshire village while taking on many of the struggles of the entire human race (that’s why it’s called
Our Town
). In the third act, the heroine, Emily, who has died in childbirth, is offered the opportunity to return to earth for one day of her short life and relive it. The offer comes from a character known as the Stage Manager, who has led the audience through the entire panoply of small-town life without benefit of scenery or other stage effects. Emily chooses her thirteenth birthday, and it is suddenly revealed in all its ordinariness. After watching the distracted, routine behavior of her parents and herself as the day sweeps by, she begs to go back to the grave, away from human life, and then asks a question.

EMILY

Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize their life while they live it—every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER

No. The saints and poets, maybe … they do some.

Wilder can be faulted for the latter part of the line, perhaps, in which he seems to be tipping his hat to himself, among others. But a one-word answer might have been too stark. Nonetheless, the money part of the line is the single word: No. The desire to savor life as it’s lived is continually thwarted by distraction and devaluation—we don’t know it is passing until it is too late. And that’s what
Our Town
is really about—the missed connections, lost opportunities, misunderstandings, and prejudices that make up a life that is nonetheless all too brief and dotted—but only dotted—by happiness, tender moments, fellow feeling, and love. It’s the right question and the right answer.

These simple exchanges, so easily uttered, are damnably difficult to devise. But when they work, the art that contains them tends to endure for a very long time.

18. You Can’t Stop the Beat

The End

Shows begin with infinite possibility. They conclude with all possibilities removed save one. The lovers unite. Or not. The quest is rewarded. Or not. Everyone lives happily ever after. Or not.

Among the Golden Age shows, this was often the spot for a celebratory—or not—11 o’clock: a star spot. Sometimes this was propulsive, like “Rose’s Turn,” sometimes reflective, like “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” The star has the stage to herself or himself, for the purpose of spending time with the audience while exposing an emotional core. Rose comes to grips with who she actually is—at least for a moment. Henry Higgins admits that he has feelings for another human being—to the degree that he’s able to admit anything.

Often these numbers were followed by a very simple scene, usually a sweet or wry one, between lovers united, who were, in effect, bidding us good night. And then we could all get some rest.

It’s not hard for these 11 o’clock moments to top the next-to-last scene, because they’re almost always sung, while next-to-last scenes are usually spoken. So even though Madame Rose and Louise have had a perfectly written knock-down, drag-out fight in the dressing room in
Gypsy
, “Rose’s Turn,” Madame Rose’s musical nervous breakdown that follows, easily tops it in excitement. Partly that’s because it’s thrilling on its own terms, but partly it’s a matter of temperament. The next-to-last scene is patiently answering our questions about where and how and why the events of the show happened—and what it all means to the people we’ve invested in. The finale, not to put too fine a point on it, is the show’s orgasm, which comes at the end in any good encounter—followed, for a moment, by a shared cigarette.

“Rose’s Turn” wasn’t so much written as mined. Late in rehearsal, the director-choreographer, Jerome Robbins, realized that the ballet he had planned, in which Rose would confront all the characters and crisis moments of her past, was wrong for the spot, so a new plan was concocted. Rose would sing about her gradual self-destruction, but defiantly, not reflectively. According to Stephen Sondheim, he and Robbins holed up one night in the long-abandoned rooftop theater that had once been home to Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic shows. Located at the top of the New Amsterdam Theatre, it is now the executive offices of Disney’s Broadway operation. Robbins played Rose. Sondheim played the piano and ad-libbed lyrics, which were refined over the next few days. Using snippets of music from the show by the composer Jule Styne (who was not present), they gradually stitched together what has become the signature 11 o’clock number of all time. Robbins moved around the stage, stalking Rose’s past and present states of mind, while Sondheim plugged in jagged fragments of Styne’s music, linking them with a few of his own inventions, until they had zeroed in on Rose’s psychological profile—a woman abandoned by her mother, who had so tightly controlled her own children that they both have abandoned her, leaving her with nothing at all to cling to except scrapbooks and selective memory. It’s possible that Rose might give up in despair at the end of the number, but even in total emotional disarray, she’s indomitable and the mistress of denial. Having clocked all the defeats and disappointments of her life, she makes one brave if not entirely sane declaration: from now on, she’ll be the star of her own life: “This time for me!” she shouts defiantly. “For me! For me! For me!”

When the show opened out of town in Philadelphia, it was at this moment that Louise interrupted her, and the two of them played out the last scene, a rapprochement that is sweet, though we know it won’t last. Sondheim didn’t want applause at the end of the number—he feared it would cut into the applause at the final curtain, which was only a moment away.

But Oscar Hammerstein, at Sondheim’s request, came down to Philadelphia to see the show, and his one big note was “You’ve got to let them applaud for ‘Rose’s Turn.’ If you don’t, the audience won’t listen to the last scene—it’s coitus interruptus.” Hammerstein felt that denying a star of Merman’s stature in such a galvanic number was cruel—not only to Merman but also to the customers. All they wanted was to release their pent-up excitement and gratitude.

Merman got her applause, and that’s how the show opened.

In 1973, Arthur Laurents directed his own production in the West End, starring Angela Lansbury, and added a new touch: he let Lansbury take a bow at the end of the number, and then kept her bowing as the applause gradually faded, no matter how long it lasted, until she was alone again, bowing to an imaginary audience in an empty theater. It was eerie and uncomfortable (and it echoed the atmosphere of Sondheim’s 1971
Follies
), and finally, in silence, we saw her for what she was—a woman consumed by fantasy and far over the edge. And then Louise entered.

That’s how “Rose’s Turn” has been ever since—topping itself in a moment for which credit must go to Robbins; Sondheim; Jule Styne, who wrote the tunes but not the piece itself; Oscar Hammerstein, who got on a train and saw something that could be improved; and Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book in the first place and then, fifteen years later, saw an even better way to stage it.

The little scene that follows is memorable on a number of counts, as Rose and Louise try to pretend that they’re friends again, while all of us in the audience know that the bond is forever broken. Louise, in a rare moment of kindness bordering on blather, tells her mother that she really could have been the star. It’s something that a mother might do for a disappointed daughter, and in this little moment, their reversal is complete: the child has become the mother, and the mother the child.

But childish or not, Rose is no fool. “If I could’ve been, I would’ve been,” she replies. “And that’s show business.”

It’s as cruel and accurate an assessment of the business as has ever been stated, and perhaps the briefest. It’s also the one moment when Rose faces the unvarnished truth. Like virtually everything else about
Gypsy
, it’s a model of efficiency that pulls no punches.

*   *   *

Jerome Robbins doctored two shows after he directed and choreographed
Gypsy
—
Forum
and
Funny Girl
. He also directed a couple of straight plays for the first time, one a hit (
Oh Dad, Poor Dad
,
Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad
) and one a quick flop—Brecht’s
Mother Courage and Her Children
. But when it came time to take on his next full musical project,
Fiddler on the Roof
, it was the Brecht play that proved most influential.
Mother Courage
is about a woman dragging a cart across a war zone, making what profit she can by selling to the miserable soldiers on both sides, and losing all her children to war in the process. Eventually there is no one to haul the huge, heavy cart but her, and that image of a human being dragging a wagon proved so powerful that Robbins couldn’t leave it behind.

Anyone contemplating what
Fiddler
would be during its gestation period might have imagined that Zero Mostel, who created the role of Tevye, would have an 11 o’clock number. He had become a bona fide Broadway star in
Forum
and was a big draw in
Fiddler
’s advance sales. He was the protagonist. Why wouldn’t Robbins and Bock and Harnick do for Mostel what Robbins, Sondheim, and Styne had done for Merman?

The cart, I suspect, is why. Heaven knows Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick,
Fiddler
’s composer and lyricist, were capable of writing a showstopper. But that’s not what was called for in
Fiddler.
Early in the show, Mostel enters hauling the cart, explaining to the audience that his horse has pulled up lame. The show wasn’t going to pay for a live horse—it was a serious musical, not a spectacle—and the excuse seemed natural enough. But it was setting up the final event, when the entire community of Anatevka prepares to abandon the little village that has, until this moment, been held together by internal communal spirit, external pressure from the Russians to remain within its boundaries, and, of course, tradition.

The final stage direction reads as follows:

The stage begins to revolve, and Tevye begins to pull the wagon in the opposite direction. The other villagers, including the Fiddler, join the circle. The revolve stops. There is a last moment together, and the villagers exit, at different times and in opposite directions, leaving the family on stage. Tevye begins to pull his wagon upstage, revealing the Fiddler, playing his theme. Tevye stops, turns, beckons to him. The Fiddler tucks his violin under his arm and follows the family upstage as the curtain falls.

This has to be the quietest 11 o’clock moment in the history of the musical theater and, though entirely wordless, among the most eloquent. The diaspora is acknowledged, but the Fiddler, with his essential Jewish melody, travels with the family, wherever it goes.

As the Rabbi in Tony Kushner’s
Angels in America
says at the funeral of an old Jewish émigré, “She was not a person, but a whole kind of person. The ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania … You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives, the miles of that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is.”

And this is the reason that
Fiddler
lives on so easily. Robbins was saying in movement (not exactly dance) what Kushner puts so beautifully into words, and there is hardly an audience member—most especially, but not only, the Jews—who can escape the power of it. In
Fiddler
, the 11 o’clock moment cracks open not the protagonist’s heart but the viewer’s.

In
The King and I
, hearts are broken both literally and figuratively. This was an earlier Robbins collaboration, but, as was so often true, he made movement poetry out of a culture clash and a world in transition. From
West Side Story
to
Fiddler
and back to Siam in the nineteenth century, Robbins was questing for meaning in the seismic changes that cultures go through when things collide. The stakes are always high for people on the brink.

In
The King and I
, Siam stands on the precipice of inevitable modernity, and the change, when it comes, will kill the King. Miss Anna, who will bring the change, hates the King’s authoritarian rule but admires his internal battle with it, and has fallen in love with the man himself. The moment, needless to say, is ripe with conflict and risk.

It’s not actually the last moment of the show, or even really close, though it is the last new song—there are no fewer than three book scenes and a couple of reprises to follow. But Rodgers and Hammerstein had certainly earned the right to adjust the form to their requirements and were always breaking down formulas and creating new ones anyhow. So “Shall We Dance?” may not quite fit the mold, but it’s still a classic 11 o’clock number for the stars—it just occurs a little earlier than you might expect.

Oddly, it’s a kind of conditional love song that has transmigrated from its normal home early in the first act to a spot almost at the end of the play. But there are reasons for that. Conditional love songs generally happen when couples meet and feel the pull of romantic attraction. But Anna and the King come from such different worlds, and are embroiled in such a skein of disputes, that it takes almost all night for them to realize they have fallen. There are too many reasons why they can’t, and it is from this fact that both the song and the dance derive power.