The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (37 page)

Unlike Curly and Laurey in
Oklahoma!
or Julie and Billy in
Carousel
, Anna and the King have no common ground at all that we can see. He’s a king in an autocratic ancient Eastern society; she’s a schoolteacher from a putatively modern and democratic one. He is in every normal respect the dominant one—a male ruler to whom everyone pays obeisance. She’s a female who is supposed to know the limits of her station. But from the beginning, she’s been struggling for the power position because she finds his ideas so backward and unfair. She also—though she can’t admit it to herself—finds him magnificent. Even so, she believes that her advanced understanding of a free society should allow her to be in charge, or at least to transform his thinking, not the other way around. So it appears that what’s at stake this late in the day is not their personal relationship but the social, political, and cultural direction of the world itself. Like
Carousel
’s “If I Loved You,” in which the whole natural world seems to be conspiring to drive two powerless human beings into each other’s arms, “Shall We Dance?” takes the global and makes it personal. This time it isn’t the black sea and the stars in the sky and the cherry blossoms that fall on a windless night, it’s the forces of democracy and enlightenment on the march that overtake this pair of almost lovers. And this is how the musical theater approaches the problem: with a polka.

After describing the typical English tea dance, in which every girl, her eyes cast downward, waits for the sight of “two black shoes—white waistcoat—a face!” Miss Anna sings to the King of what that experience is like—to meet a man, to try to find a way to know him a little better, and to resort to a social custom designed to solve the problem: a dance.

The King watches with fascination and becomes irritated when she stops dancing around the room by herself—so much so that he wrangles his way into the act, feigning disapproval but insisting anyhow. And soon, really for the first time in an almost three-hour-long musical, the two of them are joined not just physically but also in intent. They trade lines of the song carefully, keeping a verbal distance even as they become physically closer. They share precisely one word in the song: “romance.”

After that, it’s only a matter of time until the King insists upon holding Anna as he’s seen Europeans holding each other—one arm around her waist and the other joined to hers just above their heads. And in that moment, the music takes off like a flock of birds, and they are lost in each other as they swirl madly around the room. Properly executed, it is more powerful than the signing of any peace treaty you can imagine. It tears up theatergoers because they can see not just a couple finally in love but also two societies finally seeing each other with loving eyes and raising the possibility that in a single dance the entire world might change, might move forward. Western social dancing in “Shall We Dance?” carries the weight of cultural imperialism as a world cracks open in front of us—in song and dance.

Musicals in general may be sentimental, mythologized, full of false optimism and showbiz glitz, but every now and then one features a moment that manages to be profound. That’s what we wait for.

The moment doesn’t last, alas. Because as soon as the number is finished, they are interrupted. The slave Tuptim has been captured, and within moments the King is threatening to beat her with a bullwhip. No society was ever actually transformed by a polka. But we’ve seen a glimpse of possibility, a die has been cast, and it’s all worth it for that. We also know it’s the end of something as well as the beginning. The King’s heart fails him as he tries to bring himself to whip a helpless slave girl in front of a powerful English schoolteacher; he can’t do it. He can’t be the same king anymore and there is really no place for him to live. He dies trying to be a better king than he can be, and leaves the world to the next generation. Hammerstein was an optimist, even in death.

*   *   *

The King and I
had as its subject the collision of worlds. The much more modest
She Loves Me
was a simple romantic comedy but was also about two lovers who didn’t recognize each other until the last minute. It was so ingenuous, in fact, that it never had a real chance to become a smash hit, though its charms have endured and its craftsmanship is faultless. And it handled the task of bringing down the curtain in the loveliest possible way—by setting the lyric hook of one earlier song on the melodic hook of another.

The two most important words in the show are “dear friend.” That’s the way two members of a “lonely hearts club” address each other in letters that lead, eventually, to an abiding love. They don’t know each other and have never even seen each other—or so they believe. Actually, they work side by side in a perfume shop, where they bicker and snipe at each other all day, every day, having no idea that their workday annoyance is aimed at the person they feel most tenderly toward during evening letter-writing sessions. It’s probably an ancient premise, but in this case it is based on a Hungarian play by Miklós László, which also served as the source of the movies
The Shop Around the Corner
,
In the Good Old Summertime
, and
You’ve Got Mail
. It’s a reliable notion.

In the Broadway version, Barbara Cook played Amalia Balash, who talks her way into a job at an elegant Budapest perfume shop against the wishes of the shop’s manager, Georg Nowack, played by Daniel Massey. Cook’s magnificent soprano was put to good use at the end of Act 1, when she goes to meet her unknown beloved, who never shows up. Actually, he does show up, but he sees that his daytime enemy is his nighttime romance, behaves terribly toward her rather than reveal the truth, and ducks out. Left alone, Cook sings a soaring but somehow contained ballad called “Dear Friend,” and the curtain falls on her, alone at a table, her heart broken.

Early in Act 2, Georg, feeling guilty and confused, comes to visit her because she’s called in sick, and he brings her a pint of ice cream as a peace offering. She tosses him out unceremoniously and decides to soothe her feelings by writing to her “dear friend.”

“Dear Friend,” she writes,

I am so sorry about last night—

It was a nightmare in every way.

But together you and I

Will laugh at last night some day.

At this point her concentration fails her, and she begins to think about the pint of ice cream that Georg has brought her, and how nice he’s been to her, for the first time in her life. She suspects nothing. She’s just puzzled, and something in her is stirring. She sings to herself:

Ice cream—

He brought me ice cream—

Vanilla ice cream.

Imagine that!

What follows is a spectacular solo called “Ice Cream.” Just as “Dear Friend” manages to soar without losing control, “Ice Cream” manages to express ecstasy without ever leaving behind a sense of puzzlement. “What’s happening to me?” Amalia seems to be asking herself. “And why has it been caused by a pint of vanilla?”

The two numbers seem unrelated—one heartbroken and the other full of expectation—but they share a significant link: each has a title that consists of two one-syllable words. And the lyricist, Sheldon Harnick, puts this seemingly insignificant fact to exquisite use in the show’s final moment.

Amalia and Georg are united by it, in fact. Georg, bursting to tell Amalia the truth, understanding the risks involved, finally throws caution to the wind.

“You sounded—irresistible,” he tells her.

“But you never
said
anything!” she replies.

“How could I? I knew how you felt about me…”

“But you didn’t know!…” she insists. “What a shame we never spoke up…”

At this point, Georg reveals himself by quoting the letter Amalia was writing as the introductory verse of “Ice Cream.” After all, no one could know of those words except Amalia’s “dear friend.”

I am so sorry about last night—

It was a nightmare in every way.

But together you and I

Will laugh at last night some day.

Amalia nearly bursts with relief and gratitude, and the song continues musically exactly the way it did the first time we heard it. Except that instead of singing

Ice cream—

He brought me ice cream—

Vanilla ice cream.

Imagine that!

she sings

Dear Friend—

It’s really true then …

It’s what I hoped for …

That it was you!

By creating a simple lyric that shares scansion with “Ice Cream” but references “Dear Friend,” Harnick joins two unlikely musical companions as the plot joins two unlikely romantic companions. Sometimes genius lives in small places. The song races headlong to an embrace as the dam breaks. Love blooms like blossoms in spring, even though it’s Christmas Eve and snow is falling. The orchestra swells—not with the melody of “Ice Cream,” which we were expecting, but with the melody of “Dear Friend,” and the tapestry of music and lyrics is complete. The entire event takes less than two minutes, yet it is as full a meal as we need. Like virtually everything else about
She Loves Me
, it doesn’t announce itself or preen. It doesn’t even draw attention to the fact that Harnick and Jerry Bock, the composer, have slyly substituted “dear friend” for “ice cream.” And that’s why the number can be so short. The weaving of musical ideas with the lyric swap does all the work necessary even if we’re unaware of it. It expresses great tenderness and intimacy, and it is also startlingly efficient. Everything that needs to be said has been said, and every emotion has been covered by Bock’s music. The words “dear friend,” which brought down the first-act curtain in heartbreak, lead to the final curtain in romantic triumph. It’s a kind of writing that happens only in musical theater. No other form has any use for it, because no other form has the opportunity to do things that way.

*   *   *

She Loves Me
opened in 1963, more than a half century ago, and we are not as satisfied by tender, quiet curtain moments anymore. The rock concert, not to mention rock itself, has taught us to expect more visceral, high-energy climaxes, with maybe a megamix to follow. A megamix would not have suited
She Loves Me
, though it wasn’t unusual in those days for a curtain call to include a brief ensemble reprise of a couple of the better tunes in the show.

Still, in the classic period, shows often resolved quietly, leaving the audience alone with the protagonist, the lovers, the characters we cared most about. But at a certain point things began to change, and the final curtain became an opportunity for something more kinetic and viscerally exciting. Today, closing numbers are like opening numbers. They come in two varieties: the intimate ones that tie a beautiful knot and the noisy ones that shoot the works. They may be reprises (more on that later) or new songs, but they head for the same place—a quiet “wow” or a riotous one.
1

The riotous method is more forgiving. To do what
Fiddler
did, or
The King and I, She Loves Me
, or
Caroline, or Change
, requires that the creators thread the needle virtually perfectly and pierce the audience’s heart in one way or another. These kinds of shows often want the curtain to fall, leaving the audience in tears, even if the ending is happy. The noisy ones have a different intent: to muscle an audience into submission, which is another kind of impact altogether.

No show has ever done this better than
Hairspray
, which did it out of necessity. Always a bit of a shaggy dog,
Hairspray
is really about three couples, not two, and contains three important villains, as well as an entire population of African American characters who are not included in the above listing. There’s a lot to wrap up at the end, and the authors left most of it for the very last minute. The principal romance, the secondary romance, the political story (the racial integration of television), and the punishment of the villains were all left hanging as the show launched into its final number, thankfully called “You Can’t Stop the Beat.” The number was written before the enormity of its responsibility to bring all the strands of the plot to a conclusion was fully understood. And it was a doozy to begin with, with a title hook that morphs into an entirely new piece of music just when you think you’ve heard it all. This unexpected nugget of music and lyric (
“The motion of the ocean or the sun in the sky…”
) is so infectious that almost no human body is able to remain still when it is played. It causes a Broadway version of Saint Vitus’s dance and was the number’s secret weapon.

It’s lucky they had it, because all attempts to wrap up most, or at least some, of the subplots in an orderly manner earlier on in the act had failed. So no one was going to have the luxury of stopping the beat before an awful lot had been accomplished. Luckily the song was a killer that got audiences up and rocking, and by continually extending it so that it covered the wrap-up of first one subplot, then another, then another, it got bigger and better. Every major character got a short solo chorus, including Harvey Fierstein’s Edna in his spectacular supersized red gown. Shaiman and Wittman wrote clever lyrics that gave us all the information we needed, credible or not (did the villainous Von Tussels
really
get converted into good people simply by the beat? Well, who cares, in the end?). And the audience wanted the number to go on forever, which certainly didn’t hurt. No time for a wry or ironic scene at the end of this one—the stage exploded with streamers (shot from cannons) that reached all the way to the back of the house, and the lights went out. When the fireworks are over, they’re over.

*   *   *

“You Can’t Stop the Beat” was an entirely new song in
Hairspray
, but just as frequently shows rely on reprises of songs we’ve heard before to draw an emotional response. Sometimes they are songs that are repurposed with new or variant lyrics that cause them to set off different emotions from those we experienced with them the first time, as when Harold Hill and Marian Paroo revisit “Seventy-six Trombones” and “Goodnight, My Someone” in
The Music Man
, and love blooms, using two songs that we’ve previously associated with razzmatazz and loneliness, respectively. And sometimes, as in “Rose’s Turn,” the final number revists several portions of the score we’ve already heard to make an entirely new number. But no show revisits its score more thoroughly than
Sweeney Todd
, which spends its final thirteen minutes of narrative reexploring no fewer than sixteen musical numbers. The idea here is not to create new emotions with old tunes but, instead, to drive us headlong into a suspense climax. Stephen Sondheim uses the constant and unexpected shifting of music and lyrics the way Alfred Hitchcock uses visual montage to crank up the stakes and frighten us half to death.