The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (6 page)

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Forum
and
Mack and Mabel
, notwithstanding their varying degrees of success, illustrate the two most common forms of opening number. In the former, we get to meet and hear from everyone. In the latter, we are left in the hands of one protagonist, who sets the scene with no help from the rest of the cast. The first—the all-hands-on-deck number—has been serving musicals since their inception, although its function and style keep evolving. The second was more or less invented by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, with “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” back in the ’40s.

The invention was inspired, but also pragmatic. Both men had been writing shows (although not with each other) for a long time, and both knew the value of startling an audience. You could startle it with content, but you could also, if you had a good enough idea, do it with form. It was easy to startle with more noise but more interesting to do it with less.

Long before Hammerstein had begun writing operettas in the early ’20s, musicals usually began with lots of people onstage singing, often rows and rows of chorus girls. Ziegfeld’s
Follies
were famous for their parades of American beauties right at the opening curtain. The hall-of-fame set designer John Lee Beatty once said, with characteristic dryness, that an opening number was just an opportunity for the audience to take a good look at the company and decide whom they most wanted to sleep with. Once that problem had been gotten out of the way, the play could begin. He was only half kidding.

Having agreed to adapt a play set on an Oklahoma farm at the end of the nineteenth century, Rodgers and Hammerstein were left wondering what would happen if decades of theatrical tradition were given the heave-ho, and a Broadway musical began with a middle-aged woman churning butter in a barnyard while a handsome cowhand wandered on and sang a solo. It was a question born out of practicality—choruses of girls were hard to justify on an Oklahoma farm. It’s hard to have merry villagers when there’s no village. It’s also the way the play they were adapting,
Green Grow the Lilacs
, begins. So they took a chance, then took many more, and then revolutionized the form in the process.

They were mature writers as well as experienced showmen. Hammerstein wrote a lyric for the cowhand that, in only a couple of dozen lines, did a lot of the work that “Comedy Tonight” had in seven minutes. The song is short, but it’s long enough. Hammerstein knew he had to set the scene, create the language of the piece, get us to like this cowhand, create a point of view for the show (earnest, not satiric, romantic but of the earth, not fussy), and create a stake. By the end of this little number, we had to believe that the place the cowhand described was so splendid in its simple beauty and virtue that it was worth defending, with a gun if necessary: it was America. And in 1943, America was at war in Europe and the Pacific, protecting the values of democracy and liberty against the deadly incursions of tyranny and bigotry. The show was set at the turn of the century, but like all shows, it had to speak to the audiences of its own time.

This sounds like a tall order, and it required a mature artist to tackle it. But Hammerstein was a practical artist, too, and the first thing he did was to purloin the ideas of the opening stage direction of Lynne Riggs’s original play. The stage direction, in part, reads:

It is a radiant summer morning several years ago, the kind of morning which, enveloping the shapes of earth—men, cattle in a meadow, blades of the young corn, streams—makes them seem to exist now for the first time, their images giving off a visible golden emanation …

From that bit of purplish prose, the lyricist fashioned this much more singable vision:

There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow,

There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow,

The corn is as high as a elephant’s eye

An’ it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up to the sky.

Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,

Oh, what a beautiful day.

I got a beautiful feelin’,

Ev’rythin’s goin’ my way.

All the cattle are standin’ like statues,

All the cattle are standin’ like statues,

They don’t turn their heads as they see me ride by,

But a little brown mav’rick is winkin’ her eye.

He dealt with flora first, then fauna. (Hammerstein dealt with a lot of fauna in his career. In a wonderful if slightly mad essay by the statistician Eric Thompson, 491 creatures are accounted for in Hammerstein’s lyrics—“75 sea creatures, 240 creatures of the land and 176 birds.”)

For two stanzas, the verses are purely descriptive, though it tells us a lot that the cowhand singing them is so vividly observant, and his passion for his surroundings begins to show in each chorus. But in the third stanza, the cowhand loosens up and tells us what he thinks about all of this:

All the sounds of the earth are like music—

All the sounds of the earth are like music

The breeze is so busy it don’t miss a tree

And a ol’ weepin’ willer is laughin’ at me.

Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,

Oh, what a beautiful day.

I got a beautiful feelin’,

Ev’rythin’s goin’ my way …

Oh, what a beautiful day.

We have moved from appreciative description to a more personal statement, and suddenly we’re in the hands of a cowhand who’s a self-deprecating poet and who loves his surroundings with a kind of plainly expressed passion that is as romantic as it is proud. He’s ardent but masculine. He speaks for all of us who love our country, and he speaks in a bit of a strange patois, which is American but remote from New York and Broadway. The simplicity is deceptive, and the song is so well known that it’s hard for us to hear it afresh. But it’s worth noting that it is structured like a folk song, with its repeating chorus, not like a standard thirty-two-bar theater song. And Hammerstein’s notion of repeating the first line of every verse twice is borrowed from the rural blues songs that grew out of field hollers at the turn of the century. In those ways, it’s nothing like a Broadway song. But it contains all the hallmarks of a great opening number, distilled down to their essence and appropriately formed for a rural “folk” setting. Hammerstein changed the form without ducking his responsibility to the content. Rodgers’s melody respects the simplicity of the ideas in the verse and celebrates the ardor that’s implicit in the chorus. So it isn’t just the
idea
of a solo that’s revolutionary—it’s the confident invention and expertise of its execution. (It’s also worth noting that this opening number, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first, is so clearly echoed in their
last
opening number, in which a rebellious nun named Maria points out that
“the hills are alive with the sound of music.”
Whenever Hammerstein went outdoors, the earth seemed to sing to him.)

Since that time, most Broadway musicals have begun one way or the other—a blowout for the entire company or a solo for the protagonist. But in their second collaboration, R&H tried something that was also new: an opening ballet. “The Carousel Waltz” replaced the more traditional overture in
Carousel
. In the course of this instrumental prelude, dancers and actors took the audience through the world of a traveling New England carnival somewhere on the coast of Maine. Taking his cue from the sound of a carousel’s calliope, Rodgers wrote a richly textured piece of music, and the choreographer Agnes de Mille, working from Hammerstein’s scenario, painted the landscape of a working seaside town, with its factory girls and fishermen squeezing a night’s entertainment on the midway out of a few nickels.

It was tremendously effective, but it’s only occasionally been imitated, most notably—in an entirely different tone—by
Guys and Dolls
in “Runyonland.” This opening presents a more familiar landscape—Broadway itself—and a wise-guy tone that is as far from
Carousel
as one could hope to stray.
West Side Story
adapted the idea of an opening ballet to yet another New York location but stitched dance to a classic ensemble-type number—the “Jet Song.” Each in its own way lays out the territory of the show it introduces with astonishing clarity, imagination, and confidence.

But opening ballets are the exception—wordlessness always runs the risk of further confusing an already wary audience at the opening curtain. Solo opening numbers are somewhat more common. Hammerstein used another in
The King and I
, a few years after creating the tiny little opening duet in
South Pacific
, in which two Eurasian children sing a bit of doggerel in French, “Dites-Moi,” which nonetheless underlies the largest themes and dilemmas in that epic show. “
Tell me why
,” they sing, “
life is beautiful and happy? Is it because you love me?
” The show then spends three hours trying to arrive at a place where life is beautiful and happy, and the hero and heroine finally allow themselves to love each other. The journey encompasses war, racial prejudice, sexual obsession, pandering, terrible economic disparity, and human disaster. It’s a monumental show, slyly begun by a pair of tots whose racial makeup and parentage turn out to be at the center of the argument. They ask a simple question in rhyme (in French, yet), but, for anyone listening, it’s the right question, and it allows the audience to slip comfortably into the evening in a beautifully exotic setting. Once seduced into this pleasant place, theatergoers belong to the writers, who are then free to put them through glorious hell.

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There’s probably no such thing as a perfect musical, but when fanatics gather to compare notes, the most frequently mentioned candidate is undoubtedly
Gypsy
. Written with dispatch by Arthur Laurents (book), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), and Jule Styne (music), this examination of a show business family certainly comes as close as you can get. And in Madame Rose, the authors created the greatest show business monster-mother of all time.

Gypsy
, first produced in 1959, is based on Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir of the same name. It’s the somewhat reinvented, or at least laundered, tale of Ms. Lee (née Rose Louise Hovick) growing up as a kid in vaudeville and her emergence as the famous stripper. Many of the eccentric details in the musical are drawn directly from the memoir, which gives the show a lot of texture and a remarkable feel for time and place. But the actual subject—the crushing damage that a parent can inflict on her children and the myriad consequences—is entirely the invention of the musical’s authors. It’s also one of the key reasons
Gypsy
has stood the test of time: this is a subject that never gets old. How we love, ignore, or smother our children, how we project our own dreams onto their unwitting psyches, how we may drive them away while living in terror of their abandoning us—these are profound concerns, and
Gypsy
takes them seriously. Yet for a musical that has a lot on its mind, it begins with a kind of charming innocuousness, and it plays like a house on fire. Two children sing an apparently trivial song, rather like in
South Pacific
. But while Rodgers and Hammerstein were digging into History with a capital “H,” Laurents, Sondheim, and Styne were writing a personal drama more indebted to Freud than to Herodotus. Still, the show is a musical, and it begins by behaving like a musical comedy.

The curtain goes up on the rehearsal for a kiddie-show amateur night in Seattle in the 1920s. This is made clear by a heroic feat of expositional writing by Arthur Laurents (the entire opening scene, including the song, takes up only four pages of the script). We’re introduced to Uncle Jocko, the seedy host of the contest, who, in the course of a very few lines, lets us know that the contest is fixed, that his biggest problem is not the kids who want to be in show business but the mothers who push them into it, and that the talent-free kids themselves are so bad that they will soon “kill vaudeville.” These are all important points:
Gypsy
concerns itself with a monstrously powerful mother figure who is absolutely determined that her children will be stars in vaudeville. The problems she faces are conjoined: the kids aren’t talented, and the business is going out of business. She’s in a race against time and doesn’t know it. By the time her children are grown, the form will have all but disappeared, a fact that audiences in 1959 were well aware of. Her challenge is insurmountable, but her will is indomitable.

This makes it interesting. Every good show, in some sense, is about a mountain that’s hard to scale. The bigger and more unpredictable the mountain, and the more determined the climber, the more engaged we’re likely to be. In this regard,
Gypsy
may be the all-time champion musical-as-athletic-contest.

We meet the kids before the mother. Uncle Jocko, after suffering through sixteen bars of “Arnold and His Accordion,” turns the stage over to “Baby June and Company”—“Company,” in this case, being the shy, thumb-sucking Louise, age eight. The two girls launch into a somewhat pathetic little number called “May We Entertain You.” This is
Gypsy
’s opening number, and it appears to be about nothing. But it tells us almost everything. The kids are lousy: June is overzealous and annoying, and Louise is lost. And as soon as we learn this much, their mother, Rose, bursts upon the scene midsong, making a great star entrance down the aisle of the theater, to try to fix the number, which is impossible to do. Jocko tries to get rid of her, the stage manager tries to get rid of her, even her own children tacitly wish her somewhere else, but she cannot be dispatched. She cajoles, she threatens, she extols her kids’ virtues and denigrates everyone else.

Here’s what she says, with ineffectual interruptions by Uncle Jocko, who is quickly losing control of his own domain: