Jack Viertel - The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built

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For Daisy, Janet, and Joe,

who took me with them to the theater

And for Linda, Josh, and Anna Daisy,

whom I now get to take with me

Ive never been much of an international sightseer. Ive never been eager to tramp around ancient ruins or bask in the architecture of the great cathedrals of Europe. I understand these activities have enormous spiritual and aesthetic value for a lot of people, who are fascinated and moved, sometimes to tears, to be in the presence of the ancients. Im married to a woman who is rarely so content as when she has the chance to wander the corridors of history. But its never meant that much to me. When I find myself in one of these places, more often than not I begin to think about Broadway musicals. I consider it a defect in my level of curiosity.

Its shameful, really. Musicals have provided me with the kind of nourishment that crumbling walled cities have not. Ive loved them since my parents and my grandmother Daisy took me to see Mary Martin as Peter Pan just before my sixth birthday. In fact, along with nonmusical plays, theyve been the source of most of my education and consumed an enormous amount of my thinking and my emotional development, which sometimes makes me feel foolish.

But I have to thank one particular set of ruins for the fact that this book got written. I was clambering around the Greek island of Delos, Apollos home, on a hot August afternoon when it occurred to me that I ought to teach musical theater to college students.

Why Delos? Why teach? Why that moment? Who ever knows for sure why a thought pops into your head? I could claim that it was because Apollo was the god of music and poetry, and that got me thinking, but I doubt anything that erudite was lamping around my brain. I have a feeling that the ruined columns lying in piles all around me reminded me of the poster for the Nathan Lane production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum , which probably caused me some internal embarrassment. While I was trying to turn from the mortifying to the high-minded, the idea of imparting knowledge to young people somehow slipped into my brain.

The fact is, almost everything reminds me of the theater, and certainly ancient ruins do. There are fabulous semipreserved amphitheaters all around Greece and Italy, and even ruins that never were performance spaces seem to me to be inherently dramaticthey make me think of declamatory speech and kissing in the shadows, murder in the dark, and coups detat. But also, to be honest, they call up Nathan Lane in a toga and distant memories of Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford, David Burns, and John Carradine singing Everybody Ought to Have a Maid. Thats always been a kind of heaven to me, and ruins are about the world of the gods.

There was another connection as wella family connection. Shakespeare wrote about Greeks and Romans, and what little I know about them I learned from Julius Caesar , Antony and Cleopatra , and the others. My wifes uncle, Harry Levin, for many years head of the Comparative Literature Department at Harvard, used to spend an entire semester picking apart only four of Shakespeares plays, holding every line up to the light and questioning why it was written the way it was written, what led to it, and what it led to. He was like a Swiss watchmaker taking apart and reassembling a perfect timepiece. It was an intense fun-house ride for Shakespeare nuts, and it was glorious. But no one had ever done that for Gypsy or Guys and Dolls or The Book of Mormon . Why not? Because Broadway musicals cant compare to Shakespeare? Says who? If Shakespeare is Englands national theater, arent Broadway musicals ours?

Being a man of limited imagination but a certain dull cunning, I soon thought of stealing Uncle Harrys concept lock, stock, and barrel; the only thing that would be different was the repertoire. And why should I be the one to teach it? My reasoning was simple and, I hope, not overly self-inflated. Id been working as a dramaturgically inclined Broadway producer for two decades, developing new works and reviving old ones, and Id been the Artistic Director of the Encores! series of concert musicals at New York City Center since 2000. I didnt, and dont, claim to have any God-given wisdom about musicals, but Id been in the trenches for a long time, and worked on dozens.

* * *

I structured the course quickly in my head while pretending to admire all that was left of Apollos hometown. (Was the lyric of My Hometown from What Makes Sammy Run? coursing through my brain at the time? Quite possibly.) It was Harry Levins course, but the texts would be Gypsy , Guys and Dolls , My Fair Lady , and South Pacific . Three two-hour sessions for each show. The students would have to read them aloud to understand them. Why those four shows? A showbiz drama, a classic New York comedy, an intellectual romance, and a wartime epic. And each of them close to perfect. Why not?

New York Universitys Tisch School was happy to hear of my interest and assigned me a slot. The course was clean and simple, and it just kind of worked. We closely examined the four classic musicals, page by page, trying to piece out why every line of dialogue was there, what every lyric accomplished, and how music supported whatever the fundamental idea of the show was. The course assumed that every great musical has a single idea, a single stake, and that much of the writers job is to discover what it is and then cut away the thicket of things that dont belong so that the idea can be explored and celebrated in a way that audiences take home with them. The course asked the question: How do all the diverse tools of the trademusic, rhyme, comedy, character, dance, drama, storytelling, even scenery and costumes, lights, and orchestrationsget pointed in the same direction toward the same goal? In a sense, it was an architecture class, exploring how a structure is designed and built that is strong enough to support a single vision and fulfill or confound an audiences expectations, as required in the circumstance.

The course proved popular, and it wasnt long before I added a second one, which examined what Broadway folks call a song plot. Not to be confused with the plot of the show, a song plot is like a graph on which the songs in a musical story can be laid out. Its a surprisingly consistent diagram: an opening number, an I Want song for the main character or characters, a conditional love song (If I Loved You, not I Love You), a production number, and so forth right through the finale.

The not-so-secret agenda of these courses was to point out that this kind of craftsmanship, gradually abandoned beginning in the late 1970s, has led to a much more chaotic life for the Broadway musical. It may be incredibly hip to leave basic storytelling techniques behind and light out for the Territory, as Huck Finn did on his raft with neither a map nor a rule book. But an awful lot of shows get hopelessly lost that way and disappear into the woods, never to be heard from again. And most of the works that have experienced real lasting success in the years since the Golden Age of Broadway are, when the surface is scratched, deeply traditional and craftsmanlike. Im talking about Sweeney Todd , The Producers , Hairspray , Wicked , and The Book of Mormon , which, contemporary though it may be, is really just an orthodox mash-up of The King and I , Guys and Dolls , and The Music Man with a twenty-first-century voice and subject.