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

Tuning Up

or, How I Came to Write This Book

I’ve never been much of an international sightseer. I’ve 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. I’m married to a woman who is rarely so content as when she has the chance to wander the corridors of history. But it’s 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.

It’s shameful, really. Musicals have provided me with the kind of nourishment that crumbling walled cities have not. I’ve 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, they’ve 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, Apollo’s 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 dramatic—they make me think of declamatory speech and kissing in the shadows, murder in the dark, and coups d’etat. 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.” That’s always been a kind of heaven to me, and ruins are about the world of the gods.

There was another connection as well—a 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 wife’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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 can’t compare to Shakespeare? Says who? If Shakespeare is England’s national theater, aren’t Broadway musicals ours?
1

Being a man of limited imagination but a certain dull cunning, I soon thought of stealing Uncle Harry’s 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. I’d been working as a dramaturgically inclined Broadway producer for two decades, developing new works and reviving old ones, and I’d been the Artistic Director of the Encores! series of concert musicals at New York City Center since 2000. I didn’t, and don’t, claim to have any God-given wisdom about musicals, but I’d 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 Apollo’s hometown. (Was the lyric of “My Hometown” from
What Makes Sammy Run?
coursing through my brain at the time? Quite possibly.) It was Harry Levin’s 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 University’s 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 writer’s job is to discover what it is and then cut away the thicket of things that don’t 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 trade—music, rhyme, comedy, character, dance, drama, storytelling, even scenery and costumes, lights, and orchestrations—get 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 audience’s expectations, as required in the circumstance.

The course proved popular, and it wasn’t 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. It’s 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. I’m 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.

The students wanted to talk about those shows as much as the classics; this was
their
Broadway. And so
Mormon
was added to the syllabus. We examined I Want songs from
Wicked
and how a deadly serious six-character musical like
Next to Normal
copes with the need for some noisy comic relief. Everything was fair game.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to teach at Tisch and to interact with a student body that is as curious, energized, and passionate as any group of young people I’ve ever encountered. It’s great fun for me, and for a few years I assumed that was that.

But after a while, I started to get invited to give talks outside the classroom, and that’s when people started asking me when I was going to write a book about all of this. In some ways, looking at Broadway shows mapped out in the way I had mapped them seemed like a secret language that was fun to let other people in on. Frankly, I had my doubts about this book proposition, because the classes were really for young would-be professionals, not just musical theater fans. But the outside talks
were
for fans, and they seemed to be the ones urging me on. Part of the process, then, has been to take what began as an academic course and broaden it into a wider realm—the story of how musicals got made in their heyday, the much vaunted but never quite defined Golden Age, and how they get made today. Some of the songs and shows are ancient history to my students, and perhaps to the younger generation of readers as well. But I don’t apologize for that. Ancient history can have its inspiring effects, as I learned, by accident, on Delos.

*   *   *

On the other hand, recent history can be educational in a different way, especially if you’ve been a part of it. When the producer Margo Lion asked me to take a look at the John Waters movie
Hairspray
, for instance, I told her I thought it was a perfectly silly idea for a musical—it felt almost like a home movie. But Lion saw in it the bones of a classic musical theater story waiting to be exposed, and she was completely correct. The show succeeds with general audiences while the original film remains only a cult classic, because the show has real architecture in addition to a real subject: it opens the door and lets
everyone
out of the closet. But it would never have worked without the first-rate craftsmanship of storytelling that took five writers and a world-class director to achieve.