Top-heavy aria

I very much enjoyed Linda Holmes’ piece on the score to The Muppet Movie posted on the NPR website but the immediate question becomes: Why is this an article on a website? Doesn’t NPR have some sort of radio station where we could listen to these songs?

If you want to grasp musicals, ideally you’d go to some place where you’d be in conversation with someone who, at any moment, can run to the piano and play and sing an example. And that’s what’s happening in L.A. August 7, 8 & 10 at New Musicals, Inc. I’ll talk the talk, tinkle the keys, sing a little. And I realize this blog is similarly limited. I post some videos and sound clips, but musical theatre is a dish best served live, so click here for tickets.

Holmes makes a great point about Muppet singing: It’s never quite beautiful. The lack of dulcet tones from those foam mouths distinguishes Muppetland from, say, Disney, where the best professional singers they can find hit every pitch squarely. In a way, this is part of the joke: Muppets are pure id, and what they express comes out without varnish. It’s funny when Miss Piggy or Fozzie the Bear let rip with far from mellifluous sounds, and we accept that they’re too excited to sing any better. Or that nobody in the storied Jim Henson Workshop cared about that sort of thing.

In our world of stage musicals, the closest thing to the Muppets is, of course, Avenue Q. To a certain extent, John Tartaglia and Rick Lyon continue the untrained-sound tradition of Henson and Frank Oz. And now I’m flashing back to a memory from about twenty years ago, when I met the original Kate Monster, Stephanie D’Abruzzo

We were in a gorgeous theatre near Lincoln Center for the annual Broadway Bound concert. I had a funny duet in it that brought down the house and D’Abruzzo sang A Fine, Fine Line without puppet. This was greeted with polite applause. The audience saw a young woman delineating romantic troubles and didn’t get that this was a spoof of anything. Now, this is going to sound like I’m knocking D’Abruzzo’s voice – trust me, I truly admire her – but nobody knew what Avenue Q was back then. In the 1990s, when way too many musicals featured women pitying themselves, people naturally expected a certain high quality sound. If it were Kate Monster, a puppet, performing, we’d get that this was part of the Muppet aesthetic, and appreciate the odd pleasure of an inexpert forlorn foam diva we care about.

A far older memory: On my parents’ hi-fi, the rather unusual contralto of Carol Channing. This is not a thing of beauty, but it’s certainly a thing of musical comedy gold. Last week, the Playbill website put up five different renditions of If You Hadn’t But You Did and it’s an eye-opener how much funnier Channing is than, say, pretty soprano Kristin Chenoweth. It says something about these times we live in that the latter has to resort to physical shtick while that much-preferred blonde uses her voice, acting and inflection hysterically.

The world of musical comedy embraces all sorts of voices, from Ezio Pinza to virtual cartoon characters. Channing, after all, once voiced Mehitabel and his South Pacific and her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes opened the same calendar year. But now, seventy years later, I wonder if voices with rougher edges are as welcome as they were.

We have, today ubiquitous colleges and conservatories, instructing aspiring musical theatre performers to sing as prettily as possible. Many include so-called “juries” that seemed designed to throw anyone with a catch in their voice out on to the street. Then, more weeding out of oddballs goes on in auditions, if composers, musical directors and colluding casting directors call for it. No two characters voices sound exactly alike, but two over-trained songbirds can be indistinguishable.

And many’s the time we go to the theatre for reasons other than vocal beauty. We might want to be engaged in a story – this would need superior acting more than a delectable sound, or we might come to laugh. How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum are two hysterical musicals with hysterically long titles. I don’t go to either of them for the players’ musicality.

When people complain about the “clean” quantity of the modern generation of Disney princesses, it’s likely they’ve a preference for character voices like you’d hear, more commonly, in Golden Age musicals and Muppet musicals. Of course, a little of that goes a long way. For some reason I still don’t quite understand, my GPS voice became that of Cookie Monster this summer. And I wasn’t happy about this. Of course, I’m never happy to be driving. The GPS voice setting was then switched to “Boy Band” and that’s pretty annoying, too. It’s just one boy. With a British accent. Band of brother?

Maybe he wouldn’t have left me

      A coloring book picture of Rosie the Riveter was going around and, given the way my mind works, I immediately thought of two musicals that were smashes in the late forties but only make brief appearances in my Subjective History of Musical Theatre because I don’t have time for everything.

     To see what I do have time for, attend the two parts next month: New Musicals Inc. is hosting in North Hollywood, California, Part One 8/7; Part Two 8/8; both parts, 8/10. The presentation flies by, because I don’t believe in going on too long, I zip through the last 153 years at breakneck speed.

     But back to Rosie: she stands for all the women who worked during World War Two while the men-folk were overseas doing the combat thing. Before the war career gals were relatively rare, but the country had a need so pressing, patriarchy was supplanted for a time. Winning the war sounds like a wonderful happy ending, but where you choose to drop your curtain can make a world of difference. All those troops returned from the battlefields and, naturally, wanted their jobs back. But their feminine replacements in the work force, why should they have to give up their positions? And what if they’d done the job better than the men? There’s a conflict.

     Good musicals have been built on far less. Translating this into musical comedy terms let a Broadway product exorcise a societal demon, the work war between the sexes. Imagine seeing a gal in a traditional male field, out-competing a blustery prideful male. Might be fun. And then throw in the obvious plot twist and have them fall in love. But first establish that they’re total opposites. You could even have the title subtly reference the war experience the nation had just been through. Not Johnny Get Your Gun, but Annie Get Your Gun.

     Rodgers and Hammerstein, after the revolutionary success of their first two collaborations, Oklahoma! and Carousel, decided to venture into producing. They booked Broadway’s biggest star, Ethel Merman, and who better to compose than Jerome Kern, who’d written Show Boat with Hammerstein? In later years he’d collaborated with the pre-eminent female lyricst, Dorothy Fields. And she and her brother Herbert, who’d been responsible for the libretto of some early Rodgers shows, would do the book. This seemed a perfect plan until Kern died.

     That led Rodgers and Hammerstein to call Irving Berlin, but there were a couple of problems. One was that Berlin was his own lyricist; Dorothy Fields would have to give up that role – Berlin was nice enough to compensate her, though. Everybody respected Berlin; except, it seemed, Berlin. He realized that Rodgers and Hammerstein had revolutionized the form, and wasn’t sure he could write their new style of show. But the innovators themselves would be standing by to the guide them through it, and before long, Irving Berlin came up with the best set of songs that had ever been written for one score.

     This sublime entertainment, created for 1946 audiences, has to come up with some sort of resolution of the conflict. Rosie the Riveter left her job at the factory. Annie Oakley perceives that she can’t retain Frank Butler’s affection if she bests him in a shooting contest. No refrain of “I’m not throwing away my shot” for her. Although we know she’s the superior marksman, she intentionally misses the target to shoot an arrow through Frank’s heart. Disappointing by today’s standards, but embraced by practically everyone in its time.

     Currently revived on Broadway is a post-war smash with a host of similarities, Kiss Me Kate. When its original producer was a stage manager, he observed the Lunts, the married pair of non-musical actors then considered America’s best. In some play in which they played a loving couple, backstage on-lookers were surprised to see them bicker – unhappily married people – as soon as they weren’t in front of the lights. There’s clearly a musical comedy in this, and the producer came to Cole Porter to write the songs. But Cole felt exactly what his friend Irving did: he thought he’d been supplanted by Rodgers and Hammerstein and their new-fangled “integrated” musical. To take the pressure off Porter, the idea became to do show a divorced couple working on a musical version of a Shakespeare play – and not a particularly good one. So, the show-within-the-show has a lower barre set for it: it really didn’t have to be good. And it could be as Porter-esque as anything the Indiana scion had written before the aforementioned revolution.

     Book writer Bella Spewack has my admiration for making this work. Unfortunately, she shares credit with her husband Sam, who did very little. They’d long been a team, but were now divorcing. (She didn’t need to rely on her imagination re Splitsville.) The libretto milks the premise: When we watch Petruchio spank Katherine in the show-within-the-show, we don’t know if we’re seeing Fred slapping the butt of ex-wife Lili a little too hard, out of spite. By the show’s conclusion Katherine sings Shakespeare’s words,

I am ashamed the women a so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.

Is this how Lili truly feels? Kiss Me Kate, like Annie Get Your Gun, exists in that pre-feminism period where musicals couldn’t risk upsetting “the tired businessman” who paid for the tickets. In recent decades, the Bard’s monologue has rubbed many the wrong way. Often, the actress will wink to show she’s not sincere. “Ah, there’s a wench!”

tickets/info about my subjective history

Get you hence

August 7 – 10 I’m performing my Subjective History of Musical Theatre again, in Los Angeles.

When I tell people about it, I tend to sound egotistical – “Yeah, I do this thing and it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.” People who’ve already attended the thing tell me I’ve undersold it. “It’s so much better than sliced bread, sliced bread isn’t a proper comparison.” I’m trapped between two camps: one suspects I’m being immodest; the other believes I’ve been way too modest.

Promoting one’s shows is just a fact of life in the theatre, something we all must do. I’ve never been comfortable with it. But here on the blog, at least I don’t have to look in your faces, seeing your “Oh, come on!” while I do it – this alleviates my embarrassment.

After my show, people inevitably come up to me and say they’ve never been so thoroughly entertained by anything of an educational nature. And “lecture” seems the wrong word for it, connoting the imparting of facts for students who might be taking notes, or falling asleep. The word I used in my first sentence today – performing – gets at it a bit more. I sing songs. I run to the piano to play illustrative pieces. I execute a Fosse move (!). But a lot of time, I ask my audience questions, such as “If you lived in Victorian England and wanted to gamble, legally, where would you go?” There’s a lot of improvisation as I deal with wrong answers. And, in a way, a light bulb goes on, as people connect that seemingly silly gambling question with a key moment in the development of musical comedy.

Just yesterday I asked a bunch of children if they knew the meaning of chip-on-my-shoulder. And this might have seemed too schoolteacher-y if there wasn’t a spirit of fun; no penalty for giving a wrong answer. Grown-ups don’t mind being teased in my lecture. It’s mock school. Learning happens, but we all know there are no grades given.

I’ve performed this every year since, I think, 2001. So, certain punch lines have hit enough audience’s ears that I know exactly how they’ll land. But what’s the opposite of a punch line? A cry line? People are quite surprised how moving at all is. Jokes are easy; I take more pride in getting tears to fall.

Some history lessons are a bunch of dates, easy to forget or dismiss. Others are a bunch of names. So, you’ve heard of Gilbert & Sullivan, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sondheim and probably you know their music. By the end of my lecture, you’ll know them as a bunch of people, some of whom hated each other so much they couldn’t stand to be in the same room together. Another guy had to literally lock his collaborator in a room to get him to write. And I dramatize that story in a way that gets my audience to gasp.

Plus, there’s music. We tend to prefer the musical versions of plays – My Fair Lady over Pygmalion, for example – because music enhances the tale, gives us something extra to enjoy. So this is a far cry from college because how many college professors break out into song all the time?

I don’t mean to give anyone SAT flashbacks here, but there’s an Is To analogy that fits: My Fair Lady is to Pygmalion what my lecture is to other people’s lectures – worlds more entertaining because it’s chock full of song.

A lot of writers, I’ve noticed, wish to teach their audience something. I’ve a pretty low opinion of this ambition, because the shows often seem preachy, too school-like to effectively entertain me. My show’s the reverse. From the trappings, it seems to be an educational experience, but it’s more show than lesson. And I see an overlap between giving a riveting talk and creating a riveting musical.

It’s all about the storytelling. Picture cavemen around a campfire, captivating each other with accounts of their days. The one champion, the raconteur everyone most loved listening to, was Mel Brooks. Yes, he’s that old. (He’s the 2000 Year Old Man, after all.)

This sets me off on a tangent: His earliest professional credit I know of – billed as Melvin Brooks – was a sketch he contributed to the Broadway revue, New Faces of 1952. The best thing in that show was a song by Sheldon Harnick – also his first professional credit – and they’re both alive today. Pretty impressive. Who expects two members of a writing team to be around 67 years after opening night?

Adapting The Producers into a musical, Mel visited Jerry Herman, hoping to get him to write the score. Herman went to the piano and demonstrated that the perfect person to write the songs was right in that room – he played a medley of numbers Brooks had written for his films. Could Mel do it all? Not exactly, he needed a collaborator on the script, and the understanding of story structure Thomas Meehan brought to the piece proved a key ingredient in The Producers’ success.

Eventually, the pair published an explication, “The Producers: How We Did It.”

Now you know that this book exists, you naturally anticipate a fun time could be had reading it. You’re used to laughing at Mel Brooks material. I’m not comparing myself to Brooks here – who would do that?* – and this here blog is fairly dry: I don’t know that I get you to laugh all that often. So, it’s a bit of a stretch, imagining you’ll have the time of your life watching a manic raconteur detail the entire history of musical comedy. But… “It’s true! It’s true!”

Info/tickets