Bright lights

“You’ve got to come to New York!” begins a Rodgers and Hart song and you know Rodgers and Hart are never far from my mind. On the recording with Dorothy Loudon, it’s sung like a loud drill sergeant’s order, as if the singer is grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you. (I failed to find the clip.) It’s from their musical, I Married an Angel, a rarely-performed romantic fantasy that was recently done at City Center by Encores but I missed it because I wasn’t in New York.

That fortissimo imperative would seem to be a message to musical theatre writers. So, perhaps we should consider the question, Do you have to be in the New York City metropolitan area in order to create musicals?

Years ago, I said something and thought it was hyperbole: That you could attend a musical you haven’t seen every day for a year in New York. Now I’m wondering if that was an overstatement. There are roughly two dozen musicals on Broadway, but Broadway is a place with a limited quantity of venues. Off- and Off-Off- Broadway means many more, and that’s not counting all the cabaret spaces. I mentioned Encores a moment ago, and that’s at a far larger space that’s not considered any of these types of houses. They do roughly six old shows a year for limited runs. But that leads me to start counting other spaces, like Town Hall, the Shed, Queens Theatre in the Park (where one of my musicals once played) and the various venues associated with colleges. Need we add high school auditoriums? And then you have NYMF – what is that, another three or four dozen shows right there? – and the Fringe, and why not NAMT? Does anyone have a clear count on the number of backer’s auditions? Are we anywhere close to 365, yet?

Why should you care? Well, perhaps you live far from New York. I’m going to make up a mythical town for our purposes, Polecat, Alabama. How many different shows play Polecat? If musical theatre is a thing that can only be truly appreciated in live performance – and I believe it is – you’re going to want to attend far more frequently than you can in Polecat. Or San Francisco. Or some other mythical place. This is a living, breathing art form, and you, as a creator, need to cast your eyes on living, breathing performances as often as possible.

Somewhere – and perhaps it’s Polecat – somebody is reading this, thinking they really don’t need to see a different musical every night throughout the year. And somehow, the Bard of Polecat writes something, and, drunk with accomplishment and hubris, decides it’s ready to hit the boards. Are you going to do that in your Alabama hamlet? You got a lot of theatres there that produce new musicals? But of course, since musical theatre is the most collaborative of art forms, you’re going to need more than just a producing organization. You’ll need a director, a musical director, a choreographer, a full design team, backstage personnel, musicians, and actors. And you’re going to rely on these people, so they all better be freakin’ talented. At the risk of sounding snobbish, I’ll ask, are they Polecat talented or are they New York talented. Because, as the song goes, “If I can make it in Polecat, I’ll make it anywhere.” Sorry, I meant New York, New York.

Somewhere on my computer is my current résumé. And, foolishly, I don’t know where I keep it. So, I always have to search for the word, “résumé” and, in addition to mine, a bunch of other people’s résumés come up. Without intending to, I cast my eyes on the c.v.’s of a whole bunch of directors who popped up out of nowhere when it was announced I had a show in the New York Musical Theatre Festival. And the thing about these people is – they all had an impressive list of credits. Because New York.

I was urged, some weeks ago, to consider producing Baby Makes Three in a city known to be full of actors and my first thought was that I don’t know anyone whom I’d trust to bring life to those characters. Of course, cast size is a factor. Baby Makes Three requires two prodigious players. And then I start thinking about director, musical director, producer and such folks are plentiful in New York. But of course they are. New York’s theatre scene draws talented people and now let’s think like a mathematician and consider the nexus of opportunity.

What makes for a successful show is having excellent people in every role, on stage and off. In New York, you can’t swing a cat without hitting top quality theatre people. In other places, it takes a far greater amount of luck to find top-notch showfolk. If a person’s strongest suit is a theatre job, they’re more likely to be in the Big Apple.

My experience, as a native New Yorker, is that one meets like-minded individuals and learns from others in the field. In college, my teachers included Lee Adams, Howard Teichmann, Arnold Weinstein and Kenneth Koch. The same years I was at Columbia, I learned a lot at the BMI Workshop under Lehman Engel, and the ASCAP Workshop under Adams’ main collaborator, Charles Strouse. A graduate program in musical theatre writing began at NYU, and Pace, even further downtown, bolsters new creations as well. I ran into Tom Jones at my local copy shop, and Sheldon Harnick just happened to be in the audience as one of my comedy songs played at a benefit. To be complemented by the Greatest Living Lyricist! This doesn’t happen in Polecat.

My mind flashes to a Harnick line, “Soon I’ll be a stranger in a strange new place, searching for an old familiar face.” Displacement and exile are heartbreaking. My advice: Don’t be a stranger.

 

The king of this department is the prince

Harold Prince died this week, the day after he turned 91 and a half. I’m gearing up to do my one-man show telling the tales of musical theatre history in Los Angeles next week, and of course Hal Prince is a major part of that. Seems like it might be an appropriate time to say a little about what he did as the shaper of extraordinary shows.

I like to focus on the connections between people. Prince had two directing mentors, and, to a certain extent, he became a combination of them both. The first was the Great Old Man of the theatre, George Abbott. Mr. Abbott also started as a stage manager, and the musicals he directed and sometimes wrote were traditional musical comedies, thoroughly trained on giving the audience a good time, rarely with a serious thought in their minds. An example is The Pajama Game, which is about a labor strike at a Midwestern factory, and yet refuses to treat that possibly explosive topic as anything more than a lark. This hit was the first show produced by Prince, and it was co-directed by Abbott and Prince Hal’s other mentor, Jerome Robbins. When you look at Robbins’ musicals, you see a genius often attempting to pull the genre forward, with more serious ideas, and new ways of presenting musicalized action on stage. Two of the best shows in terms of packing an emotional wallop, West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof, were produced by Prince, directed by Robbins. I think of Fiddler as the apotheosis of the Golden Age musical and it marked a transformation for both men: Prince began his shift from producing to directing and Robbins left the stage to innovate at New York City Ballet.

There’s no such thing as a typical Prince show, but Cabaret exemplifies the lessons learned from Abbott and Robbins. It never loses sight of the fact that it’s an entertainment, providing substantial razzamatazz in the diegetic numbers at the Kit Kat Klub. But it’s also a sober depiction of the rise of Nazism, and pierces the heart with a quartet of lovable characters forced to make gut-wrenching choices. Early in his directing career, Prince established two realities: Sally, Cliff, Schneider and Schultz live in echt Berlin; there’s naïveté, marriage proposals, broken engagements vandalized shop-windows, and abortion. But in the cabaret life is beautiful, and each number is a fun-house mirror of the main plot. After the protagonist gets a financial windfall, there’s an incredibly energetic number about suddenly becoming rich. When Sally’s promiscuous tendencies seem to hurtle towards breaking a man’s heart, we get a daffy depiction of polyamory. Prince’s idea is to fuse the audience with the unsophisticated American at the center of the story. We and Cliff are Americans who know and care nothing about European politics. We step into an oddly charming cabaret, are soon seduced in two senses: by the M.C.’s showmanship and, sexually, by an Englishwoman who enjoys sex like no musical comedy character we’ve ever met. As the Kit Kat numbers grow more and more sinister, we (and Cliff) realize to our horror we’ve been enticed into collaborating with Nazis. Chilling in the extreme, especially when Prince lowers a mirror angled to show us watching the show.

Cabaret takes a troubling moment in 20^thCentury history and answers the question, “How could it happen?” My musical, Such Good Friends, asked the same question about a time a few years later when people who’d named names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee found themselves working with those who’d suffered from being named. Prince, Abbott and Robbins found themselves caught up in these circumstances when a supposed-to-be-hysterical show, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was playing to near-empty houses in its out-of-town tryout. Abbott, directing, couldn’t understand why all the jokes were falling with a thud. Many times in his career, he’d been called in to fix other people’s shows out of town. Now Abbott said, ruefully, “I like it, but they don’t like it: We need to call in George Abbott.” Producer Prince called in Robbins, but this meant emotions were bound to over-boil. The star of the show was Zero Mostel, a victim of blacklisting. Robbins had named names. One can only imagine what Prince did behind the scenes to get the two to set aside their history and fix the show. But that’s exactly what happened. Robbins thought nothing needed changing except the opening number, so he got Stephen Sondheim to replace it, staged it with his trademark proclivity for physical jokes and Comedy Tonight turned a flop into a hit.

Years later, Prince, as director, teamed with Sondheim on a series of innovative – I’d say revolutionary – shows, each more audacious than the last. The zenith of these is Sweeney Todd, in which characters indict the audience in Brechtian fashion. “Isn’t that Sweeney there beside you?” The fun revenge drama of the source play was given a broader resonance, at Prince’s insistence. We enter the theatre and are confronted with a chart showing the strata of Victorian society. We contemplate this as eerie organ music plays, then a piercing factory steam whistle overhead shocks us, in the manner of horror films. Anything can happen, now, and Prince has us on edge, eyes darting around the stage. Something wicked this way comes.

In Cabaret, a mirror comes down from the flies. In Company, an elevator goes up and down. In Sweeney Todd, characters rise from a trap in the stage, and there’s also a slide that takes newly murdered bodies from the second story of a set piece into a bin in the basement below. And I seem to recall some fairly awful musical in which a chandelier falls from the theatre’s ceiling, but this may just have been a nightmare I had.

All that stunning movement grabs the audience’s attention in exciting ways. There’s only one medium that can present such a thing, Prince’s beloved Broadway. Seeing any of these effects on a screen diminishes them almost out of existence. You had to be there. I’m glad I was. Grateful to have been in the audience for a cornucopia of Hal Prince creations.

My lecture at New Musicals Inc.