Toccata

‘Tis the season.

New York and Los Angeles are currently regaled by totally separate revivals of Little Shop of Horrors. Is there something in the air? Mischief! Mischief! I probably read a little too much in the casting: New York’s off-Broadway production features people who’ve made their mark in musicals, such as Jonathan Groff and Christian Borle while Pasadena Playhouse uses television stars MJ Rodriguez and Amber Riley, although you won’t see the latter. The show holds a special place in my heart because I got to know it pretty well before the rest of the world. I heard Ellen Greene’s Somewhere That’s Green on the radio, recorded it, and then transcribed it for my girlfriend’s audition for a college show. So, I can claim to be the first person ever to play that beloved “I Want” number at an amateur audition.

The composer, a young man named Alan Menken, and I were both in Lehman Engel’s writing workshop at BMI. As the show was being developed, Alan insisted on bringing in the numbers, dragging along his seemingly aggrieved collaborator, Howard Ashman. Howard hated Lehman, didn’t want to hear what the old man had to say; he was indulging Alan. Something similar had happened a few years before, prior to my arrival at BMI. Ed Kleban dragged his collaborator Marvin Hamlisch along because Ed respected Lehman’s views. That helped to shape A Chorus Line.

Mighty proud to say it: I was there as Alan and Howard sang Now (It’s Just the Gas) – which had many more verses then, A Little Dental Music – eventually cut, Suddenly Seymour and Somewhere That’s Green. Lehman was delighted, encouraging. But Carol Hall, whose Best Little Whorehouse In Texas was then in its umpteenth year on Broadway, didn’t get it. “Why would you boys want to make a musical out of a B horror movie?” she drawled in the best little accent from Texas you ever heard. Her assessment brings to mind another negative reaction by another Texas belle. When Lerner and Loewe played their score to My Fair Lady for Mary Martin – hoping she’d play Eliza Doolittle (!) – she listened and said “You boys have lost your talent.”

Beware of Broadway luminaries calling you “boys.” Better to avoid the all-male collaborative team altogether, I guess.

My developmental group was recently asked to name genres of musicals and one answer surprised me: “Horror.” That got me thinking of Sweeney Todd’s desire to serve up nail-biting terror. Just a few years before Little Shop, Hal Prince had an iron factory moved to Broadway’s biggest stage. The sheer size of this set made us in the audience feel tiny, vulnerable. In previews, there was a large light attached to one of the higher catwalks. Or, should I say, just barely attached, because it came crashing down to the stage during a quiet moment in the second act. Angela Lansbury looked behind her, ascertained that nobody had been injured, amazingly, and then sung her next line, “Nothing’s gonna harm you, not while I’m around.”

I’d say that brought down the house, but I don’t want to confuse the figurative and the literal. What impresses me about Sweeney Todd is the large variety of devices used to scare the audience. Is there anything more effective at putting an audience on edge than a dissonant organ? Then, suddenly, from directly overhead (I had a good seat), the factory steam whistle, triple fortissimo. Dark-clad men ripped down the huge beehive drop. A 12/8 toccata began, in a minor key, eventually punctuated by piercing high reeds. I mention this grisly start with some nostalgic sense of loss. Many subsequent productions cut the prelude, or don’t have an organ, or a steam whistle, and it’s been forty years since I saw the beehive drop drop. It’s a horror.

The size of a theatre means so much. When I saw the first Broadway revival, commonly called “Teeney Todd,” the theatre-in-the-round couldn’t produce those effects. Similarly, I saw Little Shop of Horrors in what was once a Yiddish theatre in the East Village. At the end, when the plant is taking over the world, the side walls of the auditorium were illuminated and you could seen green tentacles all around you, previously unnoticed. If the Little Shop’s actually a big shop, well, it ain’t no horror.

It would be interesting to know if Little Shop of Horrors was written in reaction to Sweeney Todd. Certainly, Ashman and Menken must have seen the Wheeler and Sondheim frightfest. But their aim wasn’t to scare, per se. They used the trappings of a B horror movie as the setting for a musical comedy, one with a certain amount of heart. (To quote another Faustian musical, “You gotta have heart.”) So that’s why, Carol: there’s fun to be had here, and most of the songs are effectively humorous.

Some of Sondheim’s best comedy is in Sweeney Todd, but there the laughter sets off the solemnity. The second act isn’t as effective as the first because the creators infrequently hit the funny bone. They truncated some amusing business with a man who can’t resist singing songs at Mrs. Lovett’s harmonium. I never thought these were particularly funny, but it’s helpful, dramatically, to relieve the considerable tension.

It’s fair to say that Sweeney Todd and Little Shop of Horrors have had a huge influence on the past four decades of musical writing. For instance, Jekyll and Hyde was a famous public domain novel for about a century before Frank Wildhorn, Steve Cuden and Leslie Bricusse converted it into mirthless mush. Some shows attempt to scare (fruitlessly) and forget about the value of laughter. I’ve little regard for such dreck.

But, yes, I’m conscious of how often I complain about bad musicals. Remember, you, the audience, can add a ghostly element to any lousy show…just by yelling “Boo!”

 

Trio

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Back in the 90s I saw two musicals on exactly the same subject. One was hysterical, had the audience convulsing with laughter at every turn. I can still remember some of the jokes. The other didn’t resonate with the audience at all, and whatever laughter there was consisted of stifled giggles at how ridiculous the show was. It quickly fizzled on Broadway, running fewer than a hundred performances.

You can tell where this is going, can’t you? The excellent romp, From the Hip, is completely forgotten, having garnered no fame. The deathly serious show that was unintentionally funny has legions of fans, got revived on Broadway, and you’ve probably heard of it: Side Show.

Two decades have gone by, and I don’t put much stock in my memory. But what’s never left my mind is a puzzlement. I am consistently mystified that so many people find so much to admire in Side Show, although its leading ladies, Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner, were delightful “finds” at the time.

And the 1990s saw the flowering of a type of musical that has always revolted me. Ones in which the audience is supposed to be moved by woebegone characters expressing how awful they feel. To my way of thinking, if you, the character, are busy pitying yourself, you don’t get my pity; you’re already doing it. You get my sympathy if you refuse to pity yourself when life throws you a curve.

It seems a perverse reversal (a perversal?) of what musicals do best. Great Golden Era shows tended to celebrate life’s brighter moments. Think of the joy in She Loves Me’s title song or If My Friends Could See Me Now. Lachrymose shows outdo each other in the heaps of sadness they throw on stage: the abandoned pregnant prostitute in Miss Saigon or that falsely-accused-of-child-murder dude in Parade.

Sad to be those people. Isn’t it painfully obvious? Side Show and From the Hip are about Siamese twin sisters in show business. That’s a difficult row to hoe, certainly, but there’s a dramaturgical problem in giving expression to something an audience already knows. So, when Daisy and Violet Hilton lament,

I am lonely pondering
Who would want to join this madness?
Who would change my monogram?
Who will be part of my circus?
Who will live me as I am?
Who will ever call to say ‘I love you’?
Send me flowers or a telegram?

I don’t feel for them; I’m impatient. I’m waiting for the show to tell me something I don’t know. In stark relief – and boy, am I relieved! – Sissy and Sassy Sheraton are told by a producer, “You two are a hard sell with that stuck-together thing.” I love how this is phrased almost as much as I abhor those badly-accented “gram” rhymes.

An on-line discussion yielded a nice point about Side Show’s opener, Come Look at the Freaks: “couldn’t tell if it was a parody. It wanted to have the gravitas of ‘Attend the Tale of Sweeney Todd,’ but felt like the opening sequence of ‘Streetcar!’ on The Simpsons.”

Both Sweeney and Side Show featured the same actor, Ken Jennings. Sweeney Todd earns its somber power with an organ prelude, the tearing down of the huge “beehive” drop, and, most startlingly, the factory whistle. When serious is unearned, it strikes some of us as ludicrous.

From the Hip creators Blair Fell and Maggie Moore were unaware of the mega-serious take when they were writing lines like “Slow down with the Scotch, Sissy! I’m the one with the liver.” And “Mother told us we shouldn’t fool around with romance unless it was with another set of Siamese Twins.” “With our luck, we’d probably fall in love diagonal.”

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A guy I know lives in one of those cities where everyone would like to live, but there’s ample reason to be annoyed at the powers-that-be who present national tours of musicals there. They’re charging the same hefty price for the Tony-winning Dear Evan Hansen that they are for Waitress, which won none. His beef isn’t that Waitress has a smaller cast, but that it’s a non-union tour, while Dear Evan’s Equity. I can sympathize with his dismay over finding this out after purchasing the tickets. But his anger at the producers of non-union tours is misplaced. I’m sure they’re proud of their production, and it’s not going to help them sell tickets if they trumpet the fact they’re putting performers on stage who haven’t joined Equity.

Actor’s Equity often tries to convince the public that the shows populated with their players are somehow better. And this isn’t always the reality. I can think of many examples of tours where the non-union talent out-performed the card-holders. It’s a very common complaint, saying that ticket prices are too high. But, to a great extent, they’re set by economic forces. Honda would love to sell Civics for $50k. Instead, they sell a huge number of them for less than half that. The price of anything is what a critical mass of people are willing to pay.

Waitress is soon ending its Broadway run. After its first year, producers filled the seats in its modest-sized theatre with a variety of people famous for things other than theatre: Sara Bareilles, Katharine McPhee, Jordin Sparks, Jason Mraz, Joey McIntyre, Colleen Ballinger, Todrick Hall, and Al Roker. Yes, that Al Roker.

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Also closing soon, after over 2400 performances, is the previous Jesse Mueller-led show, Beautiful, the jukebox biography of Carole King. I tend to get cynical about the success of any show featuring songs the ticket-buyers already know and love. (My seven-year-old once called them “juice-box shows.”)

But I like to think a lot of credit is due to director Marc Bruni, who previously helmed my 2007 show, Such Good Friends. Marc was so helpful to me, getting transitions to flow, encouraging me to get scenes and songs to make their point and move on. It’s a point of pride to say I thought he was brilliant years before the Broadway community caught on. Choosing a director can be a harrowingly difficult decision; my pick was, in a word, beautiful.

The star-spangled banner

My baby is Sweet 16 today. No, not my daughter. My most famous musical, Our Wedding, the one with full-page coverage in The New York Times – which means this is also my 16th wedding anniversary. Yes, Joy and I got married in an original musical, on stage at an off-Broadway theatre, and that’s remarkable. Notable. So it’s the thing most people seem to know about me.

Fame Becomes Me. No, that’s not me complimenting myself. It’s the name of a Broadway musical that’s been on my mind as the last of a now-dead breed. In Broadway’s Golden Age, every season contained Star Vehicles, and fans of that star would buy tickets with the not-unreasonable expectation that they’d get to see the star doing what the star was best at. That might mean Phil Silvers perpetrating some crazy scheme. Or Carol Burnett being loud and aggressive but simultaneously charming. Ray Bolger with his lanky legwork or Ethel Merman blowing the roof off the place.

And today… not so much. Economic forces have killed the star vehicle. A bona fide star, with a following, won’t commit to enough months doing a musical for the show to recoup. And it takes a certain amount of bravery today’s stars don’t possess – that an original musical will provide worthy material. The last example I can think of is when Martin Short brought his shtick to Broadway, entrusting the Hairspray team of Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman to do the songs. (This is, in my opinion, their best work. Nobody agrees with me.) I never saw Fame Becomes Me – not that big of a Short fan, but now I celebrate it as the final example of a glorious sub-genre.

Album still sells for $20

Growing up, I had an ambition to write a star vehicle. Recently, a friend was fascinated by an old paperback I had on my shelf of tomes related to my musicals, produced an un-. This was something a well-connected friend proposed we adapt as a vehicle for Carol Channing long ago. Looking back, I’m struck by what a terrible idea for a musical this was, but the idea of writing for a major musical comedy star was catnip to me. When we abandoned it, my desire to fashion material for a star was left an unscratched itch.

Jump to 2003, and the creation of Our Wedding: The Musical. The cast contained no stars you would have heard of, but, in that specialized subset of a community known as “wedding guests,” there are certain individuals everyone wants to see. We gasp at brides. We might look forward to a Best Man’s toast, or see the pride of the Father of the Bride. In a way, most members of a wedding party are celebrities-for-a-day, and it’s no great stretch to say my writing of our wedding show gave me the chance I always wanted to write to the particular talents of people whose “fans” have built-in interest in what they’ll do.

My task became to let each one shine in their own idiosyncratic way. My best man could give a rambling toast that covered tons of personal history not only because that’s the expectation of best men, but because I knew Sandy Schlechter could run on with a torrent of words in an amusing way. Father of the Bride embodied Classic Rock, so his genre was an easy call, and I could make use of his size – much bigger than me – and so we acted out a mock threat of violence. Another burst of energy came from my sister, who’d done musicals in her youth. So, her exposition had shifting tempos, and jokes I knew she could put across. Joy had four bridesmaids, all from college, and I felt this was too high a quantity for the audience to keep distinct, so I treated them as one, a choral quartet that did danced, here and there. And when the new wife and husband dance for the first time, all eyes are on them. I wasn’t quite comfortable with this, so I split the focus with my father, who sang a sentimental instructional waltz as I galumphed and Joy gracefully twirled.

In old Hollywood, studios would sometimes put a wide array of famous performers in one film and then promote it as a cavalcade of stars. Our Wedding gave me so many singers to fashion material for, my work cut out for me in the best possible way. So, my four-year-old niece as flower girl would need something short and simple, because how much can you expect someone to handle at that age? I had to trust her parents, in California, to rehearse her and make sure she was ready to go. We only had time for one rehearsal in New York, and people were coming in from all over the country – Baltimore, Oakland, Phoenix, Florida. All flew in to New York, we rehearsed on Saturday and performed on Sunday at the Soho Playhouse. So, not just my little niece, I needed everyone to self-rehearse, get ready to go. Our officiant was one of the few New Yorkers, and an experienced musical theatre professional, so the least worries about him. Of far greater concern was our mothers, and for them I’d fashioned a duet.

I explained and re-explained to my mother that I’d only write notes she could sing, bits of business she could do. It took her a while, but she came to believe me. And she was fully prepared when she arrived at rehearsal, ready to at last bounce these lines off her duet partner. But where was Bea? My mother-in-law-elect was the only person late for their rehearsal time, and she was extremely late, causing us all great stress. I don’t think she had a cell phone in 2003, and she had no sense of time. She decided to take a walk around New York, then come back and take a bath, never glancing at a clock. The rehearsal space was near her hotel, and eventually a team of bridal party stalwarts got her there. Exactly the sort of bad behavior some difficult stars are known for.

This anniversary, Bea’s the only parent left to recall performing that night. And she and my mother indeed landed their jokes, to everyone’s delight and my profound relief. The chief anxiety of the wedding weekend was whether she’d be able to pull it off, but she did, and whether my mother could ever forgive her for waltzing in so late for their rehearsal slot, but she did (I think). Amazing how that turned out, and amazing that Joy and I, the musically consecrated couple, are still enjoying marriage after sixteen years.

He is Ohioan

Early in September, and then late in September, I made small talk with a nice-enough guy I know. He scrunched his face a bit in the second conversation, accessing his memory, and asked if I’d filmed my screenplay. I concealed my shock and tried to explain that I do theatre, and a new project had just begun. He admitted, sheepishly, that he didn’t understand the difference. 

(Not the photo Prince showed.)

A week earlier, two twenty-something friends and I took in the Hal Prince exhibition at the Lincoln Center Library. I wondered, out loud, whether they’d have the magazine photo of an angry white mob which Prince had displayed at the first rehearsal of Cabaret. Since the assembled company knew they’d come to rehearse a show about the rise of the Nazis, they assumed the scowling faces in the picture were Germans. But Prince revealed these were contemporary Americans protesting desegregation. It’s happening again, here. Which is a sobering thought.

I mention this because my friend already knew the story. She has a wealth of knowledge about the theatre, and I’m struck by the contrast with the dude who admitted to knowing nothing about theatre. And I’m now reminded of my previous trip to the same exhibition hall last spring. Ran into an old friend I’d met in the improv world. He’s familiar with my songwriting and I’m familiar with his. And there’s something to be said for an environment in which you run into people you haven’t seen for years and they know exactly who you are and much of what you can do.

There’s an analogy about a seed in fertile ground. It comes from the Bible. And I only know it comes from the Bible because it’s part of a musical based on the Book of Matthew, Godspell. You can have a perfectly good seed, but if you plop it down in some desert where rain is a rarity, it’s unlikely to grow into a tree. New York is rich soil, a nurturing environment to hundreds of musical theatre writers. And the other little bromide that applies is “It takes a village.” To get your musical to grow, you’re going to need to connect with a dozen or more like-minded artists. Together, you’re working to tell a story using songs, one that entertains at every turn.

I’m bemused that my daughter has homework to do before she auditions for a community theatre production of Annie. She’s 7, and the company wants her to learn terms like “down right” and “playing the sweep.” There’s an implication that kids who are unfamiliar with theatre terms are less likely to be given leads to which I say “Good! She downright better play the sweep!” But what I’ve discovered with my child’s forays into performing arts programs is that they’re like metal detectors running over sand. They’re a magnet of sorts, gathering seeds that have been plopped in a desert, binding the breed known as “theatre people” together. It’s a happy thing to see my kid find like-minded friends.

Which reminds me that her mother and I found each other in an internet chatroom devoted to theatre. These things don’t exist anymore, but there was a time when AOL and others provided spaces where people from all over the world could share thoughts about shows with each other by typing in boxes. One could be the only Broadway fan in some cultural wasteland, and go online to interact with other stage enthusiasts.

For some months now, I’ve been moderating a musical theatre writers’ group. Far-flung people from three different countries share their work, and we “meet” for a  monthly videoconference. I wonder, sometimes, whether our confabs provide respite for the alienation that comes with being the only theatre person for miles around.

So, I’ve once again managed to bury the lead. Today marks the ninth anniversary of this here blog. One of the unanticipated perks of having a blog is that WordPress shows you a map of the world so you can see where your page’s “visitors” are coming from. These essays about musical theatre have been looked at by people all over the world and that’s awesome in the original sense of the word – something that produces awe. It’s hard to believe 26 Uruguayans or 61 Indonesians are really interested in what I have to say. Could be that they’ve clicked here by mistake, or just to see a photo I’ve put up. Or it could be there’s a seed in the Sahara, using the internet to look around for similar seeds, feeling less alone in the universe.

The map shades the countries various degrees of pink, depending on the quantity of visits. Five continents and the major unshaded area is Greenland. So, just putting this out there: I’d like to buy Greenland. Do you hear, you 21 visitors from Denmark? Sell! Or I shan’t visit any time soon.