I miss breastfeeding

Well, it’s the big day, the big celebration, the holiday to beat all Holidays (Billie and Judy). And that would be my daughter’s eighth birthday. Is there some other? Now, I’m not going to fill this page with fatherly boasts, as this isn’t a personal blog, But this time the thoughts about our world of musicals will relate, in some way to the world of the world’s most widely-loved child performer.

Her entire school was deeply involved in a fundraiser for the school itself, one where all the kids run laps. If there was an opt-out, I never heard about it. And I was a little annoyed, on several levels. In general, I wonder why we, as a society, are teaching Second Graders how to solicit cash contributions from friends and relatives. It’s not as if this was supposed to back up math lessons. (“People I know pledged $6 per lap and I ran 27, therefore I earned my school $162.” Nothing like that.) I do get that there’s a health benefit to training children to run long distances, so that’s good. But the irony is that the school, most of the year, has spotty and insufficient physical education. I assume it’s underfunded, and they’re raising money in hope of some day having gym classes. Or a gym, for that matter.

As I was wondering about the value of my kid learning fundraising, I recalled a time in which I had to raise funds for one of my musicals, and may have said to myself “I wish I’d learned how to do this in school.” A dozen years ago, my Such Good Friends won its way into the New York Musical Theatre Festival. So far, so good: this was a blind selection by an estimable panel of judges. The not-so-good news was that financing the production involved me calling everyone I know and begging for money. The richest of my friends merely asked “How much?” and, in retrospect, I stammered too low a figure. Another friend felt very bad that he was in no financial position to contribute. Another said no, which didn’t bother me, but it may have bothered him to be asked, as we didn’t talk again for many years. This drought ended when I ran into him at a performance I attended with my daughter.

Obviously, the skill to be a good fund-raiser is rather different than the skill required to write a good musical. And this brings my thoughts to Frank Wildhorn, who, in my view, doesn’t write good musicals. But he’s gotten an amazing quantity produced. I’ll list a few and fess up that my wife cast one of them on Broadway: Jekyll & Hyde, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Civil War, Camille Claudel (NYMF), Dracula, Bonnie & Clyde, and Wonderland. Collectively, these have lost more money than any other songwriter’s oeuvre you can name, but that doesn’t stop his hopeful investors.

My daughter is surprised and appalled to find her school chums haven’t heard of Broadway musicals. But the school only has art and music classes once a month. I couldn’t help noticing that the state where we’d planned to educate her, New Jersey, just announced they’re the first state that teaches arts in all its public schools. Cole Porter once wrote a comedy song called See That You’re Born In Texas. I’d amend that to See That You’re Educated In New Jersey.

There’s a broad societal problem in the mix, here, and you know I make it a practice to steer clear of politics on this here blog. But you see the state I’m in. Citizens here have voted to underfund the public school system. I was with my little one as we passed a political type seeking donations or signatures in front of a supermarket to preserve that taxation status quo. I yelled so loud he folded his folding table like a folding table and ran. And the next thing you now, I was reading about Ivo Van Hove.

The point of the piece in The Atlantic was that the avant garde director has been stunningly successful in that most commercial of marketplaces, Broadway, but he’s the product of state-funded theatre in Holland. With the backing of the Dutch government, Ivo Van Hove has had abundant opportunities to run rather wild experiments. It’s an enviable place to be, one that few Americans could ever know. Because America has very little in the way of state-funded theatre where budding directors get chances to take chances. In order to conquer New Amsterdam, see that you’re born in Old Amsterdam.

This tale has another turn: Ivo Van Hove revealed his plans for his next mad experiment, a Broadway revival of our beloved West Side Story. Anticipating the cutting of I Feel Pretty and the Somewhere ballet has upset a lot of Broadway wags, who feel fully justified in criticizing that which they have not yet seen. I’m wondering if this is a peculiarly American reaction. God knows we venerate West Side Story – for good reason, it’s one of the all-time greats – but there’s a closed-mindedness about opprobrium expressed so many months in advance of a production’s opening. Could this be because too few of us got proper arts training growing up?

While writing this, I lost track of the time and was late picking up my daughter from school. Two to three times a week, I shuffle her off to rehearsals, an education in performing arts we pay for out of pocket. You do what you can do, as a parent. Just a few years ago, I was shaping young minds at two New York City public arts magnet high schools, Reperatory and Talent Unlimited. My fondest birthday wish for my now eight-year-old is that the education system never limits the reach of your talent.

Janey

History, unlike perfectly rhymed stanzas, doesn’t come in neat little packages. You can’t assume that a decade, say, will contain shared characteristics, because we’re not going to turn over the etch-a-sketch and shake vigorously the moment Barbara Walters announces “This is 2020.” So, when we talk about eras, epochs, and periods, we rush to use the word “roughly.” I’ll try to restrain myself from using that here.

So, 100 years ago today, the thing we’d recognize as a Musical Comedy began, with the opening of Irene.And, as long as we’re allowing a certain degree of inaccuracy, let’s say that 50 years ago, the thing changed into something else. The first half of this century of musicals might be called Old School, while, for some strange reason, the second half is often called Contemporary Musical Theatre. It’s also tempting to break this into quarters: I’ve been known to use Golden Era to refer to the period that starts with Oklahoma! (1943) and dies out roughly 25 years later with Hair. Another handy demarcation point is Rent (1996) so I might use these smash hits to divide into four parts. (Boy, the temptation to use “roughly” is strong!)

I don’t remember much about Irene, but it might be the oldest Broadway musical I’ve seen, albeit in a much monkeyed-with revisal. It involves social climbing, a character we root for, and songs that have a certain amount of charm. These have tunes you can hum, and instantly understandable words that relate to the sound of the characters and their emotions. Some are funny; others, poignant. Songwriters Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy weren’t great artists. It’s unlikely they thought of themselves as such. Their hope was that the public would like the songs well enough to buy copies of the sheet music, because that’s where the real money was for songwriters, then. Stage-works, and royalties derived from other productions, weren’t the main source of lucre. Commercial records didn’t exist; nor were there ASCAP payments for radio play. Of course, a few years later into this first era, vinyl sales and airplay did become a big deal. But, throughout this earliest quarter, it was more important, to songwriters, to get that extractable hit song than it was to tell a story effectively.

With very few exceptions, the pre-Oklahoma! musicals had disposable plots. The audience wasn’t looking for an interesting story. They liked the star turns. That is, there were specific Broadway performers they were turning out to see – picture Fred Astaire – and, certainly, the songs stars put across needed to be attractive, immediately delightful.

I just remembered that I’m going to be quizzing kids later today on what they know about George Gershwin. And his Broadway songs exemplify this type of entertainment. The lyrics, usually by his brother Ira, are intricately rhymed. Never a false rhyme, and if there’s a near-rhyme, it’s called out. That is, it’s put across in such a way that the lyricist is acknowledging it’s forced. An example by Ira’s friend Yip Harburg:

Dorothy: Not even a rhinoceros?
Cowardly Lion: Imp-oceros!
Tin Man: How about a hippopotamus?
Cowardly Lion: Why, I’d thrash him from top to bottom-us!
Dorothy: Supposing you met an elephant?
Cowardly Lion: I’d knot him up in cellophant!

Wrapping an elephant up in cellophane is a rather odd threat – do lions work with clear plastic? – when you think about it. But you don’t think about it, because the attempts to rhyme are so amusing.

I’ve written on other occasions how Oklahoma! changed everything. In the second quarter of our history, audiences cared more about the story, and the writers crafted numbers to move that story, no longer prioritizing creating a hit song. And yet, the majority of chart toppers came from Broadway musicals. Songs still rhymed; tunes were hummable. Ballads were pretty, and up tempos got you tapping your toes. Show tunes defined popular song. Until they didn’t. By the sixties, Baby Boomers spent enough on 45s, rock began to edge theatre tunes off the charts. A torch was passed when The Beatles knocked Hello Dolly off the Number One spot. Don’t let it be forgot that, earlier, the fab four had recorded a Broadway ballad, Till There Was You.

The revolution of a half-century ago threw out the craft baby with a torrent of bathwater. Hair had no coherent book, but it did have an impressive number of Top 40 hits, and often the radio listeners had no idea they were enjoying songs from a musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice joined the fray by releasing a cast album of a show that had never been produced, Jesus Christ Superstar, which was, Jesus Christ, a super-hit. Rock musicals had that callow iconoclasm that says the old ways are bad. Why write Old School musicals if a new day has dawned? And so, out went the rhyming. In the past fifty years, most scores have contained false rhymes and nobody’s having fun with forcing. Dramaturgically, it seems less attention is paid to effective storytelling. So there are a host of plots that make no sense, or fail to engage an audience’s emotions. Melodies lost their sweetness, as if a mellifluous tune was something your mother might go for, but not you.

One could view the third quarter – from Hair to Rent – as something of a culture war between traditional values (La Cage Aux Folles’ brassy cheese is an example) and shows that have similarities to rock concerts (Dream Girls is one). There was an Old Guard that complained about the rock kids taking over, as well as a New Guard who felt the Broadway musical audience would die out if scores didn’t embrace the aesthetics of tunes you could hear on the radio. (Remember radio?)

Successful pop-inflected musicals were a fairly rare thing prior to Rent, but now they’re so common, the more traditional show-tuney scores stand out as unusual. In retrospect, that rock vs. old-fashioned schism seems quaint and unnecessary. Why can’t musicals embrace contemporary sounds while still utilizing the traditional mechanics of good story-telling and lyric-crafting? Does it spoil the rock aesthetic to rhyme? Why shouldn’t plots make sense and deliver emotional peaks and valleys? We all seem to agree that the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution improved storytelling in our form. The rejection of so many of their innovations can seem like a step forward, but sloppily written shows? That’s the oldest fashion of all. 

Near dark

Prompted by a preternaturally expert tween-age production of The Addams Family, and in the midst of the hangover that follows one abnormal night in which my family was Gomez, Morticia and Wednesday, I’ve a couple thoughts about the surprisingly popular musical version.

Ten years ago, a Broadway actress hired me to accompany her audition for Grandma at the Telsey office on West 43rd. An impressively large crowd watched some finely-tuned shtick without reacting, and the moment we were out the door, the comedienne said “They’ll probably give it to Jackie Hoffman.” Indeed, that’s what happened.

Perhaps ten years seems like long ago, but the Addams’ road to the Main Stem was the traditional twisted path that commonly occurred fifty or more years ago. Big budget, packed with stars, and not quite clicking in its out-of-town pre-Broadway run. The producers understood some drastic action needed to be taken, so they fired the directors (there were two, avant garde guys) and brought in the most experienced and Tony-honored helmer of comedies they could find, the zany Jerry Zaks.

The buzz on the Street was that The Addams Family would change from a cutting-edge parade of creepy thrills into a laugh-a-minute joke-fest. The writing team, comprised of hit-makers, would seem to be more appropriate for the funnier take. Marshall Brickman, decades earlier, had written some of the most hysterical screenplays of the time, such as Sleeper, Annie Hall and Manhattan, in collaboration with someone too controversial to name. His collaborator on stage musicals, Rick Elice, had penned the very amusing play, Peter and the Starcatcher, and together they’d written the most successful of American jukeboxes, Jersey Boys. The Addams Family has music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa; more on him later.

The show opened to lukewarm reviews, but ran more than a year and a half. And then… its popularity exploded. Schools and community theatres ate it up; it became one of the most-produced musicals in the United States. And this prompts me to make an unfair comparison to a recent musical about an unusual family, whose house is a museum, and they literally live in a funeral home. That would be Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s high-quality memory musical, Fun Home. Now, say you’re running a theatre some place where nobody reads New York theatre reviews. You consider Fun Home a hard sell, because your audience hasn’t heard the title, is unaware it won the Tony Award and might possibly find the subject matter a little discomfiting. In contrast, The Addams Family seems an easy sell: people know the title, already love the characters, can picture it’s good and funny, and are unaware of the tepid critical reception and lack of Tonys. Quality is totally beside the point.

It seems we’ve stood and talked like this before. But it sticks in my craw, as a writer who strives for quality, that a mediocre musical can rake in the chips while an admirable one gets seen less.

Speaking of sticky things, this sustained note in the opening number kept replaying in my mind. Where had I heard if before? “Poison in your DAY.” A clue arrived with Halloween, when I read the fivethirtyeight.com “scientific” ranking of candies. I thought of this lyric line,

More addictive than Reese’s Pieces
Here the party never ceases

And the note that precedes this, held for the same length of time and with the same harmony was the one I couldn’t place. Oh, and the song, another Latin up-tempo, written ten years earlier than the Addams one: I wrote it. It’s The Cave from Area 51.

This is no accusation of theft. It’s an indication that Andrew Lippa and I occasionally have intersecting sensibilities. We’re similarly old, write music and lyrics, and, more frequently than most of our contemporaries, we’ve gotten people to laugh at our comedy songs. I’m not saying I’m like Lippa, but I am saying I like Lippa. I find it puzzling whenever people don’t.

Suppose, twenty years ago, you were making wishes for the new millennium. You might envision a musical theatre writer who wasn’t afraid to be romantic…

You’d hope he had a way with comedy…

And that, when appropriate, his tunes would have a contemporary feel…

Given that set of talents, Lippa always seemed to me a perfect pick to write The Addams Family score. That was a good move. The chock-full-of-jokes book by Elice and Brickman was a good move. Going with Voice of Experience Zaks over a couple of off-Broadway tyros with no Broadway experience – seems fine. And yet The Addams Family is not nearly the sum of its parts. The daughter, Wednesday, is saddled with a desire for normalcy – completely out-of-character. Another personage is defined mostly by her predilection for speaking in rhymes, a weird quirk in a musical, where everybody rhymes when they break into song. Marital problems between Morticia and Gomez? Unthinkable! The plot gets tied up and then we hear a ballad from the laconic butler. Huh?

Long ago, I saw kids similar ages essay another musical that started as drawings, Li’l Abner, it was hysterical. Charles Addams’s inky creations seem resistant to the emotionality musicalization naturally provides. I can recall nothing particularly moving in the old TV sitcom, nor the three films about them. So, when Lippa provides a sentimental dad-to-daughter waltz, the choice is a bit weirder than the ooky clan itself.

Of course, my daughter and I dressed as Wednesday and Gomez for Halloween and naturally I fell for this moment of poignancy. Others may be less taken. But I take this touching bit as further proof that Lippa fires on all cylinders, and someday I predict the elements will come together and he’ll write a show everyone, including critics, will embrace.