The Ryan connection

The annual inundation of Christmas carols sets my mind a-spinning. As you know, songwriting mistakes bother me greatly, way more than they should. Trying to keep this positive, I’ll start by saying a few things about a show tune that’s two, two, two carols in one.

Long before the success of The Music Man, its creator, Meredith Willson, was a famous man of music. He conducted an orchestra on the radio back in the days in which that sort of thing conferred fame. His best-known creation as songwriter was the delightfully blithe It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas. It is only appropriate to play this song early in the season, so, if you’re hearing it now, it’s overripe.

A dozen years after its release, Willson was writing his third Broadway musical, Here’s Love, based on Miracle on 34th Street. With Santa Claus as a character, there was a definite need for a Yuletide carol, and here Willson did a clever thing. The song composed for Here’s Love, Pine Cones and Holly Berries is heard. Then, it’s repeated in counterpoint with an existing holiday song we all know. And that song is the old Willson standard, It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas.

In those days, it was exceedingly rare for an already-written well-known tune to appear in a new musical.

HOW I WISH THIS WERE THE CASE TODAY!

Sorry to shout. When the 1963 audience heard It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas in the surprising position of the second half of a quodlibet, it was like meeting an old friend. The characters in Here’s Love seemed to be singing a traditional carol. Now, today, as you listen to Christmas music – often against your will – you hear a mixture of songs composed in the last century and “classics” by Handel, Mendelssohn and the like. Few make the distinction. Willson, by using his composed carol as if it’s a classic, solidified the song’s acceptance as part of the canon. Strikes me as a clever self-promotion.

In a quodlibet, we hear one song, then another song, and we think the second song is unrelated. Then – surprise – both songs are sung at the same time, and fit together nicely. Willson performs this trick in The Music Man with two pairs: Lida Rose plays against Will I Ever Tell You and Pick a Little Talk a Little is countered by Goodnight Ladies. But wait: Willson didn’t write Goodnight Ladies. It was a traditional song from long ago, familiar to the audience. Rather like how It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas hits our ears.

This quodlibet trick is one I’ve turned countless times in my musicals. It seems to be the weapon in my arsenal I use more than any other. In fact, one of the things I’m doing over Christmas vacation is creating an opening number with different groups singing in counterpoint, somewhat like the four family contingents in Tradition from Fiddler on the Roof. I’ve been asked to write this by collaborators who are aware of my bag of tricks.

It seems like I’ve used the word “tricks” way too often and I’m getting tired of typing it. If I may be so bold, I’d like to present to you this bit of advice as a Christmas gift, dear reader. Know your devices. Composers and lyricists alike need to be aware of the various ways songs can be structured. Tricks are there to be used, and it’s good to understand the reasons one might employ them.

A nice fellow I work with surprised us by announcing he was moving on to a new job in a different city. His last day would coincide with a little performance by a class I teach. We were preparing to sing The Rainbow Connection, and I’d done a little choral arrangement of it. Now, with very little notice, we needed to whip up some sort of a send-off to our friend. There was very little time to rehearse, no time to introduce something completely new, and the ability of this particular class to apprehend the unfamiliar in a short period of time was a legitimate concern. So, I thought of a trick.

The altos in the class had already learned a harmony line to The Rainbow Connection. The rest of the class had listened as I taught this line to them. In fact, when accompanying the song, I’d always brought out the alto line, as everyone else was on melody at that point. So, I took that alto part, wrote new lyrics to it, completely reharmonized it (in the piano) and wrote a Christmas-y minor key introduction.

Now, our little last-day concert would seem to be over once we got to The Rainbow Connection. But then, it was announced we had a surprise parting gift. I launched into that unfamiliar intro. The whole group sang the alto part with the new words, and the audience was unaware that what they were hearing had any connection to The Rainbow Connection. In the final few bars, I revealed the trick, by ending the way the Kermit classic does. You ever see a grown man cry?

Rehearsing this little surprise involved stealing time from other numbers, and making sure the man of the hour was unaware. So, we were very careful about scheduling our time to go over it. But there was a significant wrench thrown into that plan. Nobody had told the students their pal was moving on. So, during the prescribed time, everyone started crying. Not over what I’d written but over the news we’d no longer have this good guy in our lives on a regular basis. They struggled to learn my little composition while they struggled with the blow to their hearts. Nobody had warned me that the singers didn’t know the news. I’d run into an emotional buzzsaw.

 

How to be happy (reprise)

    Just got back from taking a tour of an Arts Magnet elementary school we’re considering for our daughter. It’s two miles away, and so the difficulty of bicycling there is a drawback. When I was a kid, I biked a half mile. And so did Holly. And Holly was – is – very pretty.

     You all know what the title, Spring Awakening, refers to. In life, at some point, you feel the first stirrings of attraction. In all likelihood, you feel crippling shyness about it. Rare is the pubescent lad who can utter, “Holly, I like you,” and so…

     I did the bravest thing I could. I bicycled about fifty feet behind her. And I sang. I sang original songs at the top of my lungs. One went, “Who looks at you the way I do?” Don’t get the wrong impression. Holly never heard any of these songs. When you’re riding downhill, wind rushes by your ears, and the cracking voice of the boy singing into the wind behind you is a wave of sound stilled by circumstance.

     By Ninth Grade, I’d written a good number of songs. This was a fairly round number of years ago, which is why we all had a reunion last year and I was able, at long last, to relate all of this to the still-gorgeous Holly. (I turned red, but I did it.) As a 14-year-old, I embraced the notion that songwriting needs a purpose. I loved musicals, show tunes and standards. I searched for opportunities to write. Then Ms. Steele, our sometimes shockingly progressive English teacher, gave our class an assignment: Write a few pages in dramatic form. A short play, or skit. Eureka! Opportunity had knocked.

     A few pages? That was for other kids, not for me. I wrote an entire musical, with intermission; book, music and lyrics. The pieces were to be read out loud in class, so, I recorded the accompaniment on cassette tape, brought in a portable player, and entertained the whole class, singing at them.

     Everyone was dumbfounded. Friends began planning to produce the show at school. We cast it, and I made a poster with everyone’s name. Because a friend’s older brother played the trumpet, I wrote a trumpet part. Eventually, the plan fell through, but the mere fact that anyone wanted to do it was quite a compliment at the time. Our would-be leading lady died in the past year, and so did Hal Prince. The latter was a character in the show.

     You see, my original musical was based on my Walter Mitty-like fantasies of what my life could be. How To Be Happy was about a teen boy who writes a musical that attracts the attention of Hal Prince and Jerome Robbins, becomes a smash hit on Broadway, starring the kid. The dramatic conflict, inspired by the old play, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, had to do with whether the kid would write a second hit Broadway musical. He’s lonely at the top, and Prince and Robbins have the bright idea of paying a girl to fall in love with him. Ew.

Robbins, Abbott

Adolescent scribblings, of course, usually look ridiculous in the cold light of adulthood. But How To Be Happy was the first link in a long chain. Encouraged by the classroom response, I began a more ambitious musical, based on a truly ancient play. It had been co-authored by George Abbott when he was a young man, and, as any Broadway old-time will tell you, Mr. Abbott was never a young man; he was always old. So, at 15, I was playing my new score for anyone who’d listen. Since the piece was set in the Roaring Twenties, it didn’t sound like a new score at all. But among those that learned of my musical-writing – what’s the word? Talent? Passion? Proclivity? – was a bright girl of similar interests. She asked me to collaborate on a show.

     The idea was for her to do the book, but I didn’t get to see the script until a few days before we were to present it to the drama teacher. And, it wasn’t good. Dialogue from our source novel was simply stuck around my songs, and as a result, I felt, the characters didn’t sound like real people. So, I hurried to a manual typewriter and rewrote the whole thing. At that point, it didn’t seem like having a collaborator had saved me from doing much work.

     I was encouraged, through a lady I met in the improv world, to apply for Lehman Engel’s BMI musical-writing workshop. And, once again, I recorded on cassette. I was, by far, the youngest person accepted that year. Whether these teenage efforts were any good or not, there was no denying that, by the age of 17, I’d written three musicals. And the mere act of writing musicals is the best lesson in how to write them. My fourth show, Pulley of the Yard, or, Murder at the Savoy (the subtitle has taken over as the title) got produced in New York a couple of times, then at the Edinburgh Festival three times, and also elsewhere in Britain.

     It wasn’t my U.K. debut, however. Because the collaborator on that third show, without telling me in advance, got it produced in England. The audience, she told me, consisted of people with what were then termed “mental problems” which closes a circle, as I’m now creating musicals co-written and performed by autistic youth. That collaborator who once seemed valueless was, in fact, indispensable in getting my first show produced.

Theresa

It was December, in New York, in a year ending with 9. I had an idea for a musical, a theatre company that could offer me space, a director I trusted and a book writer I didn’t quite trust. But the more remarkable thing is that I conceived of an entirely radical new way of developing a musical.

The Company of Women was designed to celebrate female friendships, but I, a male, could claim no first-hand knowledge of the subject. I’d need to do research, and came up with the notion that my investigation could take the form of a troupe of players – all women – improvising scenes that, in some way, related to their actual experiences. I’ve a near-religious faith in improv, and here it was the secret sauce that, we all hoped, could develop an interesting show in an innovative way.

The actresses we cast were a diverse bunch: that was our intention. I think there were about a dozen. Two were friends. Two were named Sara, and they were the youngest and the oldest of our ensemble. One African-American, and one who’d grown up in Puerto Rico. One was so patrician, a rumor started that she had lots of money. At least one clearly didn’t. What we had them do was to write premises for scenes on index cards. The premises were true things that had happened to them. The people improvising were never the card-contributors, so, individuals had the fun of watching how other players were acting out events from their own lives.

I watched, fairly silently, and took notes. Ideas for songs occurred to me. Somebody humorously dismissed the male gender with a line, “They’re good in the winter,” that struck me as a great song title. And this suggested a context. If a bunch of gal pals became aware they were sitting around, drinks in hand, ragging on men, they might challenge themselves to speak in positive terms. And struggle with it … the premise of my song.

My grandfather’s wife had once been an actress, and, hearing about the project, she pooh-poohed it as if I were doing something immoral. “What’s in it for them?” she demanded. The couple who ran the theatre company had the opposite view: Our participants were gaining valuable experience in developmental improvisation. Their improv skills improved and they had the satisfaction of contributing to a new musical. No money flowed in any direction.

In the 1970s, Michael Bennett recorded rap sessions with working Broadway dancers, known of whom were stars. The show that evolved from these, A Chorus Line, cast its contributors and became the longest-running Broadway show of all time. With all that profit, there developed a problem: how to adequately compensate those that provided the fodder for the writers? We should all have such problems!

While I was aware of A Chorus Line, I knew nothing of a then-not-popular sitcom that was running on HBO. It focused on the man troubles of four upper class urban white girls. It seemed the characters barely had a thought that wasn’t connected to dating. Shoes, clothes, cocktails, and tales-of-cock – these were its concerns. Since cable networks didn’t live and die based on ratings, the show was given many seasons to develop an audience, and, eventually, it did.

The Company of Women, we all felt, shouldn’t show females as dependent on males for emotional well-being. Our lesbian character wouldn’t derive self-worth from a girlfriend, either. There’d be no supply of disposable income magically coming from nowhere. This would be a musical that would reflect contemporary reality.

But the untrusted librettist wasn’t quite down with that last goal. She kept talking about having our characters receive mylar envelopes in the mail, inviting them to hop a spaceship to a far-off planet. Why mylar? I don’t know, but it was very important to my partner.

How real to make the show was a collaborative disagreement that couldn’t quite be settled. I kept writing songs that were inspired by the improvs. Pat kept writing scenes that were products of her wild imagination. I got increasingly annoyed by this. The producing pair called a meeting for us to settle our differences. I anticipated this with a great level of intensity. The longer we kept on divergent paths, the more likely the show would end up a mess. Were we not cut out to be collaborators?

I had something of a head of steam as I reached for the doorknob. This thing had to be resolved, and communication had to be repaired. I entered the space and a roomful of people yelled “Surprise!” It was my 30th birthday, and everyone – including Pat – wanted to celebrate. Indeed, I was surprised, but that hoped-for resolution had to wait. I could barely enjoy the party, cake and gifts.

Two months later, we presented a draft to the gang that had inspired us. They cold-read the script and I sang all the songs. And then we all parted ways. Pat went on to write a musical about women journeying to a distant planet. And I went on to work with a new librettist who shared my vision of keeping things as real as possible. When she moved from New York, I soldiered on, alone.

All these experiences, that journey of learning-through-improv, led to a script with an impressive amount of verisimilitude. Its commercial prospects, though, were completely hamstrung by the existence of that homogenous television entertainment. It had captured the zeitgeist and become extremely popular. My six women, of various ages, races, and social status who’d go out drinking together were no match for the four white clotheshorses sipping cosmos America fell in love with.