Dance with a rake

The broader world of entertainment danced its way into a controversy this month that I do not understand at all. So, rather than commenting, rather tardily, on the pearl-clutching “Eek! There’s a stripper pole in the Super Bowl halftime show” thing, I’ll use it as a springboard for some thoughts about musicals. That is, if a stripper pole can be used as a springboard: I don’t know that, either.

“Something wrong with stripping?” asks a character in Gypsy, with a delicious dollop of indignation. America’s long history with Puritanism means that somebody’s bound to object to sexiness wherever it rears its pretty tush, but America’s musical theatre history had scantily clad dancing girls right from the start, a little over 150 years ago, in the legendary “first musical,” The Black Crook. For at least a century, comely chorines were a main factor drawing straight men to Broadway. Here’s how Bob Merrill, the principal purveyor of not-quite-clever-enough rhymes, described the stage scene of 1910:

Any guy who pays a quarter
For a seat just thinks he oughtta
See a figure that his wife can’t substitute

It’s not always the male gaze on the female curves, of course. In 1956’s hysterical Li’l Abner, government scientists create a magic tonic that turns scrawny men into Atlases. I have a wonderful, if vague, memory of an elementary school production many years ago, in which the boys put on the sort of shaped plastic used in old Halloween masks to give themselves abs and hulk-like muscles. More recently, when Encores put on Li’l Abner, they hired a bunch of behemoths from a modeling agency. In other words, the real thing. Not as amusing, but satisfying to audience members who appreciate well-built males – most people, nowadays.

Li’l Abner was based on a surprisingly risqué comic strip in which Al Capp let his imagination run wild and drew his characters, of both genders, as preposterously well-endowed. The musical’s plot has the transformed husbands (and yes, they’re all husbands) concomitantly lose all interest in sex, leading their wives to sing:

They was not known for beauty,
But they sho’ done they duty,
And they made the boudoir buzz!
Put ’em back the way they wuz!

They was long, lean, and lanky,
But they loved hanky-panky
They did things that outdone duz!
Put ’em back the way they wuz!

They wuz vile lookin’ varments
Wearing vile lookin’ garments
But they knowed a his from huz…
put ’em back the way they wuz!

They was no shakes as lovers,
But they warmed up the covers,
Covered as they wuz with fuzz!

(Johnny Mercer)

I can claim a small family connection to this musical, as my father, then a young lawyer for a show business firm, was assigned to keep an eye on Al Capp, make sure he stayed out of trouble. This proved difficult, as Capp eluded Dad’s watchful eye and, before much time had passed, was found chasing some underage girl through a hotel room. This is similar to the plot and setting of another musical, My Favorite Year, in which the young hero has to keep watch on a hard-drinking movie star with limited success.

None of Johnny Mercer’s other musicals ran more than a year, but I’m just now reminded he wrote a novelty song about stripping that never fails to bring a smile to my face.

That notion that she’s always a lady plays a big part in Gypsy, where we come to the inescapable conclusion that Gypsy Rose Lee elevated the form with her patina of class. And one of the few lyricists I feel is superior to Mercer, Lorenz Hart, used this as the basis for an amazing comedy song in 1940, Zip.

Ten years later, my favorite songwriter, Frank Loesser, thought of two musical permutations on strip tropes. (Say “strip tropes” three times fast. It’s a good thing this isn’t an audiobook.) One involves an emotional justification for removing clothing, Take Back Your Mink. The character claims to be shocked that the man who gave her expensive tokens of his esteem tried to remove them all, and so she throws them at him in a fit of pique, stripping in anger.

Now, it just so happens I can claim a family connection to this song. My grandfather was in the fur business, and, at a fairly advanced age, found herself on a beach chaise by a pool in Miami, Florida. Go figure! She got to talking to the lady next to her and they discovered they both had husbands in furs. It was Mrs. Hollander, whose husband had invented a treatment to make cheap muskrat fur look more like mink. When Adelaide sings “tell him to Hollanderize it for some other dame” she’s revealing that the mink isn’t really mink at all, an insult the entire New York audience would have understood in 1950 but nobody gets today.

Adelaide, which is the name we gave our daughter, is also central to the other strip-borne number in Guys and Dolls. At one point, Frank Loesser thought about how uncomfortable it must feel to stand on stage in minimal covering. The temperature might be chilly enough to make you sick, and so he began a song called The Stripper Had Developed a Cold. The music had the driving 12/8 repeated chords one associates with ecdysiastic accompaniment, but, eventually, the song was abandoned. But when the idea emerged that Miss Adelaide would break into sneezes every time Nathan Detroit exhibited his faithlessness, it was a hop, skip and a jump to “A person can develop a cold.” So that’s why you hear striptease music in Adelaide’s Lament, widely considered the best comedy song ever written for the stage.

And so I ask you, once again: Something wrong with stripping?

Good night waltz

It’s Valentine’s Day so it’s not wildly inappropriate to subject you all to a description of a wonderful date I recently had. Since we saw a musical, and I’ll have some comments about that musical, it fits the theme of the blog as well as the theme of the day. Also, I’m not holding myself up as the model paramour here, but I will say that if more of us took in a musical on dates, the business of musical theatre would be in better shape.

The theatre was near the corner of Hollywood and Vine and I explained to my date that this is, for no good reason, the most famous intersection in all of California. Many years ago, when radio was a popular form of mass entertainment, a high-rated show announced it was broadcasting from this corner. Soon, tourists flocked to the space, as if there was something to see here. But there isn’t. And there never was. Radio studios exist in non-descript office buildings. But did you know that Sondheim composed a song called Hollywood and Vine? It’s not very good and he didn’t do the lyric. I once owned a lead sheet copy but seem to have misplaced it.

There’s famous-just-for-being-famous, and then there’s the Walk of Fame, where you have to have succeeded, in some aspect of the entertainment business, in order to have your name stamped into a star stamped into the sidewalk. The young lady I was with didn’t previously know about this, but said that, if it weren’t disgusting, she’d lean down and kiss the star of Kristin Bell. This came as a surprise to me: I’m certain she’s never seen Veronica Mars nor The Good Place. We crossed Hollywood Boulevard and found a few feet of street with no star. “That’s where my star is gonna go one day,” she said, assuredly.

Another thing we did before the show was ride an escalator from the Walk of Fame deep into the ground. Turned out to be a subway entrance, and this surprised us both. Do people use subways in Los Angeles? I mean, it’s great if they do; I just can’t picture it. You get out of your apartment building, and within a block or two, descend into the ground to quickly get to a location you can walk to from your destination stop? I’ll have to learn more about this.

Then my date remembered a friend of hers was turning 8 the next day, and she looked around and asked, “Is there a toy store here?” Once, not so long ago, you could buy toys on Hollywood Boulevard, but these weren’t the sorts of toys a child would enjoy. Those days are gone. Some decades ago, Times Square underwent a similar transformation; all so-called “adult” amusements got shunted away. In making our entertainment centers cleaner, in this sense, I wonder if theatre gets swept along for the ride. A family-friendly entertainment district is more apt to present family-friendly fare.

Which brings us to the musical of the evening, Frozen, at the Pantages. The Pantages was built as a one of those grand old movie palaces in the grand old days of movie-going. We were in Row QQ, very far from the action. The performers looked like ants – well-trained ants, certainly, but ants nonetheless. When you design a movie palace, the far-back seats aren’t a problem because the heroine’s face, in a close-up projection – perhaps voiced by the aforementioned Kristin Bell – could be twenty feet tall. I’m always disconcerted by cinema-to-legitimate theatre conversions for this reason.

Enough of Frozen focuses on romance that my date snuggled into me. At other points, she put her head down on my lap, exhausted. That’s a sign of how enervating the stage version is. Frozen, for us, exists in three different forms. It’s most familiar as the original animated film. There, it zips along with many amusing and emotional songs by Kristin and Bobby Lopez. And then comes Let It Go and everything changes. No more songs, just snowy adventure-drama. I’m reminded of Yip Harburg’s disappointment with how the classic film, The Wizard of Oz turned out. It’s great, and then it stops being a musical.

We’d recently enjoyed Frozen on stage at Disneyland; a good friend’s in the cast. This is in a tall structure in California Adventure, built as a theatre. Holds a lot of people, but nobody’s so far from the stage that anyone looks like ants. And it’s far shorter – a saving grace. The amusement park Frozen doesn’t have time for avalanches and abominable snow monsters. It hits its emotional points, sings its fine songs and gets you out of there.

Which gets me thinking about how musicals choose to spend their time. On the legitimate stage, the major plot points, impressive special effects, and the familiar songs are spread far from each other. What’s sandwiched in-between is material of far-lesser effectiveness. We get characters singing about their feelings, and these bits of self-reflection are never catalysts for action. Plus at least a half-dozen butt jokes. Not to mention the production number that highlights the limitations of shows meant for the whole family…

Like something from Hollywood’s dirtier past, we’re meant to be amused by a chorus line of naked people. Yes, you read that right. Bunny-hopping out of a sauna are men and women in strategically-placed towels. When my date and I saw the same show a couple of years ago on Broadway, we sat close enough to get the joke. Sort of like fan dancers of the strip-tease era, the merry choristers zip from one strategic placement to another. At the Pantages, we couldn’t tell what was going on, although the lady to the left of me could. Far-sightedness enhanced her experience.

The girl on my right, though, had such a good time at Frozen that, a few days later, she sat down at a toy piano and improvised a song that went “I love you, Daddy.”

The mushy stuff

Recently, I got super-productive, churning out more than a dozen pages per day of a libretto. I packed my daughter off on a sleepover; my wife was on a business trip; in the middle of the night, I woke and couldn’t get back to sleep. Perhaps writing issues were swirling around in my brain. I needed to take a break, clearly. But here’s proof I’m crazy: I picked up Todd Purdum’s book, Something Wonderful, about Rodgers and Hammerstein.

So now my mind was filled with details about the birth pains that led to South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. I think you all have to read this book, because, even though we know these turned out to be huge successes, it’s a page-turner. Problems crop up, and, as you take these in, the happy outcome seems very much in doubt. Also, we look to these masters for some uncanny secret sauce: what can we emulate after 60 years?

Oscar Hammerstein was born into a theatrical family; the roman numeral after his name, II, was originally necessary to distinguish him from an eponymous uncle. He took time and care to educate himself in the ways plays work. This involved stage management gigs and other sorts of apprenticeship. In the Roaring Twenties, all that know-how led him to pre-eminence in the then-popular genre of operetta. It’s a style of musical theatre I’ve little fondness for, partly because it all feels so unreal; forced, oddly unnatural.

Seven years his junior, Richard Rodgers chose the opposite direction. His tunes swing in a way operetta does not. They knew each other: teen Dick saw Oscar in the Columbia Varsity Show and was star-struck upon meeting him. He decided then and there to attend Columbia because he wanted to compose the annual Varsity Show, and Oscar gave him that job and teamed him up with Lorenz Hart.

I wonder if either young man was aware of the schism in their ambitions. Oscar gravitated towards the big-throated romances, often set in exotic places and times. Rodgers was attracted to jazz – as the term was defined in the Jazz Age – more rhythmic, more vernacular. This was a far better match for the loopy word-play Hart excelled at.

Algonquin Round Table doyenne Edna Ferber published a novel dramatizing the racism of the post-Civil War South and when Hammerstein and Jerome Kern musicalized that, Show Boat pointed to a reality-based future. It wasn’t frilly; although there’s lots of comedy, it’s a musical drama that takes itself seriously. While it was widely-recognized as groundbreaking, for the next fifteen years, Hammerstein was unable to create anything remotely similar. His post-Show Boat shows without Rodgers are largely forgotten today.

And Rodgers and Hart kept hitting them out of the park, like Babe Ruth in the Bronx. More than anybody else, they shaped what musical comedies are. There’s piquancy and pep in those Rodgers melodies, matched to unparalleled wit in Hart’s lyrics. It’s fair to say they paved the way for Cole Porter, and the brothers Gershwin were worthy rivals, but not quite as successful.

As they weren’t parallel lines, Rodgers and Hammerstein were bound to meet; their collaboration started about a year before Hart died. Rodgers, for seventeen years, had been the master of popular music. His are the tunes everyone loves, such as The Lady Is a Tramp, Bewitched, Isn’t It Romantic?, My Funny Valentine and I Could Write a Book. Now he was ready to give up the hit-songwriting pursuit to try something radical. I don’t believe people understand just how radical it was.

When you picked up your Playbill, right under the title, and above Rodgers and Hammerstein’s name, were the words “A musical play.” The creators took enormous pains to make certain the audience experienced an entertainment every bit as thoughtful, as fully-wrought, as any straight play. Musicals of the time simply hadn’t done this. Rodgers’ music is filled with harmonies and rhythms that one could plausibly have heard in the Wild West of the twentieth century’s first decade. I love that minuet, Many a New Day, more than the equine clip-clop of The Surrey With the Fringe On Top. There’s propulsive bass-clef accompaniment, thundering up as in Copland’s prairie pieces, in I Cain’t Say No, The Farmer and the Cowman and All Or Nothin’. The words that Hammerstein chooses are distinctly of the period, too – isinglass, velveteen settee, gas-buggies and privies.

From then on, every odd-numbered year came a new Rodgers and Hammerstein premiere. I know people hate when I make this comparison, but in the past 30 years, Sondheim’s premiered three musicals, Assassins, Passion and the oft-rechristened Road Show. Purdum’s dual biography depicts Hammerstein hard at work for months, attempting to get every detail just right. While waiting for lyrics to arrive, Rodgers thought about the harmonic palette of the show’s setting, be it New England, Siam, Monterrey, or Austria. And so, exasperatingly, he was able to toss off these perfect tunes with head-turning swiftness.

On Oklahoma, Carousel, Allegro, Me & Juliet and Flower Drum Song, the team made the conscious decision to cast no stars. Famous performers gave them all sorts of trouble, and it’s odd, given their pre-eminence, that anyone ever doubted their judgment.

Purdum’s one weakness is in his analysis, at the very end, of what’s happened to the reputation of their five mega-hits since Rodgers’ death forty years ago. Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music continue to be produced and loved all over the world. Carousel has seen its popularity fall a bit because the syndrome of wives defending abusive husbands reaches contemporary ears in a discomfiting way. But the whole of their output is earnestly moral, anti-prejudice, and pro- (and proto-) feminist. These are big themes, and I wish more writers today would sweat the details like these Masters did. Examine Rodgers and Hammerstein, gang. You’ve got to be carefully taught.