Three heads are better than one

My fourth impromptu Facebook Live concert is devoted to Jule Styne, so I’ve been thinking about him and this piece can serve two purposes. I can share some Styne thoughts as I get ready to sing. The first three concerts were devoted to far-more-famous writers of an earlier era: Rodgers & Hart, Cole Porter, and the brothers Gershwin. But when we think of the sound of Broadway, the fortissimo brass excitement, it’s probably a Styne score that comes to mind.

A pun I can’t resist

In one way, they all belong to a distant era, when songwriters wrote with one eye on the prize of getting a hit song to emerge from the score. Late in his life, Jule Styne met the grad students at NYU’s then-new program for musical theatre writing. And he was shocked to find the young people seemed unaware which moments in their stories needed to be put into song. Over the years, I’ve overanalyzed this exchange between the generations. Styne would have focused on bits of story that could have become extractable hits; the students, having grown up in a world where show tunes never made it to the Top 40, wouldn’t have bothered.

There was a memorable (to me, at least) essay years ago in Dramatics Magazine by Jeffrey Sweet. Ostensibly reporting on my musical comedy wedding, he discussed the idea that one of the things musicals tend to do is celebrate. They take little moments of happiness and magnify them into the delirious, and the audience catches the joy. In Bells Are Ringing, our heroine wonders what it would be like if strangers said hello to each other on a subway. This quickly explodes into a massive carnival of conviviality. It’s typical Styne.

A more famous moment occurs at the end of the first act of Gypsy, which I think we can all agree is his masterpiece. Rose’s talented daughter has run away to Hollywood and it’s devastating. All her work, for years and years, has been to make June a star and now she’s got no one except her completely untalented and klutzy other daughter who can’t sing, who mainly sews sequins on costumes. We all wonder how Rose will deal with the annihilation of her dream. Other songwriters – foolish ones, perhaps like that NYU class – would provide Rose with a lament, so she can express her pain in mournful melody. Styne turns the tables on that expectation with the peppiest bit of extreme brightness the theatre has ever produced, Everything’s Coming Up Roses.

In reality, Styne had written the tune years before for a forgotten project. But he played it at the piano for his young collaborator, Stephen Sondheim, and never informed him he’d be setting lyrics to a recycled tune. This wasn’t the only Gypsy tune that was repurposed. So, long before the cast album came out, someone surprised the twenty-something lyricist by saying “Hey, the cast album’s ready” and put on an overture that included You’ll Never Get Away From Me and Everything’s Coming Up Roses and only then did Sondheim understand the subterfuge.

Jule Styne was the last member added to Gypsy’s collaborative team. And that’s because he had the sort of experience a star can trust. After the success of West Side Story, master producer David Merrick swooped in with a brilliant notion. He’d purchased the rights to Gypsy Rose Lee’s show-busy memoir and wanted to hire as much of the West Side team as he could. The composer, Leonard Bernstein, was too busy, as America’s pre-eminent orchestra conductor, to sign on for his fourth show of the 1950s. But wait, the lyricist Stephen Sondheim was a trained composer, and, once again, the masterful Jerome Robbins would direct and choreograph, with the redoubtable Arthur Laurents taking care of the book. And, to play Gypsy’s mother, Merrick got the biggest star of them all, Ethel Merman. But there was a problem. Merman’s last show was an embarrassing flop and she naturally blamed the inexperience of its songwriters. At this point, Sondheim had one show on Broadway, as lyricist alone, and the queen from Queens wasn’t going to risk singing a score by a first-time composer. She demanded a music-writer with a proven capacity for creating hit songs, and, naturally, Styne’s name emerged. But Sondheim was unhappy to be robbed of the compositional role. He went to his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, to ask advice. The older sage pointed out that one learns a lot from dealing with a major star – West Side Story had none; Gypsy would be worth doing just for the experience.

I shudder to think how the project would have turned out with Sondheim’s jagged harmonies. The Broadway fable needed an evocative and entertaining sound, and Styne came through in spades. It’s impossible to listen to Gypsy’s overture without getting your spirits lifted.

It’s hard to believe this, but Styne didn’t consider Gypsy his masterpiece. He preferred Funny Girl, and I think on that one, he’s the true hero of the creative team. Much of the book had to be tossed out; many of Bob Merrill’s lyrics are incoherent – does anyone brag they have ten American beauty toes? – and genius director Jerome Robbins abandoned the project. But everyone knew that Barbra Streisand was a once-in-a-lifetime star. Give her a good tune to warble, and you’re golden. Styne did just that.

My favorite Styne score, though, is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which he wrote with the not-so-famous Leo Robin, a lyricist greatly admired by other lyricists. Robin would get the tune in his head and start walking the perimeter of Central Park. Styne would hail a cab, tell it to go down Fifth, across Central Park South, up Central Park West and complete the circle around Central Park North. Eventually, he’d find Robin who’d say “A kiss on the hand may be quite continental but diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” Styne was no hack, but he sure could take a ride in one and find gems.

Elizabeth and Wayne

You might think I’d have enough time on my hands to write obituaries in advance, which is something newspapers traditionally do on slow news days. And so many of the musical theatre writers I admire are so old, you never know when I’ll need to rush to publish one of those sad things. But the five old dudes who immediately come to mind – Sheldon Harnick (95), Lee Adams (95), John Kander (93), Charles Strouse (91) and Stephen Sondheim (90) – will be celebrated in all sorts of places when they go. You don’t need me to eulogize such obvious heroes.

On April Fool’s I learned that the current pestilence has taken the life of a musical theatre writer I had a great deal of admiration for, Adam Schlesinger (52). I don’t know a whole lot about him, and he only had one musical on Broadway (so far, there are at least two in the works). Then it occurs to me that you’ve probably never heard of him, and that makes him more worthy of discussion than the well-known nonagenarians listed above.

Schelsinger’s measure of fame derives from a different field, as one of the clever folk behind the much-admired rock band, Fountains of Wayne. Their song, Stacy’s Mom, made a splash in 2003, and got a Grammy nomination.

When I heard he was writing a Broadway musical, I had my typical reflex. I loathe it when rock stars decide they’ll try their hand at the theatre. It’s so plainly stupid to me, the notion that the ability to create a pop song means you’ve some idea how to craft a song for the stage. They’re such different animals.

But Adam Schlesinger beat those odds. He had a knack for delivering punch lines, in pop, special material, Broadway and Hollywood. So, the first song of his you might have heard was the sprightly title song from the Tom Hanks-directed movie, That Thing You Do. And my mind goes to how the writing assignment must have looked. First, you’re working for the best-loved of Hollywood stars, here directing his first feature. The plot involves a small-town band that makes it to the big time in the early sixties, all on the strength of a single number which you’re going to have to come up with. It must embrace the time period, be exactly the sort of merry pop that could take kids far in those palmier days. And the audience has to buy it, that is, truly believe that this is a good-enough song to be a ticket to the top of the charts.

Me, I get familiar with songwriters’ names when I see them at the top of a piece of sheet music. So, one day, someone put on my piano something from a new musical that had not yet opened on Broadway. It bore the memorable title, Girl, Can I Kiss You With Tongue? and was utterly hysterical. I knew two things: I wanted to see the rest of the musical, and I should memorize the authors’ names because they were so clearly up-and-comers.

The lyricist on that was one David Javerbaum, who, at the time, was America’s chief jokester, as head writer for Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.

And the Broadway musical, Cry-Baby, was based on a John Waters film. This was quick on the heels of Hairspray, a much-heralded hit based on another flick by the insouciant Baltimorean. Here’s the thing: I can’t stand Hairspray because I think most of its songs attempt to be funny, and fail. Cry-Baby is a mess: much of it meanders and it’s ultimately unfulfilling. But the quality of its comedy songs is at a very high level. The most famous number sends up Willie Nelson’s Crazy to literal extremes. Screw Loose became, for better or for worse, the most popular female comedy song for auditioners.

Broadway musical audiences didn’t adequately reward Schlesinger and Javerbaum, although the latter had a hit play some years later that included the former’s music. But Daily Show networking led the team to write the songs for an intentionally old-fashioned Christmas special Stephen Colbert did in 2008, and they made it to #1 on iTunes. It’s fair to say this wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t so expertly crafted. Much as the world loves Colbert, it’s not his singing that attracts fans.

The worlds of theatre and television smash up against each other once a year when CBS broadcasts the Tonys. Often, the host will launch into an original opening number, and these must be funny both for a Broadway audience and a general TV-watching audience. Another tall order, and boy, did Schlesinger and Javerbaum deliver.

 

If you’re someone who enjoys musical comedy material on television – I’m afraid that doesn’t describe me – you may have caught any number of his witty ditties on a show called My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Which reminds me that a friend of me told me an older sitcom he enjoyed was going to be turned into a Broadway musical, The Nanny. I thought this was a terrible idea, the sort of show I’d surely avoid, until I heard Adam Schlesinger was composing it. That immediately inspired confidence, as did the presence of the best director I’ve ever worked with, Marc Bruni.

Speaking of shows that sound awful until you realize Schlesinger’s on the creative team, there’s a new musical based on an auto-biography called The Bedwetter. Now, as it happens, I’ve been hard at work on a show loosely based on a performer’s upbringing and he, too, wanted to reference the same childhood affliction. Parallel challenges. I hope I’m addressing it in a way that doesn’t make you go “ick!” But I’ve every confidence Adam Schlesinger found the funny. He always did.

Something momentous

Stephen Sondheim, the Boy Wonder of Broadway, turns 90 today, so I’m hell-bent on saying some positive things about him that other people might not say. And those who’ve read my comments over the years know that I have a somewhat idiosyncratic view of the man so many take to be a God. I think he’s written a handful of excellent shows, maintains a very high level of craft, but doesn’t nearly live up to all the adulation heaped upon him. I’ve known many otherwise perspicacious folks who claim they only like Sondheim musicals. And I’m appalled at those who believe he’s never done anything bad. I’m sure he’s just as appalled, because nobody could possibly think as highly of themselves as most Sondheim fanatics – I like to call them Steve-adores – think of him.

His first effort, Saturday Night, failed to raise enough money to get produced. I musical directed a school production and it’s charitably described as an interesting failure. One can see the positive influence of Frank Loesser, and there are a few nice moments: The verse to the main ballad, So Many People, goes up and down the thirds of a single chord in a haunting way. There’s a little chorale about Brooklyn that’s certainly droll. And there’s a fine up-tempo late in the show, What More Do I Need, which I prefer to the Berlin ballad it’s stolen from. 

But then came West Side Story, the first of two for which the 20-something only did lyrics. This is a classic, a huge leap forward. While Saturday Night never managed to build up enough feeling for its characters, audiences are totally invested in Tony, Maria, Riff, Anita et al. I’d say it’s one of the most moving musicals ever written. When Maria warbles “It’s alarming how charming I feel” she is Everygirl In Love, effusing in her native language.

Next, his Gypsy lyrics do more of the narrative lifting, and he hits an entertaining balance of humor, colloquialisms and cleverness. The proficiency of West Side Story and Gypsy, which both have fine books by Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins staging, would land him in the first tier of Broadway lyricists had he written nothing else.

The Sixties, though, were a bit of a let-down. The success of the first Broadway show to feature Sondheim’s music, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, was due to its riotous libretto, not the songs themselves, which failed to garner a Tony Nomination. Not-funny-enough comedy songs also litter Do I Hear a Waltz and Anyone Can Whistle.

Then, 1970’s Company ushered in a truly brilliant period. Here was a show not quite like anything that had been attempted before: The songs, at long last, featured great gobs of actable subtext. A languorous ode to ambiguity, Barcelona, finds humor in a real and previously unsung situation. There’s also a patter song that’s a prestissimo ode to ambiguity, a ballad about ambiguity, and a quirky little jazz number about, you guessed it, ambiguity. If you can abide a whole score of that sort of thing… I’ll drink to you.

The following year, Sondheim demonstrated a real knack for pastiche with Follies. He used the type of songs we were familiar with from the age of Gershwin 

and added inner emotional layers.

As I was writing this not-quite-successful attempt at positivity, a friend asked what my favorite cut Sondheim song is, and I knew right away it’s Follies‘ Who Could Be Blue?/Little White House. So unlike anything else he’s ever written because it’s naive, simple, pretty, and a wholly positive expression of love. Not a color he paints with very often.

In his next show, A Little Night Music, a waltz called Soon begins and you think it’s going to be this loving expression but then he cuts the sweet with the sardonic and makes fun of the character. I want to say “I get it, Steve: You think love is awful.” It’s the color he paints with most often and anti-romantic cynics eat it up.

Still, the quality and craft exhibited in Company, Follies and A Little Night Music have no precedent; that is, I can’t think of anyone else who wrote three better shows in a row. What followed was Pacific Overtures, a wildly experimental entertainment with no human protagonist, and I admire its ambition if not its execution.

But then came Sweeney Todd, a brilliant synthesis of Grand Guignol melodrama and techniques taken from opera. It sounds overwrought but Sondheim filled every moment with enough majestic scoring to make it riveting.

After the debacle known as Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim stopped working with director Hal Prince, who’d helmed all his shows since Company. He sought something truly new and experimental off-Broadway, and cast quite a spell with Sunday in the Park With George, a score filled with leitmotifs, its staccato riffs standing in for the pointillist techniques of artist Georges Seurat. I found this one very moving and relatable, and I’m one of the very few who prefers the second act to the first. It gives meaning to a whole bunch of things that, at intermission, seemed meaningless.

His most-performed show, Into the Woods, has a blithe vaudevillian duet for the baker and his wife that charms me, but I find it exhausting to sit through the rest. It means to be profound – always a bad sign – and means to be funny, which it isn’t – and I’ve very little emotional connection to Cinderella and what seems like a dozen familiar fairy tale characters. What it does have, in spades, is intricacy, and one comes away impressed with the mind that thought up all those tricky numbers.

The less said about The Frogs, Passion and the one I didn’t see, Road Show (f.k.a. Bounce), the better; so I won’t. Instead, I’ll take a complaint I’ve made about Sondheim – that he wrote so little beyond the age of 57 – and make it a compliment. I truly wish you had taken your words to heart: “Give us more to see.” The work is so good, so fascinating, I wish there were more of it.

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.

Elegance

This is not about me; it’s about Jerry Herman, who passed away the day after Christmas, which he told us we need a little of, right this very minute. But I’m going to do the gauche thing and quote my own review. Fifteen years ago, a critic declared my tunes Jerry Hermanish, and I was thrilled by the specificity of the compliment. Herman strove to be like Irving Berlin and I’ve often emulated them both. The three of us can’t resist writing quodlibets. Berlin wrote the most famous one, You’re Just In Love, while Herman’s fantastic Tea Party counterpoint from Dear World is little known. Mine are the most obscure of all, but the point is I’ve long felt a kinship with Herman, a master of uncomplicated expressions, rousing choruses, and delineations of love.

Nothing of import happens, but a great lady lives by her own appealing philosophy. What show am I talking about? This describes three Herman musicals of the 1960s, two of which starred Angela Lansbury. I doubt it describes three of anyone else’s musicals, only Jerry’s girls do that sort of thing, live that way. Part of the enduring popularity of Hello Dolly and Mame is that shows too rarely revolve around brassy ladies of a certain age. The theatre produces wonderful young women, who then grow out of youthful parts, and then the audience wants to see them, larger than life.

When I was a young man, Jerry Herman’s goddaughter asked me to collaborate on a musical. Her mother had sung at all of Jerry’s backers’ auditions, only to be replaced, on Broadway, by the likes of Carol Channing and Bernadette Peters. My interest in this collaborator was solely based on who her godfather was, which, let’s face it, isn’t enough. We abandoned our project. Around the same time, one of my mentors at the BMI Workshop, Maury Yeston, was working on a New Orleans-based musical about a middle-aged gay couple who deal with their son’s engagement to a daughter of an arch-conservative politician. The producer wasn’t happy with Yeston’s work, probably preferring something with more hummable melodies. And so, Yeston was sent packing and in came Jerry Herman. It’s sad to see good writers replaced, but the proof is in the box office: La Cage Aux Folles became a huge hit, Herman’s final Broadway bow.

Are you reminded of the producer in Merrily We Roll Along who tells two young songwriters “There’s not a tune you can hum. There’s not a tune you go bum-bum-bum-di-dum?” Well, I suppose we have to talk about a perceived rivalry between Herman and composers of less-easily-grasped material. When he started writing, in the 1950s, show tunes generally sounded a certain way, easy on the ears, instantly apprehensible. Elsewhere, on jukeboxes and certain radio stations, young people were digging the less subtle strains of rock and roll. The dominance of popular culture flipped from one to the other. Herman’s Hello Dolly knocked The Beatles off Number One on the Billboard chart. Soon, Broadway material was off the chart for good.

By the seventies his new shows weren’t embraced by the public, and Stephen Sondheim kept winning the Tonys. Many people considered Sondheim’s music completely unhummable: it’s easy to imagine Herman feeling alienated from less melodic scores and Broadway rock by the likes of Stephen Schwartz and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

It all came to a head in 1984. Sondheim had cast a Herman leading lady in an avant garde musical with jagged untraditional tunes, Sunday in the Park With George. It won the Pulitzer Prize, but, at the Tony Awards it was up against Herman’s throwback hit, La Cage Aux Folles. And the Award for Best Score goes to…

Theatre wags viewed this speech as a big slap in the face to Sondheim. But one shouldn’t question Herman’s motives. They’re the building blocks Herman used to make his songs easy to hum and remember. He repeats uncomplicated phrases more frequently than most nursery rhymes do. These match each other in shape, rhythm and length. One verse might use nine restatements, and it’s rare his songs have just one verse. By the time you’re done hearing, for instance, Wherever He Ain’t, you may have heard the same phrase 18 times.

I seem to recall Forbidden Broadway skewering this with “The catchy song is now” but my memory is a bit foggy. But you never forget your first Broadway show and so I’ll recollect what my life was like when I was the age my daughter is now.

I cried. A lot. A great variety of things struck me as unfair, and weeping was part of my daily existence. Back in those days, every grown-up – including total strangers! – would tell a kid to stifle his tears. Big boys don’t cry! I heard it again and again, and cried about that. My parents were preparing to move our family away from New York, but knew they couldn’t go without introducing their son to Broadway. And so I watched in rapt attention this Jerry Herman musical about a boy’s relationship with his loving aunt. Their duet, My Best Girl, a waltz that lands on an unexpected note in its fourth bar, became my favorite song. And Young Patrick grows to adulthood and his aunt’s husband skis off an Alp and dies. Not-So-Young Patrick consoles Mame with their old song and I cried (I’m crying now) but I noticed something: People around me were crying too. Including the true big boys, grown men. This Winter Garden, this glittery palace, was a place where it was O.K. to cry. The theatre is a safe haven for lachrymose types like me.

My memories burn in my head with a steady glow
So if, my friend, if Jerry’s dead
I don’t want to know.

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.

Dance

“They sure don’t write ‘em like that any more!” Words often heard when people appreciate a revival of some old musical. It’s utter crap, of course, an inadvertent display of ignorance.

There’s a new musical on Broadway now that’s chock full of Golden Era virtues. It’s very funny, but it also has a hell of a lot of heart. It makes you feel good, and you also get to experience the giddy joy of a teenager getting to dance with a loved one at her prom. In the film world, the term “RomCom” is used disparagingly, as if there’s something unworthy about making an audience laugh and feel the feels. Call me old-fashioned, but I appreciate musicals that deliver these old-fashioned goods; a RomCom, well-done, is a great thing to be.

The Prom has music by Matthew Sklar, lyrics by Chad Beguelin, and book by Bob Martin and Beguelin, based on Jack Viertel’s inspiration, a decade ago, that there ought to be a show about a Midwestern high school banning gay couples from prom night. I wouldn’t call that a brilliant idea; in retrospect, it seems an obvious idea. But if you’re a writer wondering whether you have a good idea for a musical, think about the Sondheim canon. Bachelor observes friends’ marital squabbles; man with much younger virgin bride can’t quite connect with his mistress, revenge killer has an accomplice bake victims into pies; sickly ugly woman stalks a soldier. Premises, premises: I’m all through with premises premises now.

It’s how it’s handled. The Prom is rendered by experienced musical theatre writers who know a thing or two about time-tested craft. Sklar, Begulin and Martin wrote Elf, which I didn’t see, but I much admire their Broadway debuts: the songwriters did The Wedding Singer and Martin wrote book and starred in The Drowsy Chaperone. That hysterical love-letter to musical theatre nerds was the directing debut of Casey Nicholaw, who directed two musicals centering on high school girls last year, Mean Girls and The Prom. Without Sklar (my colleague at City Lights Youth Theatre), Begulin and Nicholaw have a monster hit in Aladdin. And now it seems like I’m just listing a lot of credits, but I’m thinking back to the Disney cartoon-to-stage adaptations that weren’t nearly as successful and surmise that these guys have some secret sauce that makes musical comedies successful.

In a different era, Casey Nicholaw would be a household name. If we venerated humor – and I believe we should – we might build a shrine to the master of making things funny. So, forgive me, more credits: Nicholaw choreographed Spamalot, an uproarious hit, and directed and choreographed The Book of Mormon and Something Rotten. The guy’s doing something right, and may hold the record for landing more jokes than any director alive.

Just last night a friend told me she knows all the songs in The Prom and I believe her. These strong and hummable tunes are put together well; they land their laughs and, when they need to, tug on the heart. A show-stopper called Zazz is so specifically crafted to chorine Angie Schworer’s amazing talents, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else doing it. Nicholaw here creates the rarest of things, a solo dance that actually provokes laughter.

But a good number of the numbers do this wonderful old school thing of playing up things the cast members do particularly well. So there’s that Drowsy Chaperone herself, Beth Leavel, ripping into a driving up-tempo that works both as a parody of what Leavel can do and an exemplar of it.

Similarly, Brooks Ashmanskas rips into a number that’s funny, fabulous and emotional. Too similarly, though, there’s Christopher Sieber. Nothing at all wrong with his performance, but somehow nobody noticed that his character is totally unnecessary, performing exactly the same function Ashmanskas performs in the show.

So that’s a qualm about The Prom. I thought it a very good musical. Glad I saw it, has a lot of heart. I don’t think The Prom is an excellent musical, though. There’s a level of predictability to the plot that might lead an East German judge to shave off a point on his card. And while the book and lyrics are very, very funny, I found myself wishing they were even more hysterical. Maybe three verys.

At times like this, I can’t avoid thinking about another Bob Martin creation, The Man In Chair. In The Drowsy Chaperone, he addresses the audience, conveying his enthusiasm for 1920s musicals with their creaky improbable plots and their shoehorned song cues. Then we see scenes from the show he’s describing, and it’s delightfully awful. Or wonderful. Or we’re meant to confront this confusion. Old musicals – awful, or wonderful? Both. There’s much that can be appreciated as well as much that’s disappeared with the era, like bathtub gin evaporating. (Does it even do that? I’ve never left a drop behind to see.)

So here, in the twenty-teens, we have a musical set in the twenty-teens, filled with the virtues and methods of musicals from the nineteen-fifties. Am I the only one who finds this odd, or ironic? Idea-generator Jack Viertel published a book a few years ago delineating things that make Golden Era musicals work. And The Prom, set in our time, seems not of our time. They sure do write ‘em like they used to! Would Man In Chair cheer?

Jewish girls

Last Sunday one of the most extraordinary musicals I have ever seen ended its Broadway run. I apologize for being so late to the party, but, if you’ve seen anybody’s reaction to The Band’s Visit, you’ve heard similar awestruck commendation. I don’t like being redundant because it renders me redundant, you know? So, I’ll briefly describe the show, discuss a commercial aspect, and tell you that if you’ve missed it, you’re plum out of luck. (This reminds me: I’m out of plums and must run to a market later.)

What was that?

Much as I don’t like being wrong about things, I have to start with a confession that I had an idea about The Band’s Visit before seeing it that turned out to be totally off-base. It’s set in an obscure part of Israel and many of the characters are Egyptians. This description led me to believe the show would touch on the much-commented-on Arab-Israeli conflict. I thought, somehow, that the shared language of music would somehow draw a group of people together who are normally across a political divide, mellifluous sounds overcoming prejudice.

It’s not expressing a political opinion that a lot of people have a lot of strong feelings about Israel, and I found it a challenge to get myself into the mood to see a show on that subject. Wondrously, The Band’s Visit stays true to its setting, depicts differences between Israelis and Egyptians, and yet makes no comment on any “hot button” issue. What a relief! I’ve complained, in the past, about “spinach musicals” – shows that are supposed to be good for you, but don’t provide the comforts of unhealthy vittles. I think of a line Carolyn Leigh wrote, “Sermonize and preach to me; make your sanctimonious little speech to me.” Who wants that?

Theatrically speaking, I prefer candy. But I don’t mean to say I don’t like serious musicals. The Band’s Visit is one. And feels, somehow, like an intriguing straight play. Characters rarely burst out in song. One particularly important number has no lyrics – it’s on clarinet and doesn’t build to an applause button. There were plenty of times I couldn’t quite tell what was going on, what the show was communicating to me.

And then, in one of the most infectious and beautiful ballads of Broadway’s past half-century, the meaning of everything that had gone before came into focus, like I was adjusting binoculars.

Extraordinary enough for you? The Band’s Visit has very little action. “The band” – that is, a set of uniformed male musicians that have gotten lost on their way to a gig – is, essentially, a main character. But, unlike most characters in musicals, they take almost no actions. And yet, when they make music, they have a catalytic effect on all who hear them.

Director David Cromer, one of those MacArthur geniuses, is experienced with straight plays, not musicals. His attention to detail, on a stark Scott Pask set (say that three times fast), allows us to concentrate on a succession of quiet moments. These amount to a meditation on the human need to connect, and how music nudges us in that direction.

And what music! The songs by David Yazbek are varied, sometimes exotic, often rapturous. So, if I say The Band’s Visit feels like a play (by Itamar Moses) it shouldn’t sound like I’m denigrating a perfectly wonderful score. It’s just that the show often uses music in a way most musicals rarely do.

Here’s something that strikes me about contemporary musical theatre: Four years in a row, the Tony has gone to a work that, in certain ways, is wholly unlike anything that has gone before. That’s an exciting transformation, if off-putting to traditionalists. It’s been a hell of a time: Fun Home, a memory play that never offers up easy answers; Hamilton, which is Hamilton; Dear Evan Hansen, which beat two other extraordinary musicals for the prize, Come From Away and Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, and The Band’s Visit. Usually, you need a few years of perspective to declare an era transformative. But come on! Those are six shows none of us could have dreamed of a decade ago.

Shekels?

The Band’s Visit, I’m pleased to report, recouped its entire $8.75 million investment. But here we are, less than a year after it won the Tony Award for Best Musical, and it’s closed. Something’s Rotten…had more performances. I find something disturbing about the shortness of The Band’s Visit compared to other Tony laureates.

But I embody the problem. Glance back at my second paragraph. The Band’s Visit is not only hard to describe and not anything like what I expected, it doesn’t sound wonderful. Not in the way, say, a comedy about silly missionaries in Africa sounds wonderful. (And there the magic words “South Park” get many TV-viewers interested in attending.) Commercial Broadway requires something of a crave factor. That is, when someone first hears about a show, there’s got to be some reason they want to go. Cyndi Lauper score about a drag queen saving a shoemaker – people want to see that. The Band’s Visit is very much like a dream. And if I start telling you about this dream I had, your eyes are likely to glaze over. In fact, I’m surprised you’ve read this far.

Tiny country; tiny town; tiny company

There are no production numbers. Nothing is big; everything is small, intimate. The Band’s Visit began at the rather small off-Broadway Atlantic Theatre. I saw it from the first row of the mezzanine at the Ethel Barrymore, one of Broadway’s smaller houses (about 1000 seats). Call me a snob about these things, but it was very important to me to see it in New York. Soon, the show will be off on a national tour, where it will play some theatres with more than 4000 seats and that’s just horrifying to me. Being close enough to see actors’ faces is essential to the experience.

Now, after the big house tour, it’s possible small theatres will start mounting it in more appropriate spaces. Try to imagine you’re in the modest abode of a couple who’ve recently had a baby. And the baby won’t sleep. And the couple’s relationship seems frayed by parental struggles. (So far, this is very similar to the musical I’ve been writing, Baby Makes Three.) In comes a quiet gentleman, carrying my favorite musical instrument – the clarinet, which I loved from the time one was played in my childhood apartment. He plays directly into the crib, lulling the baby to sleep. And this draws its parents closer together.

I told you it was like a dream. But what a happy one.

Ladies and gentlemen

When we think of American royalty, our minds are likely to run to the Kennedy family. One president, two brothers who ought to have been, and a widow who married a colorful Greek tycoon: it seems the stuff of fairy tales. Now, imagine a school chum of that president (both at Choate and Harvard) who wrote musicals, one said to be the Commander-in-Chief’s favorite, and another in which he lampooned the mega-rich Greek. That would be the closest musical comedy history is likely to come to royalty, and that would be Alan Jay Lerner, who was born 100 years ago today.

There used to be a department store in every American city called Lerner, and, yes, that was Alan’s uncle. So, he was well-off enough that it didn’t matter that his first success, of any sort, premiered in his 30^thyear. This was that much-derided bit of hokum, Brigadoon, but don’t be too hasty to dismiss this odd romantic fantasy. People today don’t realize it’s about something that was very relevant to much of its audience in the late 40s. Soldiers returned from Europe and felt a sense of alienation. They had experiences other Americans couldn’t relate to, and stateside life seemed oddly colorless. So, two veterans seize on the chance to grab rifles and go on a hunting trip in Scotland, a safe simulacrum of what they’d done just a few years before. Tommy meets Fiona and their connection is such that he promptly dumps his New York fiancée. And, as the rules of the fantasy prescribe, he must abandon 20^thcentury America altogether. How’s that for a solution for alienation?

My great uncle Israel was Lerner’s accountant, but, more important to our story, he was also Lerner’s neighbor. Rockland County in New York State, mid-century, attracted all sorts of Broadway luminaries. At parties you might see Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, or Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, or Burgess Meredith who’d had one of his first leads in a wonderful play by Maxwell Anderson, who lived there, too. Anderson had given a series of lectures on playwriting and Lerner, more than anyone, applied these lessons to the writing of musicals. Film musicals, too: Lerner won Oscars for his screenplays for An American In Paris and Gigi.

I like to imagine that much creativity was sparked by the intermingling of all these Broadway folks. Both Lerner and Anderson wrote musicals with Kurt Weill, and Weill asked Lerner to translate Threepenny Opera into English. Idly wondering who could be cast, he was surprised to hear Weill suggest Rex Harrison, as he never knew him to do a musical. Later, Lerner suggested Harrison for My Fair Lady and everyone seemed similarly surprised. “Does he sing?” “Well, Kurt Weill said he does” and, before you know it, a man who couldn’t hold a tune became Henry Higgins, indelibly.

Used to be, one of the more obvious things you’d do to prepare for a career of writing musicals is to read the paperback containing Shaw’s Pygmalion and Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. You could look over exactly what steps were taken in order to create what became the longest running Broadway musical of all time. The thing is, before they did it, nobody was quite sure it could be done. Rodgers and Hammerstein tried and failed to crack the puzzle. Lerner knew that the Shaw play is so solid, so filled with emotion, it should be minimally monkeyed with. But it also required, in Higgins’ songs, an extremely high level of wit and erudition. Because the lyrics would have to coexist with George Bernard Shaw’s sophistication. (I think Hammerstein must have not felt up to the task. Years after his death, though, Rodgers did his own lyrics for a television musical based on another Shaw play, with less spectacular results.)

The success of My Fair Lady seems to have made Lerner aware that writing for the rich and/or royal was his strongest suit. His earlier cowboy musical, Paint Your Wagon, wasn’t really the street where he lived – it wasn’t even a paved one. But Coco Chanel, and Regency rakes, kings, presidents, and folks who summer at Trouville – these were his baguette and butter.

The effort it took to create his next Broadway show nearly killed everyone around him. In its pre-Broadway try-out, Camelot ran more than four hours, necessitating expensive overtime payments to the crew. The costume designer died of a heart attack. Composer Frederick Loewe had a heart attack, and his doctor advised him to give up writing musicals. The director also was hospitalized with a heart attack, leading Lerner to emerge as a candidate for replacement director, leading Loewe to high dudgeon. Opening night reviews were not particularly good, but stars Julie Andrews and Richard Burton did some songs on The Ed Sullivan Show and the next morning ticket-buyers were lined up around the block.

If you think, as I do, that Loewe’s doctor did the world a great disservice by telling him not to write, well, he’s not the worst doctor in the collaborative team’s life. Lerner was a devotee of the famous Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson, who injected patients full of mind-altering amphetamines. Under this influence, Lerner created On a Clear Day You Can See Forever but never could figure out how to end it. It’s got E.S.P. and reincarnation, and, like Brigadoon, characters who love each other but live in completely different centuries. And while I’m telling you that this is one crazy show, the creation of a man not in his right mind, I’m going to recommend listening to the original cast album, starring the late great Barbara Harris. It is among the most delightful listening experiences one can have, due in no small part to the brilliance of Lerner’s lyrics.

Which reminds me to tell the story of his daughter Liza, who, once she figured out what her father did for a living, begged him to let her assist him in any way she could. She so wanted to be included. Lerner eventually gave her a task, one that might have seemed like needless busywork. He asked her to go to the encyclopedia and list as many different kinds of flowers as possible. This is the result:

The rhythm of the night

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Listen carefully.

Music generally makes a lot of use of repeated phrases. The ear comes to expect to hear them. Without thinking about it, we anticipate snatches of music to take up a certain amount of time. But what if they don’t? What happens if each iteration goes by quicker than the last, either by speeding up, or, even trickier – removing notes? That jars us in a sort of propulsion. And that can be very, very exciting.

So, Leonard Bernstein. Born a hundred years ago today, the biggest celebrity in American music. The secret I just referred to is exemplified in our visceral reaction to his overture to Candide, which is likely the most popular orchestral piece written in the last century. The show that followed, not so much. (I’m closely related to one of its investors.) And yet theatre people are so tantalized by that overture, as well as two Barbara Cook numbers on the original cast album, Glitter and Be Gay and Make Our Garden Grow, the spoof of opera conventions gets revived and revised all the time. They hear this fantastic music, and assume It Must Be Good. But there’s a problem with having a central figure so stupid, he does very little; he’s merely buffeted by fate. And that wears out its welcome.

In Bernstein’s earlier musicals, bright characters run all over New York in hot pursuit of an elusive goal and we’re fully invested in the effort. Those are the Town shows: On the Town and Wonderful Town. The first was based on Jerome Robbins’ excellent ballet, Fancy Free, and he and Lenny faced the unusual situation of telling the same story they’d just told, in a different medium, with completely different choreography and music. The second Town was written extremely quickly. Producers had a contract with movie star Rosalind Russell, so needed to open at a certain time. When they decided they didn’t like the score and fired the original songwriters, Bernstein carved a few weeks out of his busy conducting regime and pinch-hit it out of the park.

Here, naturally, I’m focusing on Broadway musicals. But when the world thinks of Leonard Bernstein, two unrelated images come to mind. Beyond his composing, Bernstein was America’s first (and only?) superstar at the podium. His conducting of classical music, usually not his own, was admired and revered by a wide swath of Americans in a way that’s hard to understand today. Picture a nation doing something extraordinary on the world stage. That would be World War Two and the support we gave to ravaged countries in its wake. The people of the United States felt important, responsible for the fate of the world, like they never had before. And, emotionally, there was a need for a cultural component. We’d exported movies, but now it seemed time to excel in what was considered High Art. On the crest of that wave was a lovable conductor whose enthusiasm for classical music affected all who listened.

The other image is Bernstein on black-and-white television, talking to the camera in the black, with wisps of smoke from the cigarette in his hand providing the only visual interest beyond his face. The man had more than a few things to say about music – classical, of course, but also jazz and, yes, musical theatre. He revealed the secret sauce that made Bach of Mahler great and, amazingly, that was the highest rated television program of its time. The entire nation was captivated; he was just that compelling.

So we have to talk about what I call The Head Smite Heard Around the World. A playwright and a songwriter are at a cocktail party. The younger man, who’s never had a production or recording, asks that dramatist what he’s working on. Turns out he’s working with Leonard Bernstein on another musical set in New York.

“Who’s doing the lyrics?”

“Lenny. But he’s always flying this place or that to conduct, so he’s—“

And here he smites his forehead.

“Say, you write lyrics!”

“And I compose, too.” This was said a little huffily, since he’d won a college prize that had led to post-graduate study with a major American avant garde composer.

“Yeah, I didn’t like your music. But your lyrics…”

This was so insulting, by rights the two men should have never spoken again, but before the impression of his fingers left his forehead, the scribe asked “Would you like to meet Leonard Bernstein?”

And who could say no to that? Or continue to be insulted? A chance to meet The Most Fascinating Fellow On Earth trumps all.

We’ll never know what was said at that first meeting, but it led to Stephen Sondheim joining Arthur Laurents and Leonard Bernstein as lyricist of West Side Story. Originally, the idea was to update Romeo and Juliet with a Christian boy and a Jewish girl and call it East Side Story (!) but Lenny, fascinated by then-newly exposed Latin jazz, decided to switch Sides and make her Puerto Rican. And that meant the musical would relate, as none had before, to contemporary news headlines about frightening gang violence.

The transformative passion of Tony and Maria transcends their harsh surroundings. Something beautiful grows out of ugliness. In music, the tritone is a notoriously ugly interval. Using it in the middle ages could get you burned at the stake, because it was a sign you’d consorted with the devil. But what if you used its exquisite tension, lingered for a moment, and then resolved it upwards. Beauty out of chaos. Sing it with me: MA-RI-A. Difficult to sing, but an intellectual idea metamorphosizes into an emotional expression. Those three notes also start the song, Cool, and, in a different order, are the familiar gang’s whistle.

Bernstein was famously liberal, and a party he once hosted became widely derided along the lines of “Aren’t those lefties comically naïve?” But here’s what I wonder: Due, in no small part, to Lenny’s brilliance, New York began to think of itself as a world culture capital and that meant it needed a performing arts center. So, Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic play an outdoor concert at the groundbreaking for what became Lincoln Center. But that meant bulldozers came to raze the slums of the West 60s, displacing a whole lot of low-income people: how’d he feel? In fact, just before they came, a movie crew led by Jerome Robbins danced in the then-empty streets. The movie was West Side Story.

That Oscar-winner popularized the score that hadn’t quite caught on during its Broadway run. One can deduce from this that tunes Bernstein wrote were ahead of their time, ahead of the public. The Freed Unit, at MGM, the great taste-makers of the time, considered his On the Town score too sophisticated for the movie-going public, and replaced all but two numbers.

I’ve run out of time. I hate when that happens, but I’m soothed by thinking of a Bernstein melody that, years ago, I used as my 4 a.m. sign-off at a seedy piano bar:

Where has the time all gone to?
Haven’t done half the things I want to