The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built by Jack Viertel Read Free Book Online

“Actually Burt’s bigger in heaven than Larry is in Hollywood.”
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    The show was always funny.
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    “We learn more from the flops than we do from the hits,” a wise producer once said. Actually, every producer says it every time he mounts a flop. But the point is well taken. Some shows, like Forum , were unlikely to be hits but pulled the rabbit out of the hat. Others, like Mack and Mabel , seemed destined for easy success but somehow could never find the hat, much less the rabbit.
    Mack and Mabel had everything going for it: a swell Jerry Herman score, the visionary director Gower Champion (Robbins’s only real rival for dominance in the late ’50s and the ’60s), and two big and wonderful stars in Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters playing the silent film magnate Mack Sennett and his great love and most famous female star, Mabel Normand. And it had a delightfully nostalgic, colorful milieu: the silent movie era in Hollywood. What in the world went wrong? Unsurprisingly, it starts on page one of the script and continues through the entire opening number, which, ironically, is a terrific song.
    Mack and Mabel is a love story narrated by Mack Sennett at the end of his career. The curtain goes up on his old, bankrupt movie studio, abandoned except for a night watchman. Mack, still virile and full of fight, comes back for one last look at where it all began, and then he starts to talk. This is our first shot at what the evening is going to be, and here’s a little of what he says:
    MACK
    Aw, what do those jerks know about making movies, anyway?…
    I’m Mack Sennett, I know the difference. Oh, you’ll make money with the crap you grind out …
    Go on, try all the tricks you can think of but it’s still not gonna be worth one reel of Birth of a Nation , not one frame of Chaplin, not one eighth of a quarter of an inch of my Mabel …
    So what have we learned? Mack Sennett is angry, tough, bitter, unsentimental, down on his luck, and living in the past but with a big heart for film, The Birth of a Nation , and Charlie Chaplin. He believes in them, and he’s angry because that era of pure, silent cinema is being replaced by newfangled garbage. Art is being supplanted by garbage. That’s our first clue as to who he is. He may not be much fun to spend time with (always risky in a musical), but he has passion for something of value (always a good idea in a musical). Then he begins to sing, and here’s what he sings:
    Swanson and Keaton and Dressler and William S. Hart
    No one pretended that what we were doing was art
    We had some guts and some luck
    But we were just makin’ a buck
    By now we’re on page three, and the game is already over. Why? Because after telling us in dialogue that his anger and bitterness are caused by art being supplanted by garbage, he’s just turned 180 degrees and sung to us that his career was not about making art after all, but about having the guts to make money instead. In the lyric, he describes himself as being the very thing he was attacking in the dialogue.
    So which is it? What’s going on? Our narrator, upon whom we’re forced to rely, is unreliable. He can’t keep his own point of view straight; he’s suffering from multiple personality disorder, and so is Mack and Mabel . The problem may seem like a technical glitch, easily correctable, but it’s actually huge and insurmountable, because it leaves the audience in trouble—puzzled and fearful that they’ll never figure this one out. And they won’t, because the authors can’t decide for themselves. Is the show going to be about how wonderful the silent movies were, or about how venal and commercial? Is it nostalgic or angry? If the former, why the bilious and combative narrator? If the latter, why the misty-eyed tribute to Chaplin and D. W. Griffith? What’s the tone supposed to be? Is the point of view fundamentally dark or light? Bitter or celebratory? And will we ever be able to take