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

anything Mack says at face value? Words are coming out of his mouth, but they don’t add up.
    This is not to say that you can’t write a show about someone with personality disorders, as the surprise success of Next to Normal proved a few decades later. And, in fact, one can argue that silent movies were fantastically artful and the product of venal commercial interests. And you’d be right. But you can’t introduce the argument right at the start in a musical. The book and the song are taking opposite points of view. When you talk out of both sides of your mouth, it’s just too damn confusing. In fact, the hallmark of Mack and Mabel is that, for all its many assets, it remains stubbornly schizophrenic throughout—it never arrives at a clear view of what kind of experience it is supposed to be. This is partly the result of the limitations of the source material, the real Mack being something of a cold megalomaniac, and the real Mabel being something of a self-destructive drug addict. But it’s also important to understand that the show was created in the mid-’70s by artists who had done their best work in the mid-’60s, when musicals were still largely projecting blue skies and optimism. By 1976 there was a darker vision of America on display on Broadway. Mack and Mabel wants to have it both ways—it’s the awkward love child of Hello, Dolly! and Follies. The score, which contains a couple of terrific ballads, largely consists of upbeat, classic Jerry Herman tunes, while the book keeps getting darker and darker and darker until the lights just go out. But this bifurcated point of view is on display right from the moment the curtain goes up, and the audience never could find its way out of trouble.
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    Forum and Mack and Mabel , notwithstanding their varying degrees of success, illustrate the two most common forms of opening number. In the former, we get to meet and hear from everyone. In the latter, we are left in the hands of one protagonist, who sets the scene with no help from the rest of the cast. The first—the all-hands-on-deck number—has been serving musicals since their inception, although its function and style keep evolving. The second was more or less invented by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, with “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” back in the ’40s.
    The invention was inspired, but also pragmatic. Both men had been writing shows (although not with each other) for a long time, and both knew the value of startling an audience. You could startle it with content, but you could also, if you had a good enough idea, do it with form. It was easy to startle with more noise but more interesting to do it with less.
    Long before Hammerstein had begun writing operettas in the early ’20s, musicals usually began with lots of people onstage singing, often rows and rows of chorus girls. Ziegfeld’s Follies were famous for their parades of American beauties right at the opening curtain. The hall-of-fame set designer John Lee Beatty once said, with characteristic dryness, that an opening number was just an opportunity for the audience to take a good look at the company and decide whom they most wanted to sleep with. Once that problem had been gotten out of the way, the play could begin. He was only half kidding.
    Having agreed to adapt a play set on an Oklahoma farm at the end of the nineteenth century, Rodgers and Hammerstein were left wondering what would happen if decades of theatrical tradition were given the heave-ho, and a Broadway musical began with a middle-aged woman churning butter in a barnyard while a handsome cowhand wandered on and sang a solo. It was a question born out of practicality—choruses of girls were hard to justify on an Oklahoma farm. It’s hard to have merry villagers when there’s no village. It’s also the way the play they were adapting, Green Grow the Lilacs , begins. So they took a chance, then took many more, and then revolutionized the form in the