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

process.
    They were mature writers as well as experienced showmen. Hammerstein wrote a lyric for the cowhand that, in only a couple of dozen lines, did a lot of the work that “Comedy Tonight” had in seven minutes. The song is short, but it’s long enough. Hammerstein knew he had to set the scene, create the language of the piece, get us to like this cowhand, create a point of view for the show (earnest, not satiric, romantic but of the earth, not fussy), and create a stake. By the end of this little number, we had to believe that the place the cowhand described was so splendid in its simple beauty and virtue that it was worth defending, with a gun if necessary: it was America. And in 1943, America was at war in Europe and the Pacific, protecting the values of democracy and liberty against the deadly incursions of tyranny and bigotry. The show was set at the turn of the century, but like all shows, it had to speak to the audiences of its own time.
    This sounds like a tall order, and it required a mature artist to tackle it. But Hammerstein was a practical artist, too, and the first thing he did was to purloin the ideas of the opening stage direction of Lynne Riggs’s original play. The stage direction, in part, reads:
    It is a radiant summer morning several years ago, the kind of morning which, enveloping the shapes of earth—men, cattle in a meadow, blades of the young corn, streams—makes them seem to exist now for the first time, their images giving off a visible golden emanation …
    From that bit of purplish prose, the lyricist fashioned this much more singable vision:
    There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow,
    There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow,
    The corn is as high as a elephant’s eye
    An’ it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up to the sky.
    Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,
    Oh, what a beautiful day.
    I got a beautiful feelin’,
    Ev’rythin’s goin’ my way.
    All the cattle are standin’ like statues,
    All the cattle are standin’ like statues,
    They don’t turn their heads as they see me ride by,
    But a little brown mav’rick is winkin’ her eye.
    He dealt with flora first, then fauna. (Hammerstein dealt with a lot of fauna in his career. In a wonderful if slightly mad essay by the statistician Eric Thompson, 491 creatures are accounted for in Hammerstein’s lyrics—“75 sea creatures, 240 creatures of the land and 176 birds.”)
    For two stanzas, the verses are purely descriptive, though it tells us a lot that the cowhand singing them is so vividly observant, and his passion for his surroundings begins to show in each chorus. But in the third stanza, the cowhand loosens up and tells us what he thinks about all of this:
    All the sounds of the earth are like music—
    All the sounds of the earth are like music
    The breeze is so busy it don’t miss a tree
    And a ol’ weepin’ willer is laughin’ at me.
    Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,
    Oh, what a beautiful day.
    I got a beautiful feelin’,
    Ev’rythin’s goin’ my way …
    Oh, what a beautiful day.
    We have moved from appreciative description to a more personal statement, and suddenly we’re in the hands of a cowhand who’s a self-deprecating poet and who loves his surroundings with a kind of plainly expressed passion that is as romantic as it is proud. He’s ardent but masculine. He speaks for all of us who love our country, and he speaks in a bit of a strange patois, which is American but remote from New York and Broadway. The simplicity is deceptive, and the song is so well known that it’s hard for us to hear it afresh. But it’s worth noting that it is structured like a folk song, with its repeating chorus, not like a standard thirty-two-bar theater song. And Hammerstein’s notion of repeating the first line of every verse twice is borrowed from the rural blues songs that grew out of field hollers at the turn of the century. In those ways, it’s nothing like a Broadway song. But it contains all the hallmarks