The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (14 page)

The book was written by Abe Burrows (and cocredited to Jo Swerling, who wrote a first draft that was replaced). But some considerable credit is undoubtedly due to the director, George S. Kaufman, the master structuralist of American comedy. The plot shuttlecocks back and forth between two couples, Nathan Detroit and his fiancée of fourteen years, Miss Adelaide, and Sky Masterson and the Salvation Army lass he falls in love with, Sister Sarah Brown. The device that hinges this quartet together is a simple stroke of genius—a bet.

Nathan needs $1,000 to pay off a local garage owner so that he can hold his floating crap game in the garage. To get it, he bets Sky—who is addicted to crazy propositions—that Sky can’t take the religious crusader Sarah to Havana for dinner. If Sky loses, Nathan wins, of course. But it’s better than that. All Adelaide wants is to get married and Nathan to stop running the crap game. So if Nathan wins, Adelaide loses. And Sarah is just trying to keep the Save-a-Soul Mission and her reputation intact, so if Sky wins, she loses, and Adelaide wins. How, in this tipsy equation, can everyone ultimately come out on top? That’s the fun of
Guys and Dolls
. Structurally, the show kicks back and forth between the couples scene by scene, as each of their plots thickens the other, and ricochets closer to chaos. The stakes keep going up, as do the odds against the inevitable happy ending.

Sky and Nathan—in basic conflict, but not unfriendly—are each on a mission that drives the story forward. Adelaide and Sarah, who don’t meet each other until late in the first act, are left to figure out how to wrangle the two men they’ve wound up with. Good women, bad choices. It’s a traditional kind of comedy that asks an age-old comedy question: How much trouble can you get into in two and a half hours? And since it is written by men of the postwar era, you know that the women will ultimately get the upper hand. That’s the romantic joke of the ’50s: the men have all the power, but the women always win—they have all the brains. Shot through all this well-wrought anarchy is a tale of the inexorable pull of love. It turns out there is something bigger and better than a bet, even in Runyon’s world. Like
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
,
Guys and Dolls
is a puzzle box that reveals one delight after another and is always heading toward multiple weddings.

The composer-lyricist Frank Loesser, a recent arrival from Hollywood, wrote the score, and no one has ever captured the voice of his source material better. Loesser’s lyrics are continually smart and colloquial without seeming educated, and funny without a trace of self-conscious wit. And his music sounds the way a good corned beef sandwich tastes. It’s irresistible, surprisingly complex, tangy, sweet, a little peppery, and whatever other adjectives you want to associate with corned beef, brown mustard, and seeded rye.

Nathan and Adelaide have been together for years, but Sky and Sarah meet for the first time in Act 1, Scene 2 (naturally), and, ill matched as they are, they’re going to sing about it.

She’s in a foul mood, having scoured Broadway for sinners willing to convert—and come up empty. He’s surprisingly upbeat. He has to enter a place he normally wouldn’t be caught dead in and convince a chilly religious volunteer he’s never met to get in an airplane and go to Cuba with him, and there’s a part of him that enjoys the challenge. He dives in, pretending to be a sinner who has seen the light. She sees through this pose in about a minute, of course, and tries to kick him out. He’s not going anywhere, though, not when $1,000 and his pride are at stake. And a pure stroke of luck—an inaccurately attributed quote from the Bible that is hanging on the wall—saves his bacon. Strangely, for a self-described gambler and sinner, Sky knows his religious verses. And Sarah is just the tiniest bit intrigued.

“There’s two things been in every hotel room in the country,” he explains. “Sky Masterson and the Gideon Bible. I must have read the Good Book ten or twelve times. I once won 5 G’s on a triple parlay—Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego.”

This is not what Sarah is used to hearing, and it buys him another couple of minutes, but things deteriorate quickly. He offers to guarantee her a dozen sinners at her midnight prayer meeting, which will prove to be an important part of the plot later on, but she turns him down flat. He accuses her of hating men; she denies it vigorously. He alters the accusation: maybe she just hates him. She won’t even agree to that. But the man who might appeal to her, she admits, will never, ever, be a gambler.

This piece of information is like a trip wire and does to Sky what his correction of the Bible verse did to Sarah. He’s suddenly challenged and awake to the woman in the room.

“I am not interested in what he will not be,” he says. “I am interested in what he
will
be.”

And Sarah, who, if she genuinely didn’t care, would just tell him it’s none of his business, instead takes the time to paint a portrait—of the anti-Sky:

I’ve imagined every bit of him

From his strong moral fiber

To the wisdom in his head

To the homey aroma of his pipe.

Sky’s having none of it:

You have wished yourself a

Scarsdale Galahad,

The breakfast-eating,

Brooks Brothers type.

She doesn’t even hear the sarcasm. “
I’ll know
,” she sings, “
when my love comes along.
”

The irony, of course, is that he’s just walked in the door. And she doesn’t know. But she keeps singing, and so does Sky, even though she asks him not to. “
Mine, I’ll leave to chance and chemistry
,” he asserts. She’s baffled by his use of the word “chemistry,” but he stands by it. Sex plays a big part, he implies, and in this song it does. It’s all about chemistry—it certainly has nothing to do with what they’re saying to each other.

The form of these conditional love songs is fairly consistent, and it plays on the subconscious of the audience in a way that is structural and subtextual. First one sings and then the other sings a rebuttal, but both assertion and response have the same melody. So there’s something that tells us, subliminally, that these two have more in common than they think they do—they have the same music. At the end, for a moment, at least, the two actually sing together, in simple harmony. And when a couple sings in harmony, the groundwork for eventual emotional harmony is laid, so to speak. In the case of “I’ll Know,” Sky and Sarah sing one line together, “
I’ll know when my love comes along
,” but it sounds so right that at the end of it, he kisses her. She kind of kisses back. Then she slaps him. The acting challenge of the song is to transcend the words, which are an argument, and somehow move inexorably toward the kiss, and the slap, which land things in an emotional mess—just the kind we like in these stories.

After the slap, he exits, leaving her to contemplate what has just happened.

“
I won’t take a chance
,” she sings, insisting on her original vision. But we all know what’s going on when people start talking to themselves about not taking chances. Round one has been a technical draw, but Sarah’s bewilderment gives the advantage to Sky. And from the dramatist’s point of view, an awful lot has been accomplished in one conditional love song.

*   *   *

Mike Ockrent, director of
Crazy for You
and
Me and My Girl
, among others, developed a number of shows and always insisted that the key to romance in a musical is the inappropriateness of the couple. “If you believe they belong together because they have the same background, the same ideas about life, the same tastes, what’s the point of the show?” he asked. “If you think they have no real chance of getting together, that they’re entirely mismatched, then there’s something to watch. Of course, you know they’ll end up together—it’s a musical—but the question is, how will the story accomplish it? If it’s easy and obvious at the beginning, the audience won’t be there at the end.”

For Sky and Sarah, the likelihood of a united outcome seems remote, especially because one of them would have to give up everything—a way of life that is complete, ingrained, and seemingly unshakable. Which is pretty much what happens. Like Higgins and Eliza, or, for that matter, Tracy Turnblad and Link Larkin, an ocean of difference has to be crossed before the lovers can become lovers. That’s a journey we believe in—at least for other people—and we want to watch it.

Frank Loesser was a restless writer who never repeated himself. Having done the essential mug show in
Guys and Dolls
, he turned his attention to a pastoral operatic romance,
The Most Happy Fella.
After stumbling with the folktale
Greenwillow
, he returned with an urban satire of American enterprise,
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
, for which he won a Pulitzer. Each of these shows contains an original conditional love song idea, and two more of them (let’s leave
Greenwillow
’s grave undisturbed) are worth at least a brief look.

In
Happy Fella
, Tony, an aging immigrant Napa Valley grape grower, tricks a young San Francisco waitress into becoming his mail-order bride by sending her a picture of his handsome, rugged ranch hand, Joe. On the night of her arrival in Napa, an anxious Tony gets drunk and gets in a near-fatal car accident. Not surprisingly, Rosabella, as Tony calls her, ends up in the arms of Joe. That’s Act 1, so the conditional love song between Tony and Rosabella doesn’t occur until Act 2, by which time Tony is in a wheelchair and Rosabella is pregnant by Joe, though married to Tony. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, and the two of them barely know each other.

Loesser constructs an ingenious musical scene for them in three little acts, in which Rosabella tries to improve Tony’s English. “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance” begins as a simple obligation—Rosabella is nursing the husband she wishes she hadn’t agreed to marry. But before the song is done, Tony has proved his humanity; he’s brought Rosabella’s best friend from San Francisco up to Napa to stave off his young wife’s loneliness, and this gesture, unasked for and unexpected (the friend arrives in the middle of the song), completely changes the temperature. By the time the number has concluded, we’ve gone from feeling that the relationship is hopeless to feeling that it’s somehow fated. Tony’s English hasn’t gotten any better, and it never will. But the two of them have somehow preserved at least the possibility of a happy ending for themselves and the audience.

The song features something that gives these moments a chance to be fresh: a subject other than love. Rosabella is giving an English lesson. That’s the raw material that makes the emotional connection possible. Other songs in other shows have been written about everything from disputes over horoscopes to baptism rites—as long as the combatants have differing attitudes toward the subject, it hardly matters what the subject actually is. There’s something to talk about.

In
How to Succeed
, Loesser again tried something new: he turned the conditional love song into a trio. Observing the grebe-like natural shyness of first approaches, he positioned his young would-be lovers in the elevator of a tall office building and gave them a kind of fairy godmother—the boss’s secretary—who introduces their romantic intentions to the audience as they try to find ways to flirt, while remaining virtually tongue-tied. The song is called “Been a Long Day,” and that cliché serves as its chorus, while the verses are full of the usual comic stumbling and fumbling that presages nest building. In the course of one elevator ride, the deed gets done, though without the narrator, we would have no idea what just happened. It’s a small invention, but it gives great pleasure.

*   *   *

Invention is key to keeping these songs, and the moment they dramatize, fresh. Since it’s a well-worn situation in life as well as in the theater, it’s likely to seem overfamiliar, and freshening it with wit and a different point of view tests a songwriter’s mettle. Stephen Sondheim wrote a terrific conditional love song using a different kind of invention from Loesser: “Your Eyes Are Blue,” which was cut from
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
In this case, it’s not just a matter of shyness or communication skills—the lovers themselves have extraordinarily limited brain power. They are, in fact, archetypes from Roman comedy, innocent kids with hormones raging and IQs lagging far behind. Hero, the boy, tries to make Philia, the girl, understand what’s going on between them, but he’s bashful. So he makes up a story. To disguise the identity of his beloved and himself, he puts them in the third person—or tries to—and charmingly fails.

He sings:

Once upon a time,

It happened

It happened there lived a boy

Who loved a girl …

Your eyes are blue …

And every single night

He’d see her across the way.

I’d want to say—

He’d
want to say,

“Your eyes are blue

And I love you!”

But never had they spoken,

Never had he dared.

Beautiful as she was,

I was—
he
was—

Scared.

Hero’s inability to keep himself out of the story is matched by Philia’s difficulties in keeping the story straight at all. She can’t even remember what color the girl’s eyes are—and she’s the girl. In the end, as in
Guys and Dolls
, but with sweetness instead of tart hostility, the two sing a line together and kiss. But Sondheim constructed the kiss as a missing line in the lyric:

PHILIA

When suddenly one day

She met him.

He looked so tall.