The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (5 page)

Forum
, famously, was saved by the replacement of its opening number. The show was an unusual one for 1962, written by brilliant young collaborators who were not particularly interested in following rules. Burt Shevelove had the idea to take three ancient Roman comedies by Plautus and cook up a vaudeville-style evening out of them. Inevitably, the writers were making a point about the ageless verities of comedy. Plautus lived in about 200
B.C.
; vaudeville was in its heyday in the 1920s; and the show was being written in the 1960s, by which time comedy had moved on to the era of political satire and improv in the style of Mort Sahl and the Second City.

But Gelbart, Shevelove’s co-librettist on this one, was fond of quoting a twenty-five-hundred-year-old joke from Plautus that demonstrated the immutability of comic subject matter:

FIRST CITIZEN

How’s your wife?

SECOND CITIZEN

(with a heavy sigh)

Immortal.

Luckily, there were still a bunch of vaudeville and borscht belt clowns milling around Broadway looking for work, and
Forum
managed to snare a handful of really good ones. Gelbart and Shevelove’s script was truly funny and extraordinarily inventive in the way it threaded the Plautus plots through one another to create a giant pileup of crises before the final resolution. Stephen Sondheim’s score—his first as lyricist and composer—was similarly unusual and innovative. Even the orchestrations were anomalous—full of offbeat percussive effects and lacking violins altogether. So
Forum
faced a challenge no one knew it faced: it wanted to earn deeply traditional waves of laughter, but it was actually much brainier and more sophisticated in its construction than it pretended to be. Its authors were not only smart, they were also smart-asses.

The show begins with a charming number called “Love Is in the Air”—a sweet little soft shoe about how romance tends to drive people nuts. It’s a honey of a number. But it tells us nothing about where
Forum
is headed—its style, its knockabout point of view, its plot, or its characters. It tells us to prepare for charm, the one characteristic that this singularly bountiful musical doesn’t have much time for.

*   *   *

The show opened disastrously in New Haven: bad reviews and empty houses. In other hands, it would have shuttered right then and there, or limped into town and disappeared into the vortex of misbegotten Broadway dreams. But the producer, Hal Prince, and the director, George Abbott, had almost seventy years of experience in the business between them. Sondheim was coming off two straight hits—
West Side Story
and
Gypsy
—as a lyricist and was also very well connected on the street. So they called Jerome Robbins to come take a look. Stubbornly, they believed in this strangely intractable comedy that they’d created, and they were too far inside it to divine why it wasn’t working.

Robbins, who had once had an interest in directing
Forum
, spotted the problem at once. It was the opening. In that moment when the curtain went up and the audience was in trouble,
Forum
promised charm and delivered mayhem instead. It betrayed the audience’s trust. In the face of the light and adorable “Love Is in the Air,” the show itself seemed vulgar and coarse, not funny. Robbins laid out his analysis. Sondheim protested that he’d already written a number that did exactly what Robbins felt needed to be done, but Abbott had rejected it because he couldn’t hum it.

“Write him a number he can hum,” Robbins told him. “He’s the director.”

Robbins agreed to stage the new opening and advised Sondheim to write something “neutral” so that he—Robbins—could create a lot of vaudeville-style schtick while it was going on. “Don’t tell jokes,” Robbins said. “Just write a baggy-pants number and let me stage it.” He didn’t want anything brainy or wisecracking, but he did want to tell the audience exactly what it was in for: lowbrow slapstick carried out by iconic character types like the randy old man, the idiot lovers, the battle-axe mother, the wily slave, and assorted other familiar folks. Sondheim wrote “Comedy Tonight,” a neutral, bouncy tune that anyone, even Abbott, could hum. It allowed space not only for Robbins’s staging but also for sections of narration in which the world of the piece, the major characters, and the overall style could be shown to the audience. This included, among other things, an opportunity for Zero Mostel, who was playing the leading role, to address the audience directly and explain things, in dialogue that didn’t include jokes but promised funny and potentially overripe comic situations. One thing Sondheim was unable to be neutral about was his natural genius with a comic rhyme when, at the conclusion of the number, he described the elements of the upcoming evening as

Pantaloons and tunics,

Courtesans and eunuchs,

Funerals and chases,

Baritones and basses,

Panderers,

Philanderers,

Cupidity,

Timidity,

Mistakes,

Fakes,

Rhymes,

Crimes,

Tumblers,

Grumblers,

Bumblers,

Fumblers

He erased all doubt as to what kinds of things were going to happen next. The audience was securely in the show’s pocket. His skill extended to beginning with lines of six syllables and working his way down to four-, three-, two-, and one-syllable lines before putting a cap on the whole stack with “Tumblers, grumblers, bumblers, fumblers.” This created a sense of acceleration and excitement in the song without actually having to speed up the tempo. It also meant that every member of the company could have a line or a word to sing before the song’s conclusion. The audience met everybody and knew everything, except for the plot, which was satisfyingly worked out later. The number went in at the beginning of previews in New York, and the show was a smash. In its final form,
Forum
is among the most happily launched of all Broadway musicals.

Years later, when it was being revived in a production directed by Jerry Zaks starring Nathan Lane, a question was raised about who owned “Comedy Tonight.” Clearly the authors owned the song and the book material that was written down on paper. But did Jerome Robbins own some undefined bit of intellectual property? And what about the staging? The most famous bit in the number involved the show’s “proteans,” three comic male chorus dancers who played all the nonprincipal roles. In “Comedy Tonight,” they performed a dance behind a piece of drapery that covered their midsections, and it quickly became apparent that the three of them shared seven legs instead of six. A remarkable amount of comedy was wrung out of this seven-legged dance before Zero Mostel simply grabbed the extra leg and hurled it offstage, which got an even bigger laugh than the dance itself.

Robbins was represented by a Broadway legend, the attorney Floria Lasky, who was quite old and cranky by this time. And tough. And she, gravel throated and full of fight, argued that Robbins should be compensated for the use of the opening number. Zaks promised that he would completely restage it so that any implied rights that Robbins might have had would not be violated. There would be none of Robbins’s work visible in the number. The producers went over to negotiate with Lasky. Hearing this pledge, she glared at the men over her desk for a long time. Finally she said, “Okay. But if there’s a wooden leg in it, Robbins gets a royalty.”

The negotiations for the
Forum
revival also involved Sondheim’s agent, Flora Roberts, who was often seen as Tweedledee to Lasky’s Tweedledum. Both were stocky old women whose voices seemed to betray years of whiskey and cigarettes, both were fiercely protective of their clients, and both, while enormous negotiating challenges for producers, were almost universally beloved. In a meeting between Roberts and the
Forum
revival producers, Roberts was bemoaning the loss of Burt Shevelove, one of
Forum
’s two book writers, who’d died too young. The other writer, Larry Gelbart, had gone on to create the TV show
M*A*S*H
and write screenplays like
Tootsie
. The book writers, living and dead, were asking for a lot of money. And Roberts was laying it on thick.

“Burt,” she intoned grandly, “is in heaven. But Larry called just this morning to remind me that he’s very big in Hollywood.”

Scott Rudin, who was one of the revival’s producers and a hugely powerful movie mogul, shot back, “Actually Burt’s bigger in heaven than Larry is in Hollywood.”

*   *   *

The show was always funny.

*   *   *

“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 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.