The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (7 page)

ROSE

Louise, dear, if you don’t count—

JOCKO

Madam, do you realize you are absolutely—

ROSE

I do, Uncle Jocko, but I want to save your very valuable time for you.

JOCKO

In that case—

ROSE

When I saw your sensitive face at the Odd Fellows Hall—my first husband was an Odd Fellow—

JOCKO

I am not an Odd Fellow!

ROSE

I meant a Knight of Pythias. My second husband was—

JOCKO

I’m not a Knight of Pythias!

ROSE

Then where
did
you catch our act?

JOCKO

At the Elks.

ROSE

My father is an Elk! I have his tooth here someplace.
(She dumps the dog into Jocko’s arms as she rummages in her handbag)
If you’ll just hold Chowsie for me—that’s short for chow mein.
(Baby talk)
Mommy just loves chow mein, doesn’t she, Chowsie Wowsie? Stop sucking your thumb, Louise.
(To the conductor)
Professor, I just marvel how you can make a performer into an artist.

JOCKO

(Following her as she gads about)

What is going on here??

ROSE

Now if you could help my little girls by giving them a good loud la da
da
de da da
da
—
(To Jocko, whom she delicately shoves back as he moves to intervene)
God helps him who helps himself.
(To the drummer)
Mr. Zipser—when the girls do their specialty would you please ad lick it? Show him, girls.

JOCKO

Is this really happening?!

ROSE

Oh, Gus? Gus, would you please slap Baby June with something pink? She’s the star. Smile, Baby dear!

JOCKO

I have seen all kinds of mothers—

ROSE

Do you know of a really good agent—don’t hang on the baby, Louise, you’re rumpling her dress—who could book a professional act like ours?

We may be horrified by her performance, but unlike Mack Sennett at the top of
Mack and Mabel
, we do sort of want to spend the rest of the evening with her. For one thing, she’s fixing things rather than complaining about them. She lacks any trace of self-consciousness or self-pity. And despite all her frightening gall, she’s knowledgeable, resourceful, funny, and shocking, and in some demented way, she even seems to love her kids—though she’s continually demeaning one and protecting the other. She’s instantaneously memorable, which is always a good idea in a musical. Musicals—the great ones—are rarely about ordinary life plodding by. They’re about the outsize romance that can’t be controlled, the special world we’d love to live in for a while, the faraway time and place we’re waiting to be seduced by, the larger-than-life force of nature we so rarely encounter in real life. That’s Madame Rose.

She’s the most powerful person onstage as
Gypsy
begins, and it’s made blindingly clear that the least powerful is not Uncle Jocko, whom she berates, but poor, pathetic Louise, so paralyzed by fear that she can barely move to hide behind her sister. The trajectory of
Gypsy
is such that by the evening’s end, the two characters will have exactly switched places. Louise will be in charge of everything, and her mother will be reduced to wearing a borrowed fur over her frumpy dress while begging to come to a showbiz party in Louise’s honor. Precisely how this dramatically perfect power exchange happens is the challenge the authors handed themselves.
Gypsy
has clarity of purpose. It also has an announced stake.

*   *   *

“Don’t you laugh!” Rose barks at Uncle Jocko. “
Don’t you dare laugh!
… That child is going to be a star!”

From that moment on, the word “star” peppers the text of
Gypsy
with increasing frequency, to the point where it seems peculiar that no one ever notices how many times it’s spoken. Stardom is the stake in
Gypsy
, and stake is a great and powerful way to organize the story: Rose is determined to make her daughter a star, and the world is conspiring to make sure it never happens. Everything is about this stake. It’s like the flag in a game of capture the flag—it may not be interesting on its own, but every show should have one, and only one. It’s the thing everyone fights over, and wants, and most often it’s a physical thing or a person: Sweeney’s daughter, Johanna, in
Sweeney Todd
; the verdict in
Chicago
. Anything that’s not related to it in some way can probably be written out. And probably should be. Sometimes the stake is puzzlingly irrelevant to what’s good about a show: the stake in
Guys and Dolls
is the Save-a-Soul Mission itself. It’s not a humorous or flavorful place or a location that anyone who sees the show really even talks about. But the fact that it is threatened with being shut down is the gas that powers the engine that drives the joy machine. Great shows have clear stakes.

With the stake established quickly and with utter clarity,
Gypsy
confronted an unusual structural challenge. Most shows unfold over a few weeks or months.
Gypsy
covers more than a decade. Holding it together, keeping it, and the audience, focused, is hard work. But the show takes an innovative route to meeting that challenge, and it involves the opening number.

First, it uses the opening to set up the typical old-time vaudeville show as a storytelling device. Every scene thereafter resembles, in some ways, an act in a vaudeville show. And each is announced by a title card propped on an easel on either side of the stage, just as would have been the case in a real vaudeville house. So there’s a concept that justifies the episodic structure and helps set the style of the evening. Second, the authors use the opening melody as one of a series of musical and lyric motifs that evolve but always remain recognizable. They recur just often enough to keep us in thrall to the story. Without realizing it, we come to depend upon them to reinforce time, place, and emotion. These include a powerfully dark, driving piece of music that is accompanied by Rose’s assertion, “
I had a dream
,” the self-motivating, self-deluding reminder that she must, at all costs, stay in pursuit. It also includes the terrible corny vaudeville act that Madame Rose keeps trying to redress and reinvent without ever really changing it significantly—a mishmash of patriotism, sentimentality, and showbiz. At the center of that number is the piece of music that serves as
Gypsy
’s opening, “May We Entertain You,” which later becomes “Let Me Entertain You.” Its simplicity is deceptive; the phrase “Let me entertain you” holds no special cleverness on its own but means one thing when sung by an overeager child of seven and something else entirely when worked over by a dazzling stripper in her twenties. The show is now so famous that it’s hard to appreciate the shock that must have rippled through the audience late in the second act when Louise, now Gypsy Rose Lee, cannibalizes her baby sister’s idiotic theme song and turns it into an irresistible siren’s call of sex and sin.

As opening numbers go,
Gypsy
’s does the most with the least. The song, fully integrated into the scene that surrounds it, sets up a vanished world, introduces us to the key relationships in the piece, sets up a stake, hints at the themes of neurotic family ties and their consequences, makes clear the storytelling concept of a vaudeville show, and brings onstage a hugely larger-than-life character whose possibly insane ambitions will power the evening. Five minutes into it, we’re dying to know everything that will happen next. And, indeed, what happens next is demonstrated by the song itself, which keeps morphing into something stranger and more powerful as the evening works its way home.

*   *   *

Sondheim and Laurents had their first hit with
West Side Story
, which opened in 1957.
Gypsy
followed in 1959. Meredith Willson’s
The Music Man
opened right after the former, and it was still running when the latter closed.
West Side
and
Gypsy
made people think and empathize.
The Music Man
just made them feel good; quite naturally, it ran longer than the two Laurents-Sondheim shows combined. But let’s not be smug about its popularity. It’s a terrific piece of work and has a brilliant, unique opening number.

Most every musical theater fan thinks this opening number, named “Rock Island” for the railroad on which it takes place, is about a train. And in one way, it is. Meredith Willson, who had been a piccolo player in John Philip Sousa’s famous marching band, wanted to write a knowing but nostalgic love letter to the lost world of his youth in small-town Iowa. As befits a former marching band musician, his writing gifts had a lot to do with rhythm. His music starts with percussion, and his show starts with a percussive idea: the curtain goes up on a railroad car sitting on the tracks one stop away from River City, as a conductor announces its imminent departure. There is no music, just the accelerating rhythm of the passengers’ voices jabbering as the train lurches forward from a stop and gradually reaches cruising speed, powered by the chuffing steam locomotive. Right away we are located, happy to be in the presence of this postcard world, and delighted by a conversation that sounds perilously close to nonsensical. The word “cash” serves all the necessary purposes of sounding like a train, with its
click-clack
beginning and
sh
at the end that gives us the steam escaping.

The car is populated by salesmen whom we’ll never see again, and the conceit of the number is that simply by eavesdropping on their gossip—small-minded, self-interested bickering—we will learn everything we need to know about what this show is going to be. In some senses, the number is just an exercise in onomatopoeia. The opening lines go like this:

Cash for the merchandise, cash for the button hooks

Cash for the cotton goods, cash for the hard goods

This gets the train going, and then it speeds up to the rattling tempo of a skeptical salesman asking

Look, whatayatalk. Whatayatalk, whatayatalk, whatayatalk, whatayatalk?

But the salesmen in question aren’t just rhythm; they’re philosophy and politics in motion. As the number progresses, quickening in tempo and delighting in its own ability to make meaning out of sound, we learn a lot. These men are frightened: frightened of change and frightened of time passing them by. We’re in a world that is lurching scarily toward modernity, away from safe, old-fashioned values into a new America of mass production and homogeneity. Like
Gypsy
,
The Music Man
is about a world in transition and the instability that ensues.

Why it’s the Model T Ford made the trouble,

Made the people wanna go, wanna get, wanna get up and go …

Who’s gonna patronize a little bitty two by four kinda store anymore?

The salesmen are virtually in mourning for the passing of their own time and place:

Gone with the hogshead cask and demijohn, gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan, gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce

By this time we’re getting quite a picture. The early twentieth-century imagery of Norman Rockwell’s America is everywhere. (Even in 1957, when the show opened, it’s doubtful that anyone on Broadway could have told you what a tierce was—it’s a wine cask holding forty-two gallons.) But audiences, most of whom had never seen a Model T or a cracker barrel in their lives, were feeling quite stricken by the loss, and quite charmed. This was going to be a wonderful evening. The world of the show was as attractive as an old magazine cover, at least from a distance; its rhythmic technique was irresistible. Best of all, modern theatergoers didn’t really share the salesmen’s concerns. The automobile, not to mention the Uneeda Biscuit, which also comes in for a skeptical going-over in the number, were by now fixtures of our daily existence; they made things better, not worse. It just gave us pleasure to visit a place where old-fashioned people found such everyday things threatening to their very way of life. And it told us, without saying so explicitly, that
The Music Man
was going to be about conservative small-town life challenged by newer, less reliable values. We didn’t know exactly how that was going to happen, but we sensed it, and the number was only 70 percent done. In the last 30 percent, Willson takes care of the rest of the job:

2ND SALESMAN

Ever meet a fellow by the name of Hill?

1ST SALESMAN

Hill?

The name is unfamiliar to all of them, which, of course, makes it stand out for us. Not only have none of them heard of Professor Harold Hill, but they have the deepest contempt for his chosen line of goods once they hear that he’s a “music man.”

1ST SALESMAN

Well, I don’t know much about bands but I do know you can’t make a living selling big trombones, no sir. Mandolin picks, perhaps and here and there a Jew’s harp …

2ND SALESMAN

No, the fellow sells bands, boys’ bands. I don’t know how
he does it but he lives like a king …

By this point the train has slowed (the repeated “yessir, yessir” imitating the sound of air brakes), and it comes to a halt just in time for the one salesman who has been sitting silently with his back to us since the curtain went up to rise and jump off in River City, letting the audience see the legend emblazoned on his sample case: Professor Harold Hill.

So: in an unstable, changing America, a charismatic charlatan salesman has hopped off a train in a hidebound Iowa town hoping to fleece the locals by selling band instruments. Do we need to know anything more? Certainly not, and the miracle is, we don’t even know how we learned it. We thought we were listening to a train.