On Jukeboxy-ness. Also, How Will Jukebox Musicals Age?

Last August, in the New York Times, theatre critics Jesse Green, Ben Brantley and Elisabeth Vincentelli had a conversation about jukebox musicals.

Everyone asked interesting questions and adopted varying stances on the many issues that jukebox shows raise. But nobody questioned one basic assumption, and it’s an assumption I haven’t seen questioned anywhere else either, leading, I think, to a great deal of woolly thinking.

Early in the article, Vincentelli asks “Is it worth starting with how we define the jukebox musical?”, after which the conversation moves on to revues, pop songs in the theatre and bio-musicals. Later, Brantley notes “but we seem to be too restrictive in our definition, a point Elisabeth raised earlier.” But that definition, despite all the theatre brain-power in the room, has never appeared.

Here’s the neatest definition of a jukebox musical I’ve seen, from theatre critic Cassie Tongue, in her review of Jersey Boys: “a narrative piece of theatre woven together with an artist or band’s discography”. Tongue neatly sidesteps revues and song cycles with her use of the word ‘narrative’, and the only addition I can think of is, perhaps, ‘era’, along with ‘artist’ and ‘band’, to cover those shows that mine a particular decade or genre, such as Motown and Rock of Ages.

In fact, maybe ‘pre-existing’ is sometimes all that’s needed, as in the case of a grab-bag like Moulin Rouge. And after all, isn’t pre-existing really the point?

In any case, even better than Tongue’s definition’s precision is its lack of judgement. Most of us, when we ask for a definition of jukebox musicals, are really asking “What’s a definition that allows me to loathe Mamma Mia! but praise American Idiot?”, and then the woolly thinking kicks in: we all bang on about how American Idiot‘s songs were originally written for a concept album, with an implied narrative, making them theatrical, and the show not really a jukebox show. At other times the question is, truthfully, “What’s a definition that lets me be excited about Moulin Rouge, while castigating every bio-show from Jersey Boys to Summer?”. Then we use words like ‘re-contextualise’ and ‘re-purpose’ and ‘fragment’, until Moulin Rouge is a superior, different kind of jukebox show.

Here’s the assumption we’re all making, though: that a show either is, or isn’t, a jukebox musical. I propose that jukeboxy-ness exists on a spectrum, that many shows employ jukeboxy-ness to varying degrees, and that audiences, generally, do not care about our definitions.

The question we should be asking is not “is this show a jukebox musical?”, but rather “how much does this show behave like a jukebox?”.

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A modern jukebox does a very specific thing: it takes your money and in return plays you a song you know and want to hear. The process isn’t pure, since jukebox manufacturers and distributors limit your choices to their own song catalogues. Still, in an age of mp3s these catalogues are huge, and in theory the many available titles on display in a jukebox should soothe you with familiarity.

(Jukeboxes, by the way, used to be almost the opposite: before rock ‘n’ roll radio took off, they were the places you’d find the latest records, and first. If somebody referred to a ‘jukebox musical’ in the 1940s, that would have meant one with the latest jive, where a hep cat might really cut a rug.)

Jukebox musicals often try to soothe you in much the same way as a modern jukebox, usually with their full titles and subtitles: Beautiful: The Carole King Musical; Jersey Boys – The story of Franki Valli & The Four Seasons; MAMMA MIA! THE SMASH HIT MUSICAL BASED ON THE SONGS OF ABBA. All of these titles and subtitles are designed to allay some of your ticket-buying fears by answering two of your most pressing ticket-buying questions: “how will the music sound, and will I like it?”

For me, a given show might be very jukeboxy, purely in terms of familiarity, if I know most or all of its songs in advance. I’m an Australian male born in 1970, so how jukeboxy for me is that queen of jukebox shows, Mamma Mia!? Here’s the song list:

ACT I
Prologue: I Have a Dream
Honey, Honey
Money, Money, Money
Thank You For the Music
Mamma Mia!
Chiquitita
Dancing Queen
Lay All Your Love On Me
Super Trouper
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!
The Name of the Game
Voulez-Vous

ACT II
Under Attack
One Of Us
S.O.S
Does Your Mother Know
Knowing Me, Knowing You
Our Last Summer
Slipping Through My Fingers
The Winner Takes It All
Take a Chance On Me
I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do
I Have a Dream (Reprise)

If today were April 5th, 1999, the day before Mamma Mia! opened on the West End, I could sing all but two of those songs for you, right now, before we picked up our tickets. For now, let’s leave aside whether I like all those songs, or want to hear that much ABBA in one sitting: as far as familiarity goes, for me Mamma Mia! behaves very much like a jukebox. It helps that I’m in my late 40s, and it really helps that I’m Australian.

Of course, those song choices are nearly all singles, and they’re nearly all hits. Book writer Catherine Johnson has an extensive catalogue to choose from (a complete Fernando has had to wait until the film sequel), but she shows no desire to surprise hardcore fans with obscure deep cuts. There’ll be no Bang a Boomerang tonight, and King Kong Song remains in my childhood, where it belongs. Furthermore, the two songs I don’t immediately know are exactly where they should be: the middle of Act Two, where they can do little harm, right before The Winner Takes It All kicks off three massive hits in succession, all the way to the curtain calls.

Mamma Mia! even relies on my familiarity with its songs, expecting me to know them instantly:

TANYA: What is it?

DONNA: Nothing. Leave me alone. I can’t talk about it. I knew this would happen! Of course it was gonna come out now. It had to. Oh God, why was I such a stupid little eejit?

ROSIE (sings): CHIQUITITA, TELL ME WHAT’S WRONG …

Cue the knowing laugh from the audience. The film version of Moulin Rouge has a similar moment near its beginning:

CHRISTIAN (v/o): There seemed to be artistic differences over Audrey’s lyrics and Satie’s songs.

DOCTOR: I don’t think a nun would say that about a hill.

SATIE: What if he sings, ‘The hills are vital, intoning the descant’?

TOULOUSE: No, no. The hills quake and shake –

DOCTOR: No, no, no, no. The hills –

ARGENTINEAN: The hills are incarnate with symphonic melodies!

This goes on for some time, until our hero Christian cements his place as a songwriter ahead of his time by getting the answer right:

CHRISTIAN (sings): THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MUSIC.

Why is only Christian’s answer right? Because it’s Oscar Hammerstein’s actual lyric, of course, and the audience knows this. Head Over Heels, a musical whose jukebox uses The Go-Go’s/Belinda Carlisle discography, plays this fanservice game when Pythio, the Oracle of Delphi, announces that one of their predictions for the King of Arcadia has come true:

PYTHIO: Thou with thy wife adultery shall commit … (sings) OOOOOOH, BABY, DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT’S WORTH?

You get it. Cue the knowing laugh from the audience. Each of these moments congratulates us for knowing a lyric so well-known that half the planet knows it, and chosen for this moment precisely because it’s a lyric that half the planet knows.

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“Oddly I’m not a big fan of “Mamma Mia!” but that’s because I love Abba so much that the show messed with my pre-existing ideas about the songs.” 

Elisabeth Vincentelli

“… partly because they [pop songs] were pre-written for a different context — or for no context — and partly because they tend to cycle through one generic emotion, they make character development difficult.”

Jesse Green

Besides familiarity, there’s at least one other aspect to jukeboxy-ness, which Vincentelli refers to, and it’s what happens after the opening lyric: do the writers then mess with the original? Here’s the original Andersson/Ulvaeus opening for Chiquitita:

Chiquitita, tell me, what’s wrong?
You’re enchained by your own sorrow.
In your eyes
There is no hope for tomorrow.

Here’s the altered version from Mamma Mia!:

ROSIE: Chiquitita, tell me, what’s wrong?
TANYA: I have never seen such sorrow
BOTH: In your eyes
And the wedding is tomorrow

Mamma Mia! is coy about the credits for its re-written lyrics. Perhaps in the theatre, where clarity is all, there’s little hope for a word like “enchained”, but in this instance, with a mis-accented “is”, and the clunky exposition of two characters telling a third something they all already know, I’m pretty certain no theatre lyricist was involved.

And I’m completely certain, given the show’s success, that nobody important cares. Mamma Mia! tinkers with its original ABBA lyrics all the time, and audiences don’t seem to mind, since changes are rarely made in a song’s first line, and never in an important chorus. More importantly, I think, ABBA’s songs are sometimes broken up with story-in-dialogue, but they’re never asked to convey new plot alone, or to introduce new characters – these tasks are consistently achieved through speech after/beforehand. And, as Green notes, these pre-written pop songs are often staged as dramatically static celebrations of one generic (maybe “unequivocal” is a fairer term?) emotion.

(To be fair, there are plenty of songs from non-jukeboxy original scores that are also dramatically static and emotionally unequivocal, whether they’re celebrating June for bustin’ out all over, or recommending that one give it the ol’ razzle dazzle.)

Nevertheless, this most jukeboxy of jukeboxy musicals is not completely jukeboxy. When it is, it’s unashamedly so, and for those who like the show, this is a big part of its charm:

“… the pure klutziness of Mamma Mia! is what makes it a strange work of genius. It picks up the inner karaoke demon in all of us.”

Ben Brantley

Note, though, that ‘karaoke’ implies knowing the songs in advance. What if you don’t?

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The theatre critics at Exeunt Magazine NYC had a range of responses to Head Over Heels, including this observation from Nicole Serratore about the show’s decision to use The Go-Go’s/Belinda Carlisle catalogue:

I just never got into music when I was a teen and still find myself playing catch-up. I wonder how much of this was a miss for me because the music also didn’t provide that extra layer of familiarity or tasty, satisfying musical nostalgia noms.

Nicole Serratore

As far as Head Over Heels goes, I have only three potential musical nostalgia noms: Our Lips Are Sealed, We Got the Beat, and (maybe) Get Up and Go. I never liked Belinda Carlisle’s solo hits, and I’m not even familiar with the show’s title song – although I freely admit that by the end of its first chorus, I feel like I’ve known it for years. That’s an important additional consideration with many jukebox musicals: songs originally aimed at the pop charts should be hooky, even if they’re unfamiliar, and there’s a certain imprimatur that comes with knowing in advance that a show’s numbers are drawn from a catalogue of hits.

But are they? In Head Over Heels, Pythio, the newly-appointed non-binary-plural Oracle of Delphi, has two important jobs to do, plotwise, once they are introduced: announce who they are, and make several predictions that will spur the King of Arcadia into action. Additionally, the performer playing Pythio is Peppermint, the first trans femme actor to originate a principal role on Broadway.

If I were assigned to write an original song for Pythio’s introduction, I’d be salivating. I’d want to do everything at once: address this musical’s themes of breaking down stultifying binary categories, while dropping Pythio’s prediction-bombs, while breaking the fourth wall a little to give Peppermint her debut moment, while also giving her and any future Pythios a showstopping number on its own terms. Not easy, but that’s how high I would set my sights. All in song.

What does Head Over Heels give Pythio? Vision of Nowness, from The Go-Go’s 2001 album God Bless.

To summarise: that’s a non-single, a non-hit, from the band’s non-heyday. Are there any nostalgia noms to be had here? Is anyone nostalgic for the Go-Go’s of 2001? But perhaps the song is intrinsically so well-written, and so apropos that it doesn’t matter. The lyrics:

There are some things I must never reveal
About the way I think and what I feel
To the surface, smooth, calm and cool
Eyes as deep and blue as a swimming pool
And I confess with certainty
No interference will get through to me

So far, that’s an ‘I Am’ song, allowing Pythio to announce what they’re like, rather than who they are: long on attitude, and short on specifics (also, are swimming pools really that deep?). The chorus:

Like a picture that’s been painted
And is hanging on the wall
An admired but untouchable
Reflection
A vision of nowness
A vision of now

There is a second verse, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but is mostly more attitude, followed by a repeat of the chorus. As far as all the heavy lifting goes – making predictions, explaining who they are, giving Peppermint her moment – all of that is relegated to speech. All of it, and without the compensating factor of occurring in the midst of a beloved song, a nostalgia nom, a summoning of the inner karaoke demon.

Head Over Heels, then, is jukeboxy except when it isn’t. And this Pythio-introduction moment in particular, a crucial turning point in the story early in Act One, behaves nothing like a jukebox: unless you’re a very ardent Go-Go’s fan, the show takes your money and in return plays you a song you don’t already know, and thus cannot possibly already want to hear.

One of the problems of the regular kind of jukebox is that the songs are not, typically, theatrical and, as such, often just flop on the stage like dead fish.

Jesse Green

I vehemently disagree that pop songs flop in a theatrical setting.

Elisabeth Vincentelli

I submit that Green and Vincentelli are both right, depending on the moment, and depending on the song. Vision of Nowness is, I think, a dead fish. Heaven is a Place On Earth, after the knowing laugh summoned by its opening line, does much better. Again, from the critics at Exeunt NYC:

My eye-rolling never quite recovered from the jamming together of “the beat” and “the governing ethos of a Renaissance nation-state” and wrenching the plot to make “Vacation” literal. Conversely, something like the deep irony of throwing “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” into what’s essentially an underground–like, a cave–sex club seemed to me a more successful synchrony.

Loren Noveck

Noveck’s synchrony is akin to what I think Vincentelli means when she says, of pop songs in a theatrical setting, “Their connection to the audience is very different, and so is their connection to a show’s narrative.” But that synchrony, and that plurality of connections, can only happen if you already know the song. Heaven is a Place on Earth, a 1987 bubble-gum worldwide hit, can produce irony in an underground sex club. Vision of Nowness cannot be, except for the most serious fans of The Go-Go’s, anything but a new song.

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Which brings me – and really, if you’ve stayed this long, we shall always be friends – to the second part of the title of this post: how will jukebox musicals age? What will happen when there is only a song’s connection to the narrative, and no pre-existing one to the audience?

A world in which no-one knows the songs of ABBA seems inconceivable – and for all their seeming public nonchalance, the members of the band have gone to considerable lengths to keep their songs worming in your ears, serving as producers and executive producers on different incarnations of Mamma Mia!, as well as endorsing Mamma Mia-themed restaurants, and lending their support to ABBA: The Museum (where the audio tour is written by – who else? – Catherine Johnson).

Likewise, thanks to other people whose job it is to keep catalogues prominent and earning, none of us will stop hearing the songs of The Beatles, The Eagles, Michael Jackson, Elton John, Queen, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones etc. any time soon.

But there is a jukebox musical with songs are so old that they’re barely known by anyone in their original incarnations. They now have only their present connection to the musical’s narrative, and no original musical nostalgia noms to provoke. Actually, this musical has been around for long enough to develop new musical nostalgia noms of its own. And, like every jukebox show, it was never completely jukeboxy.

My principal criterion for jukebox musicals is do they summon the pleasure we once derived from the works being hymned?

Ben Brantley

It’s Singin’ in the Rain, conceived by MGM producer Arthur Freed as a vehicle for his songwriting catalogue with lyricist Nacio Herb Brown. This was while, conveniently, Freed was head of the unit responsible for making musicals at MGM, but who in hindsight can blame him for having an ego? When the film debuted in 1952, the oldest of its songs dated from 1929, so in terms of nostalgia, this is like writing a jukebox musical today featuring the hits of TLC and Hootie & the Blowfish.

I first saw Singin’ in the Rain on video when I was 17, with my then-girlfriend, who had a serious and entirely justifiable thing for Gene Kelly. After I’d overcome my seething jealousy at Gene’s magnificent butt, I thoroughly enjoyed Singin’ in the Rain, realising I was seeing, in Moses Supposes, Good Morning, Make ’em Laugh, and the title song, some of the greatest dance numbers ever filmed.

But how much did this jukebox musical function like a jukebox for me? Hardly at all. I’d seen snippets of one or two numbers elsewhere, and I knew the “doo doo doo doo” introduction to the title song. Otherwise, this was all new, with none of Brantley’s summoning of pleasures once derived. Moreover, at the time, I didn’t know this film was using a pre-existing catalogue of songs.

But then, how jukeboxy was Singin’ in the Rain for audiences in 1952? Often not, it turns out. Make ’em Laugh, apart from being a brazen ripoff of Cole Porter’s Be a Clown from four years earlier, was a new song credited to screenplay writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green. So was Moses Supposes, with music by the film’s musical director Roger Edens. Edens also wrote the “doo doo doo doo” introduction to the title song, so even that part was new to audiences in 1952.

It would be easy to say “Well, of course, Comden and Green came from Broadway, so they wrote theatre numbers where they were needed.” Except they didn’t. Make ’em Laugh takes four minutes, in terms of plot and character, to achieve this:

COSMO: Come on, Don, snap out of it! The show must go on!
DON: You know what? You’re right.

And Moses Supposes takes four minutes to achieve this:

TEACHER: Moses supposes his toeses are roses …
DON + COSMO (mocking flawlessly): But Moses supposes erroneously …
TEACHER: Well, I can see you two don’t need my help.

Elsewhere, pre-existing songs like Good Morning and the title song are written to function as dramatically static celebrations, capping spoken scenes in which plot and character advance and develop. They’re used, in other words, very much like pre-existing pop songs are used in jukebox musicals today.

A modern stage adaptation of Singin’ in the Rain, then, is a revival of a jukebox, a live version of a familiar film, but with none of that film’s original nostalgia available to it. The audience, if they’ve not seen the movie, are a bunch of 17 year-old mes, not thinking about how this narrative has been woven together with the Freed/Brown song catalogue, but rather about how these songs work – or fail to work – on their own terms.

And a similar fate, eventually, awaits every jukeboxy show.

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Jukeboxy-ness is often bewailed, especially by those of us who write original songs, as an affliction, a modern-day blight brought on by risk-averse producers. For what it’s worth, I think it’s more a symptom than a disease: with tickets to a Broadway musical now costing $113 dollars, on average, including the flops, who can blame audiences for wanting to be soothed with familiarity? (An orchestra seat for Carousel in 1945 would have cost you, in today’s money, about $70.)

Elsewhere, shows with original scores but familiar titles and storylines (Mean Girls, Pretty Woman) demonstrate jukeboxy-ness of a different kind: here is a show that takes your money and in return tells you a story you already know, and (presumably) want to hear again, in musical form.

And sometimes, (I whisper this, Frozen and Greatest Showman) those original songs written for original stories sound so much like pre-existing songs that I still feel like I’m hearing a jukebox show.

In 1945, for my $70 or so, Carousel would have presented me, amongst other things, with a seven-and-a-half minute solo number near the end of Act One, slightly pretentiously entitled Soliloquy, and like nothing I’d have heard before, advancing plot, developing character, establishing a star, all in song, and throwing down a challenge for every composer and lyricist to come. None of it familiar, none of it soothing – and part of a score that, for all of Carousel‘s other problems, remains the chief reason it’s revived today.

Not bad for $70. And jukeboxy-ness, for all its charms, can’t do it.

Scene: Me and Sir Tim Rice, rewriting ‘Chess’

A spacious lounge room, wooden floor, old, weathered furniture. SIR TIM, attractively rumpled,  is in an armchair, watching something on a laptop computer. ME enters, pulling a script and another laptop from a satchel, a little too keen.

Me: (setting up) Morning, Sir Tim. Day 1, ay? I’ve got the 1990 Sydney script here.

Sir Tim: (pausing the video) Where on earth did you get that? And please, it’s Tim.

Me: Tim! Great. Well, I know people, Tim. Chorus-folk. They hoard stuff.

Tim: (of the video) So are these just sitting there on YouTube? All these versions, out in the open?

Me: Yep, until someone takes one down, and someone else puts it up again. People bloody love that score.

Tim: I know, I know. Every time we do a concert version, it’s “Oh, those songs … shame about the book.” And they look at me as though someone else wrote it.

Me: Could be worse. Could be the other way around.

Tim: What no-one seems to understand, though, is that it’s not just the dialogue.

Me: No, no, it is just the dialogue, Tim, I’m sure of it. We tweak a little here, move a bit there, make everyone nicer –

Tim: (Of the script) May I see that?

ME hands it over.

Tim: (reading) I’d forgotten this. Director’s note: “Chess is virtually unique among modern musicals, in being neither nostalgic nor a period costume drama.” Well, I suppose it is now.

Me: Let’s talk love triangle: Freddie, Florence, Anatoly. Go. Hit the musical beats for me.

Tim: Tea first? Coffee?

Me: I’ve had four already. Love triangle. Beats.

Tim: (reading, sighs) “One or two less mistakes.” It should be fewer.

Me: What? No, no, don’t change ‘The Story of Chess’. People bloody love that song. Get to Freddie and Florence.

Tim: Righto. (leafing) Arbiter announces where we are, who everyone is – dear God, the exposition! The clunking of it. Freddie is this, Florence is that, blah blah blah. Have we another version?

Me: I thought you’d like that one! It’s yours.

Tim: How about the latest fan version?

Me: (swivelling laptop to show) I’d say Wayne Rossi is a bit more than a fan. This is from 2015.

Tim: (reading from screen) Prologue with little Florence and her father, then the lullaby. So two prologues, really. Then Freddie at  – ah, yes, a press conference! Refuge of the destitute. Probably my idea.

Me: Stop being so hard on yourself! It gets the job done. Now, give me love triangle.

TIM stands up and begins pacing.

Tim: No matter which version we’re talking about, when we meet Freddie and Florence, they’re together, after a fashion, and they bicker a lot, sometimes in song.

Me: (typing) Great. One side of the triangle.

Tim: Then, when Anatoly meets Florence, he calls her nice and civilised.

Me: (nodding) Yes, yes. ‘Model of Decorum and Tranquility’. People love that song.

Tim: Later, Florence and Freddie fight after Freddie misbehaves at the first chess match, and – most of the time – Florence sings ‘Nobody’s Side’.

Me: (typing madly now) That’s the one, baby! Goddamn best keyboard riff, makes me want to climb halfway up a staircase to nowhere and stick one hip out. I bloody love that song.

Tim: (undistracted) And in it, Florence sings “the one I should not think of keeps running through my mind” – which I’ve always felt was a bit rich, because all Anatoly has done is treat her with politeness and respect, while Freddie’s been a complete twat. I mean, these are her options?

Me: No, you’re doing great. Second side of the triangle, done.

Tim: Well, then the third side follows almost immediately in the Mountain Duet. Freddie doesn’t show up, and Florence and Anatoly discover they like each other, and sing about it. Then they kiss.

Me: Boom. Three sides, triangle sorted. OK, so let’s just look at the dialogue –

Tim stops pacing.

Tim: See, this is my point, though. It’s not just the dialogue, because it’s all book, all of it. Having a Hungarian prologue, a press conference at the start, the fact that Freddie’s surname is Trumper. God-awful, what was I thinking? The decision not to show Florence and Freddie in love. We’re supposed to care that Florence is thinking of leaving Freddie, but really, who wouldn’t? We never learn what she likes about him, so good riddance, Yank. And then, a couple of compliments from the only man onstage who isn’t a right bastard, and she’s snogging away! That’s all book. I could rewrite every line, I could stop pretending that Persia rhymes with inertia, and none of that would change. Bloody hell, I’ve got a woman singing about seeing her “present partner in the imperfect tense”! Is this someone on the horns of a dilemma, making grammar puns? It doesn’t even make sense!

Me: Don’t you say a word against ‘Nobody’s Side’. That’s a solid-gold hit!

Tim: It’s a bloody albatross around my neck! Nearly as bad as ‘One Night in Bangkok’. This show is supposed to be a love triangle with the Cold War in the background, but instead it’s pallid jokes about the Cold War with a love triangle in the background. No, the only way to fix this is to cut some songs –

Me: No!

Tim: Yes! Cut some songs and write some new ones. That’s what you do when you rewrite the book, you rewrite the score too. Because it’s all book.

Me: But –

Tim: All of it is the book!

A pause. Me is aghast, adrift.

Me: But –

A long pause.

Tim: I know. People bloody love that score.

Tim slumps back into the armchair. Me quietly closes his laptop. Slow blackout.

A Note to Lyricists, on Behalf of the Word “Behalf”

“Behalf” is a handy little word, and lyricists like it because because it rhymes with “laugh”:

I’d like to say a word in her behalf
Maria makes me laugh

That’s Oscar Hammerstein, in The Sound of Music.

When I see depressing creatures
With unprepossessing features,
I remind them on their own behalf
To think of celebrated heads of state
Or ‘specially great communicators …
Did they have brains or knowledge?
Don’t make me laugh!

And that’s “Popular”, obviously, from Wicked, by Stephen Schwartz.

The world stands still
On my behalf
And I find that I’m in love
With Lucy’s laugh

And that’s “Lucy’s Laugh”, lyric by Christopher Dimond, from the song cycle Homemade Fusion.

Of these three, only Hammerstein gets it right. “In her behalf” means “in her favour” or “for her benefit”. “On their own behalf” means while acting as their representative, and “on my behalf” means the world stood still because I was going to do it, but I got held up by traffic or something.

Schwartz and Dimond mean “for their/my benefit”, but of course, that doesn’t rhyme. I suppose you could argue that Galinda makes the error, not Schwartz, but I don’t buy it.

What Hollywood’s Addiction to The Hero’s Journey is Doing to the Broadway Musical – Part Two

Part One is here.

2. The ‘I Want’ Song – Immovable and Generic

Using Christopher Vogler’s stages in The Hero’s Journey, Julian Woolford observes:

“not every stage of the story necessarily contains a song. There are, however, certain key stages that commonly do contain songs. These tend to be the major stages of the story:

1.  The Ordinary World
2.  The Call to Adventure

4.  Meeting the Mentor …”

That’s fair, and Woolford, who prefers the term ‘I Wish’ to ‘I Want’ goes on [emphases are his]:

“The ‘I Wish’ song can occur at any point in Act One, but is most common at the Call to Adventure or the Refusal of the Call stages; it is one of the cornerstones of any score. The ‘I Wish’ song is about who the Hero is and what he wants.”

But here’s how Steve Cuden applies the Journey’s opening stages to a musical [emphases his]:

“So, you’ve established the world that the protagonist, antagonist, and other characters dwell in. And you’ve shown the audience how those characters interact. You’ve set up what the protagonist wants in his life, but not necessarily his overall goal just yet. A catalyst must occur to drive the protagonist out of his normal world …”

This is the influence of Hollywood thinking: the hero will be longing for something, but not for anything too specific, because The Call to Adventure hasn’t happened yet. So, in Beauty and the Beast (about to be re-made into a live-action film), Belle doesn’t sing:

I’ll stick these peasants with a fucking knife …

No, Belle sings:

There must be more than this provincial life …

There’s an added attraction in putting the ‘I Want’ song so early: the star gets a big sing very shortly after she appears on stage. That makes good box-office sense; but without concrete details in that song, she’ll be stuck singing about some big symbol, which we all know is a mere stand-in for vague self-fulfillment. You know, this kind of rubbish:etc.

3. Act One is Bloated; Act Two is Thin

Here are Vogler’s twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey. In Woolford’s approach, eight of them will tend to occupy Act One of a basic two-act musical.

1. The Ordinary World
2. The Call to Adventure
3. Refusal of the Call
4. Meeting with the Mentor
5. Crossing the First Threshold
6. Tests, Allies and Enemies
7. Approach to the Innermost Cave
8. The Ordeal

Act Two will make use of the remaining four stages:

1. Reward
2. The Road Back
3. The Resurrection
4. Return with the Elixir

Steve Cuden’s seven plot points look more balanced in print …

1. Normal World – Opening Image
2. Inciting Incident – Catalyst
3. Point of No Return
4. Midpoint Begins

INTERMISSION

Midpoint Continues

1. Low Point – The Big Gloom
2. Climax into Resolution – Final Challenge
3. New Normal – Closing Image

… but the same problem is hidden therein. You can see it coming, can’t you? Cuden and Woolford point out that Act Two is generally shorter than Act One – and they’re right – but look at the differences in story proportion! To use Cuden’s own analysis of Chicago as an example, Point 3, the point of no return, occurs when Roxie decides to hire Billy Flynn. Between that and Point 4, at the end of Act One, there are twenty-eight pages of script, and six songs. Six, sitting there between two innocuous numbers in a list.

If you’ve ever looked at your watch during Act One, and wondered if this thing could possibly be ninety minutes long, you might be sitting through a Hollywood-style Hero’s Journey musical. If you’ve spent interminable scenes and songs in Act Two in the company of minor characters who don’t matter, because so much of the Hero’s Journey took place in Act One – but it’s too soon to get to the climax – you might be at a monomythsical.

It’s so prevalent now that we’ve grown used to it, even in shows that are not based on screenplays. Here’s what should happen, about ten minutes into the second act of Wicked. Glinda, you will recall, has been telling the assembled Ozians about how she and Elphaba used to be friends.

4. Only Two Kinds of Girls

Joseph Campbell, on what he called the Goddess:

“The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love”

And Campbell again, on what he called the Temptress:

“The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond (the woman), surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond”

If you write according to The Hero’s Journey, and you’re silly enough to think Campbell meant literal women, you’re in great danger of writing a show like this one:

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It’s about a guy who …

And he wants …

He meets a girl, who’s … sweet/demure/shy/beautiful/pure/virtuous

There’s also another girl, who’s … brassy/slutty/outspoken/a feminist

---

This only-two-kinds-of-girl dynamic, which is endemic in Hollywood, is nothing new to the Broadway musical either, and you’ll find it in some great shows (Guys and Dolls, for one). But adopting the Hero’s Journey as a template makes it really, really easy to keep your female characters down to just two kinds – which is bad enough – and to make sure they exist only in relation to the Hero – which is even worse.

This is particularly likely to occur, I think, in original stories, or in stories adapted from an original source without any significant female characters in it.

For example, Avenue Q Jekyll & Hyde is about a guy named Princeton Jekyll who has first met a nice girl named Kate Monster Emma Danvers, but is later tempted by a different girl named Lucy the Slut Lucy the Slut.

At the time of writing, Something Rotten! is in previews. Without going too far into the plot (spoiler: underdogs triumph), there are two main female roles, Bea and Portia. Portia is sweet and unassuming, while Bea is a brassy go-getter. On the message boards, theatrephiles debate the pros and cons of Something Rotten!, but all agree as to the female roles: at this stage, Portia does nothing, and Bea does nearly nothing. Worse, I think, is that these women exist only in relation to their men.

Film Critic Hulk, who loathes the crutch The Hero’s Journey has become in film writing, has some wise, if exasperated, advice for writers: make your female characters more like Princess Leia. Not because she’s perfection in writing, but because she’s an actual character, neither goddess nor temptress, and she has a life when men aren’t around.

But Peter, If It Ain’t Broke … 

I probably seem alarmist, as I fuss over juggernaut successes like Beauty and the Beast, and Wicked. And maybe I seem reductive, when you consider a beautifully structured piece like Fun Home, a memory play as un-Hollywood as anyone could wish.

Also, after all these years, Phantom of the Opera is still running, and if it’s a Hero’s Journey, it’s a very, very thin one. What is it, this weirdly subversive tale, that says it’s OK for girls to get the hots for their Sexy Murdering Mentor-Daddy, provided they settle down afterwards with a Bland Suitable Boy?

Phantom, for all its hokiness, suggests a way out of the Hollywood screenplay trap. Just as detective fiction has, and as science fiction loves to do, Phantom shows how musicals can get away with exploring really interesting, odd, or unpopular ideas, while behaving quite conventionally on the surface.

In any case, if we’re all going to keep writing Cinderella stories, I, for one, would like to see her lift her game. Aim higher, Cinders! Instead of merely being chosen by a Prince, what if you infiltrated and overthrew the whole monarchy?

At least you wouldn’t be boring.

 

 

What Hollywood’s Addiction to The Hero’s Journey is Doing to the Broadway Musical

“Too many musicals are being made from films!” we cry.

But I don’t think the number of films becoming musicals is the real problem. If we want vibrant, innovative musicals, I think there’s a worse problem headed our way, assuming it’s not here already. Are you already familiar with the history of writing manuals for the screen, intentional and un-? You might like to skip this next bit. Otherwise, behold:

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1949 – Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is published. Campbell compares myths from many different cultures and eras, and finds they have so much in common that they constitute what he calls a monomyth. Here’s what Campbell wrote:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Here’s what Campbell did NOT write:

“You guys should write all your stories to fit this model from now on.”

1979 – Syd Fields’ Screenplay is published. Fields’ Ideal Paradigm is a three-act structure (Setup, Confrontation, Resolution) that, despite its critics, permeates film writing and thinking to this day.

1985 – Christopher Vogler, a story consultant with Walt Disney Pictures, circulates a seven-page memo titled A Practical Guide to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In it, he points out:

“As with any formula, there are pitfalls to be avoided.”

Except Campbell’s work was never a formula. Don’t worry, it soon will be …

1992 – Vogler’s memo becomes The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. It’s revised a couple of times, and its title is tweaked, but it remains a combination of Vogler’s version of Campbell’s monomyth (now routinely called The Hero’s Journey), together with Vogler’s version of Jung’s character archetypes, such as the Hero, the Mentor, the Shapeshifter, and the Trickster.

1997 – Robert Mckee’s Story is published, based on a seminar he’s been presenting since the early ‘80s. In McKee’s analysis, the closest thing to Campbell’s monomyth is what he calls the Archplot, the apex of Classical Design:

“Classical Design means a story built around an active protagonist who struggles against primarily external forces of antagonism to pursue his or her desire, through continuous time, within a consistent and causally connected fictional reality, to a closed ending of absolute, irreversible change.”

But McKee also describes Miniplots and Antiplots, through which he believes other sorts of stories – quiet stories, absurd stories, ambiguous stories – can be told effectively. Nevertheless, Archplots are “the meat, potatoes, pasta, rice, and couscous of world cinema.”

2005 – Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat uses all of these previous works to break a screenplay down into 15 beats, right down to the page number on which story events should occur.

Now, all of these authors – even Snyder – argue against adopting a rigid formula. All of these authors say, with varying degrees of credibility, that their principles are merely a guide. And none of that matters, because here’s what Hollywood hears:

“You guys should write all your stories to fit this model from now on.”

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What about the how-to manuals for writing a musical? Behold:

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Words with Music: Creating the Broadway Musical Libretto, Lehman Engel, 1977
Writing the Broadway Musical, Aaron Frankel, 1977
The Musical From the Inside Out, Stephen Citron, 1991
Making Musicals: An Informal Introduction to the World of Musical Theater, Tom Jones, 1998

These works take their cue from Aristotle’s Poetics. They emphasise Action, Character, and Conflict as ways of generating Drama, and they emphasise the importance of where and when a librettist enters and leaves a story, in order to generate Plot. None of them mentions Campbell, monomyths, Vogler, or The Hero’s Journey.

How Musicals Work: And How to Write Your Own, Julian Woolford, 2012

Woolford uses Christopher Vogler’s version of The Hero’s Journey, explicitly, and Vogler’s character archetypes. Henry Higgins, for example, is a Mentor who becomes a Shapeshifter.

Beating Broadway: How to Create Stories For Musicals That Get Standing Ovations, Steve Cuden, 2013

Cuden advocates three story ‘movements’ (to avoid confusion over ‘Acts’), and seven plot points that outline The Hero’s Journey, incorporating some of Blake Snyder’s beats and terminology, such as the idea of an opening and closing image.

OK, so a pattern begins to emerge, but really, what’s wrong with that? Why shouldn’t one form of big, populist entertainment use the methods successfully employed in another form of big, populist entertainment? After all, none of these writers advocates a formula, and “the Hero might meet a Shapeshifter when he crosses the Threshold” is far more specific advice than “additional characters should provide conflict and contrast”.

If The Hero’s Journey (Musical Theatre Version) seemed to be leading us to effective dramatic structure, I’d say that it’s a good thing. And if that structure grew from a central character’s desires and actions, rather than conventional thinking about the page number we’ve reached, that’d be an even better thing. But here’s what I think is happening, instead, to the big, populist Broadway musical.

1. Too Many Cinderella Stories

Gerald Bordman’s  American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle labels the years 1921-24 ‘The Cinderella Era’, because of the number of shows that imitated such earlier hits as Sally and Irene. Over and over in these shows, a subgenre of The Hero’s Journey ran its course: plucky heroines in lowly jobs pretended to be someone else, met wealthy young beaus, fell for them, underwent misunderstandings about them, watched them renounce their fortunes for love, and then won the guy and the money by the second act curtain.

Of course, that’s not necessarily a good or bad storyline, because it might describe, with a few adjustments, anything from a bad sitcom episode to a great Jane Austen novel.

But today’s musical Cinderella hasn’t been adjusted much, fundamentally, even though today she might be male, or two characters. Maybe, because of changes in her outer garments, the ‘Cinderella’ tag is distracting, and we should call this modern incarnation the Appealing Underdog Who Triumphs. In any case, she’s now at the centre of this type of show:

An appealing underdog is unjustly kept down by opposing forces. She triumphs anyway, without losing her appeal.

Thus, Thoroughly Modern Millie, with its pastiche of Cinderella storylines straight out of the 1920s, definitely fits the bill. But so does Hairspray, and so does Legally Blonde. Memphis, also, is a Triumphant Underdog story, as are Sister Act and Wicked, and The Color Purple, and The Wedding Singer, and Billy Elliot, and Matilda, and Elf, and The Book of Mormon, and Kinky Boots, and Rocky.

Of these, Memphis, Wicked  and The Book of Mormon are the only ones that weren’t Hollywood screenplays first, and those last two will become films. Who knows, maybe Memphis will too.

What about the Disney and Dreamworks musicals? All of them are based on screenplays, and of them, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Newsies and Shrek are Triumphant Underdog stories.

And I haven’t included revivals/adaptations (Annie, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella), several outright flops (Tarzan, Jane Eyre, Wonderland, Big Fish, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark), or works which parody or treat The Hero’s Journey ironically (Urinetown, Spamalot, revivals of Chicago, How to Succeed)

All right, so we like our fictional Cinderellas, onscreen and off. But what about shows based on real life, especially those bio-musical jukebox shows that have been so popular lately?

The Triumphant Underdog approach, it turns out, is one of the most popular ways to tackle a real life story. You start with your Underdog downtrodden, and finish with their greatest success. That’s how Chaplin worked, avoiding the whole problem of “boy, he really liked ’em young, didn’t he?” Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (also to be made into a movie) works that way, and so does Motown: The Musical, thanks to Berry Gordy’s script about himself as the Hero of his own Hero’s Journey.

Even Hamilton, which is refreshing and exciting in many ways, is the Cinderella story you should adopt for historical people whose flaws and deaths are famous: The Triumphant Underdog’s Legacy Lives On.

Upcoming Broadway shows?

Finding Neverland – based on the film that’s based on a play. An underdog triumphs.
On Your Feet! – based on the lives of Gloria and Emilio Estefan. Two underdogs triumph.
Ever After – based on the film, a re-telling of “Cinderella”. An underdog triumphs.
School of Rock – based on the film. An underdog triumphs.
The First Wives Club – based on the film that’s based on a novel. Three underdogs triumph.

You’re thinking of exceptions, I’ll wager. Fair enough, so am I.

But I’m also thinking of Rebecca, The Color Purple revival, Waitress …

Is the Cinderella story played out? No, I’m not asking if it’s played out, because sometimes it’s the best way to tell your tale (suggestion – Believe: The Cher Musical). Is the Cinderella story an attractive lie, perfect for capitalist societies where not everyone can succeed or be happy, but everyone likes to be told they can, and to pay hundreds of dollars to hear it? Yeah, it probably is, but I’m not asking that either.

What I’m asking is this: aren’t you bored?

.

In Part Two – ‘I Want’ songs, bloated first acts, and only two kinds of girls.

Dr. Fringelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About the Pop Charts and Write More Musical Theatre

There’s a story we’ve been telling ourselves for years, we musical theatre types, and I think it’s a fallacy. It’s a pleasant fallacy, though, because it makes us feel sad and nostalgic. So we tell it to ourselves, until we feel good about feeling sad and nostalgic, and then we bond with one another over our sadstalgic feels.

The story is this:

Once, the sound of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley was the sound of the popular charts. It was the music of the people, and musical theatre sounded fresh and current.

Then rock ‘n’ roll came along, and took over the popular charts. Broadway shows didn’t really take to rock ‘n’ roll, so they soon stopped sounding fresh and current.

Now, hardly any musicals sound like the music of the people. Something valuable has been lost, and it would be nice to get it back.

Sigh. Crank vinyl OBC of ‘She Loves Me‘.

Lately, this Pleasant Fallacy has appeared whenever anything featuring rap/hip-hop lands on Broadway. If the show fails, as Holler If Ya Hear Me did, we ask “why can’t shows sound like the music people are actually listening to?” And if the show does well, as Hamilton is doing, we cry “At last! A show that sounds like the music people are actually listening to!” Then we speculate on which songs might appear on the charts.

Our motives are good. We want younger people to fall in love with the music of musicals, because then we old folks – some of us over forty – can die happy. If the music in musicals sounded more current, we reason, it might appeal to more younger people.

But look again at the Pleasant Fallacy above, and then look at all the misconceptions we have to accept for it to work:

By “Once”, we mean somewhere in the early twentieth century. We don’t look much further back than that.

By “popular charts”, we mean a problematic measure of a particular commodity’s sales, measured over very short periods.

By “the people”, we mean Americans.

By “something valuable”, we mean cultural prominence: songs from current Broadway shows on the radio, and performances from current Broadway shows on primetime television.

Bearing all these misconceptions in mind, I would like to propose two things:

1. Popular music – really, truly popular music – actually sounds a lot like showtunes.
2. They’re probably not the showtunes you’d expect.

I’ll begin with …

The most popular music of the 19th century

For the first half of the 19th century, publishers of sheet music didn’t distinguish between what we would now call “classical” and “popular” songs, and popular sheet music sales didn’t really take off until after the 1850s. Nevertheless, sheet music historians have some nifty ways of telling if a song was a hit:

Song sheets: not the full printed music, but just the lyrics, given to a theatre audience so they could sing along. It’s a fair bet the tune to any one of these was well known.

Inclusions in anthologies: in modern terms, if a song is on all the later compilation albums, chances are it did well first as a single.

Answer songs and parodies: if everyone’s supposed to get the references, the original must have been pretty familiar.

Here, then, are some songs you can include in your 1890s cabaret act, and expect your audience to know:

Silent Night, or Stille Nacht (1818) – Franz Xaver Gruber / Joseph Mohr
Home, Sweet Home (1823) – Bishop / Payne
Ave Maria (1825) – the Schubert setting
Jingle Bells (yes, pedants, it’s really called One Horse Open Sleigh, 1857) – James Lord Pierpont
The Lost Chord (1877) – Arthur Sullivan / Adelaide Anne Procter
After the Ball (1891) – Charles K Harris
On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away (1897) – Paul Dresser

Those last two are publishing phenomena; written very late in the century, they sold a wagonload of sheet music. But even without them, you can see what sorts of songs did well in the century before the century before this one: occasional songs, devotional songs and, above all, sentimental ballads.

Furthermore, that sentimental ballad Home, Sweet Home, the song Nellie Melba used as a crowd-pleasing finale in her concerts, is a showtune. It appeared first in an opera (Clari, or the Maid of Milan), and was then quoted liberally by other composers in their own operas and instrumental works, before later being interpolated into practically everything.

When Clara Butt was about to tour Australia, Nellie Melba advised her “Sing ’em muck; that is all they will understand.” This is usually taken as a slight against us Aussies, but what Melba really said, according to a witness, was “Sing ’em muck. ‘The Lost Chord’ and that sort of stuff, the same as you have been singing tonight.” In other words, Aussies loved a weepy ballad back then, and they still do. But so did everyone back then, and so does everyone still.

If we look further back than the early twentieth century, I think we gain useful context for Broadway and Tin Pan Alley’s later heady era of chart success. The listeners of the nineteenth century didn’t have “charts” as we understand them today, but they had their favourite songs: a mix of the devotional, occasional, and sentimental. Some of it came from the stage.

And so to those problematic charts, which have become less problematic since the IFPI started compiling its reports in 2001. Their more recent reports include download and streaming data.

The top selling singles of each year since 2007

Girlfriend – Avril Lavigne
Lollipop – Lil Wayne feat Static Major
Poker Face – Lady Gaga
Tik Tok – Ke$ha
Just the Way You Are – Bruno Mars
Call Me Maybe – Carly Rae Jepsen
Blurred Lines – Robin Thicke feat T.I. and Pharrell
Happy – Pharrell

Hmmmm, these songs sound like a lot of movies, because that’s where hit songs wind up nowadays, just as hit pop songs used to be interpolated into stage shows. They don’t sound like a lot of today’s Broadway. But then, Broadway scores don’t really behave like singles, do they? Singles burn quickly and brightly, but not for long. Broadway scores used to be like that, so much so that, when people say …

I wish the charts still sounded like Broadway

what they’re really saying is …

I wish shows still ran 200 performances and were forgotten in a year.

The miracle of those old shows is that some of their songs, meant to be nothing more than immediately accessible and popular, turned out to be deeper and more durable than anyone could have predicted.

But hit Broadway scores today behave more like hit albums: they burn steadily, and for a long time. So instead of singles, here are

The biggest selling albums of all time

Thriller – Michael Jackson
The Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd
Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) – Eagles
Back in Black – AC/DC
Saturday Night Fever – Bee Gees
Rumors – Fleetwood Mac
The Bodyguard – Whitney Houston
Come On Over – Shania Twain
Led Zeppelin IV – Led Zeppelin
Bat Out of Hell – Meat Loaf

Sceptical about any of these? Fair enough, and look here for why I share your healthy doubt. Nevertheless, two of these albums (Saturday Night Fever and The Bodyguard) sound like a couple of musicals, but that’s only because stage musicals have been made out of their parent films. One of these albums (Thriller) has a stage show based on its main creator’s life and music. Another (Bat Out of Hell) sounds like any musical by Jim Steinman, but that’s because all Jim Steinman sounds like Jim Steinman.

As far as younger listeners go, however, these albums are really old. The most recent is from 1997. So here are

The biggest selling albums of the last ten years

21 – Adele
X&Y – Coldplay
Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends – Coldplay
High School Musical – Original Soundtrack Cast
High School Musical 2 – Original Soundtrack Cast
I Dreamed a Dream – Susan Boyle
Midnight Memories – One Direction
Recovery – Eminem

Man, that’s a whitebread list. But you will notice that, once the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of the singles chart is taken out of the matter, all those artists we’re convinced the kids have been listening to disappear. No Pharrell, no Ke$ha (or, these days, Kesha), and no Lady Gaga. Nobody feat. anybody else. The only rap artist in that list is Eminem.

Also, there are two bona fide screen musicals in that list, plus an album named after a showtune.

That album, Susan Boyle’s (twice as many copies sold as One Direction’s album, incidentally), contains the following sorts of songs:

Occasional

Silent Night

Sentimental Ballads

I Dreamed a Dream – the showtune I mentioned.
Cry Me a River – originally written for a film set in a 1920s speakeasy.
Wild Horses – cover of the original, by The Rolling Stones
You’ll See – cover of the original, by Madonna
Daydream Believer – not a ballad when The Monkees did it, but this version is
Who I Was Born to Be – a Boyle original
Proud – from the TV show Britannia High
The End of the World – cover of the original by Skeeter Davis, slowed down

Devotional

Up to the Mountain – cover of the original by Patty Griffin
How Great Thou Art
Amazing Grace

If you ask me, Susan Boyle’s album shows how little we’ve changed, because it’s straight out of the nineteenth century. Sing ’em muck indeed.

To summarise: we need to stop worrying about the charts, music theatre lovers, because they don’t tell us what we think they tell us, and success on them doesn’t mean what we think it means. If we look instead at music that sells steadily over years, rather than weeks, we’ll find that people are actually buying and listening to showtunes, albeit ones written for the screen. Sure, they’re not tunes from Sweeney Todd, or even Rent: the showtunes that are really selling sound like High School Musical. Also, Frozen isn’t on that best-seller list yet, but give it time.

And, as fond as we are of our sadness and nostalgia, I think we should rephrase our favourite fallacy:

Once invented, recorded music used what had come before it, then learned how to make its own kind of thing later. Cinema, radio, television, and video games have all walked a similar path.

Recorded music has always gone after disposable money. Its first marks were high-tech connoisseurs, and later, the middle class (this is the Tin Pan Alley and Broadway period). After World War Two, it chased youngsters, and now it’s after anyone with a smartphone.

There was a period when the pop charts and the sound of Broadway more or less aligned. It didn’t last, and it could conceivably happen again, because correlation is not causation: all it would require is for theatre audiences and pop music listeners to want the same thing from their music.

Meanwhile, if you really want your new musical to sound like the music of the people, you should have Coldplay write a lot of sentimental ballads for Adele. Get Eminem to play the villain.

On ‘Words with Music: Creating the Broadway Libretto’ – Lehman Engel

I don’t usually post reviews on goodreads, because I’m tired. I don’t usually provide reading reports here, either, because everyone’s read the same books, and I don’t have anything interesting to add.

But for this book, I think the two predominant responses (“Engel had some good ideas, but we’ve moved on” or “Yes, if only shows could be what they once were”) both miss the point. And so …

If you’re seeking a How-To manual for creating a musical libretto, this ain’t that book. Engel’s approach is a How-It-Was-Done manual, and he clearly wishes it were still done that way.

Engel examines classic musicals (‘Fiddler’, ‘Guys and Dolls’, ‘My Fair Lady’) in order to lay out what he believes are the principles of good musical theatre construction. He urges you to do consider these models when making your own shows. Some useful sections include a side-by-side scene comparison of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with ‘West Side Story’, and an analysis of how well contrast is used in the opening scenes of ‘South Pacific’.

Engel’s principles are worth your attention. You will have to put up with a great deal of shaky generalising and straw-man erecting before you get to them. This edition contains comments after each chapter (Engel’s original was published in 1972) written by the critic Howard Kissel in 2006. Kissel points out where Engel’s opinions have not always dated well, and provides his own opinions, which haven’t always dated well either.

Many readers will be turned off by the fact the Engel loathed ‘Hair’, and ‘Man of La Mancha’. Heck, he didn’t even like ‘Cabaret’ much (he calls it a “success-failure”), but if we indulge in rage-blindness over our favourite shows, we’ll miss the troubling and interesting questions Engel raises about what’s possible and what’s not possible in a musical.

For example, Engel says all musical theatre is essentially lyrical, and so a purely intellectual exercise cannot succeed on the musical stage, as it can on the non-musical stage. Is he right? If he’s wrong, where are the counter-examples?

Because of the time necessarily given over to song, Engel also argues, the principal characters’ storyline in a musical cannot be too complex, and will therefore be too thin to occupy the entire evening. A subplot will almost always be necessary. Now, sure, we can all think of exceptions – Engel provides some himself – but we have to admit the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on his side.

These considerations are the most valuable parts of the book, but they’re not the noisiest, and they don’t occupy the most pages. Engel rails against rock throughout; Kissel gently points out rock’s endurance, then commits the same sin by dismissing hip-hop. These are the silliest parts of the book, and should remind us all of how silly we too could sound in ten or forty years.

About That “Great Australian Musical”: A Response

A couple of weeks ago, Currency House published John Senczuk’s Platform Paper “The Time is Ripe For the Great Australian Musical”. If you’re a trifle obsessed with musical theatre in this country and you’re a Currency House subscriber (or happy to pay to read the essay, as I was), Senczuk’s thoughts are well worth your time. His proposal has been summarised in the Daily Review and the Sydney Morning Herald. My response is below.

 

Dear Currency House,

As one of many Australians who writes original musicals, I thank you for John Senczuk’s thoughtful consideration of our plight (Platform Paper 42, February 1). We talk often, but not seriously, about home-grown musicals in this country, largely because there are two standard responses to essays such as Senczuk’s, and I fear his plan for an Australian Music Theatre Foundation will be subjected to both of them.

The first is dismissive, and goes like this: Australia doesn’t have the population to support many shows, and its cities are too far-flung for profitable touring. Besides, we don’t have a long cultural heritage of theatre music, or our own distinctive musical voice.

The second is defeatist (sing along, you all know the words): there aren’t enough theatres, and producers are interested only in commercial dreck. Any composer/lyricist with talent and ambition should head overseas to the real sources of Great Musicals, London and New York.

This latter position amuses writers of musicals from London and New York, because they too complain that there aren’t enough available theatres, and that their producers are interested only in commercial dreck. Additionally, the ones who write songs with a post-1995 sound worry about a cultural heritage too conservative to afford their scores a place on the West End or Broadway.

So far, in the press, Senczuk’s ‘idea to opening night’ funding model and ‘Perth Solution’ have received the most attention. His scheme is ambitious and welcome, but even if we adopt it, we have some important questions to ask first, and one terrible idea we must jettison.

That idea is this: we have yet to produce The Great Australian Musical. It’s a horrible, counter-productive notion, and it’s nonsense. See, the Brits and the Americans aren’t worried about any ‘Great British/American Musical’. They know they’ve written great shows, and they enjoy arguing about which one is the greatest. We, on the other hand, apply vague, ever-shifting criteria to every musical we write, and judge that each effort fails to match some ideal we’ve never fully discussed or defined.

I strenuously urge us all, before we think about the model Senczuk has proposed, or any other model like it, to retire the term ‘The Great Australian Musical’, and promise never, ever to use it again. Instead, let’s banter about which shows were great: I’ll vote for 1933’s Collits’ Inn, by Varney Monk and Stuart Gurr. Senczuk quotes my old Canberra Philharmonic friend, theatre historian John Thomson, who wrote that Collits’ Inn “was not the Great Australian Musical many hoped it would be”. I wish John were still alive to debate with, because what’s wrong with Collits’ Inn? It did a five-performance tryout at the Savoy Theatre in Sydney, then more at Mosman Town Hall, was turned down by J C Williamson, picked up by Frank Thring Sr, given a star-studded, beefed-up production in Melbourne for sixteen sold-out weeks, toured to Sydney for eight more, and finished with a return season in Melbourne. Best of all, in a move familiar to every showbuff’s heart, Collits’ Inn had a sequel that failed, and a film version that was never made.

By the standards of Australia in the 1930s, this success is astonishing. If it happened to a show of mine today, I’d be dancing in Melbourne’s streets. You couldn’t shut me up about it. But no, someone will say: Collits’ Inn is not revived today, and its score has yielded no lasting songs. All right, what about Keating!, or Bran Nue Dae? They toured all over the place, they’re beloved, and Bran Nue Dae’s film version was charming. Oh, but they never played Broadway. The Boy From Oz, or Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? No, they both played Broadway and won Tony awards, but they didn’t have scores written for the theatre. Crikey, but we’re tough on ourselves.

This self-defeating thinking hobbles us in other ways, and Senczuk applies some familiar leg-irons when he notes that, in contrast to the jukeboxers The Boy From Oz and Priscilla, “the only real impact an Australian composer/lyricist has had on the world music theatre stage is actor and comedian Tim Minchin”. Nothing against Minchin’s well-deserved success, but this will be news in the afterlife to Geelong’s Oscar Asche, who, granted, did not write the tunes, but provided the book, lyrics, direction, and lead role for Chu Chin Chow in 1916. That show was a massive success in London, and was revived for decades, but Ashe’s success prior to Minchin’s is not the point. We have to stop drawing hard distinctions around arbitrary categories, such as where people were born, where their shows played, and what specific contributions were made by Australians, or we will be guilty of saying silly, unhelpful things.

I hope everyone will join me in striking ‘The Great Australian Musical’ from our parlance, and instead focus on a Great Many Australian Musicals, of a Great Many Kinds. To that end, here are those questions I mentioned.

First, and most importantly, what do we think constitutes a successful musical? In Senczuk’s model, with 850-seat theatres (minimum), and Perth hosting the ‘first significant production’ of new Australian shows, the goal of Broadway and West End-sized success, on Australia’s East coast or overseas, is explicit. It’s also presented as an end in itself, with no allowance for any show’s further life. Fair enough, since everyone who’s ever written an Australian musical knows that getting the first production on stage, as difficult as that may be, is really the easy part: eliciting enough enthusiasm and funds the get the show on again, and internationally? That’s a real trick.

But under an 850-seat minimum model, where might an Aussie equivalent of, say, The Fantasticks, or The Rocky Horror Show, or Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog find support? And who would label these shows unsuccessful, when each has had enough views to fill a decent-sized theatre for years? Shouldn’t an Australian Musical Theatre Foundation hedge its bets, or, if you prefer, diversify its investments, and develop small, mid-sized, large and online musicals?

Also, if we are to focus on a model whereby shows start in a smaller city and finish somewhere bigger, we will doing what Broadway’s most savvy, hard-nosed corporate producers no longer find tenable. Witness Shrek the Musical, which had a trial run in Seattle before managing a mere 441 performances on Broadway, not nearly enough to recoup its investment. But Dreamworks Theatricals promptly sent Shrek out on tour, just as if it had been a hit, and launched a licensed school version which is now, according to Dramatics magazine’s annual survey, the most produced high school musical in America. Shrek, and The Addams Family, and Seussical (and you can be sure the producers of Matilda, even though it has recouped, will head down a similar path) demonstrate the long game Broadway’s producers are now playing: not only are these producers frequently unfazed by a flop, they’re not even satisfied with a hit. Instead, their eye is on the Grand Prize: decades of independently-mounted community and school productions, around the world. If we want to survive the mad economics of international musicals, we should plan and produce along similar lines.

Second, what do we think is the role of a new musical’s audience? In Stephen Sondheim’s pretty phrase, the audience is ‘the final collaborator’, but if we Aussies really believe this, we’ve been treating our final collaborators pretty shabbily lately. Senczuk characterises Strictly Ballroom, a case in point, as “a work that was placed before an audience too early”, but the truth is less innocent: Ballroom’s producers Global Creatures have demonstrated, as they did with King Kong, an approach to a new musical’s score and script in which the audience’s feedback is neither sought nor welcome; and director Baz Luhrmann, in replacing Ballroom’s opening number for its Melbourne season, has taken more than six months to order surgery that George Abbott would have performed in the first week. Overwhelmed by technical demands and the hideous cost of everything, we Aussie musical-makers tend to respond non-collaboratively to audiences who don’t like our songs, by fiddling with the sound mix and wondering, sadly, how the general public can be so thick.

When it comes to audiences, Senczuk is fond, as many theatre makers are, of the word ‘educate’, and while I think we can talk about ‘educating’ audiences behind the scenes, as we enthuse about turning the punters on to established, tested works, we certainly shouldn’t be talking, or even thinking this way, about audiences for new musicals. Audiences for a new musical don’t want to be ‘educated’; they want to be seduced. Nothing will turn them off more thoroughly than the idea that they ‘should’ like an Aussie show, and this is all the more reason to produce shows at different sizes, based on their likely commercial appeal. To quote the late comedian Bill Hicks, “There aren’t any bad crowds, just wrong choices”, and when it comes to wrong choices and new Aussie musicals, we won’t educate our audiences; they will educate us.

We also have to make allowances for what Senczuk experienced with his own work as co-writer, in 2004, of the musical Eureka!. He describes a painstaking writing process, and all the devoted attention given to the work by director Gale Edwards, but sometimes, even though everyone involved has crafted a show with professionalism and love, an audience just doesn’t like it. In Australia, we are demoralised every time this happens, and we brood over another failed Great Australian Musical, but it’s because we don’t produce enough shows to see how normal this phenomenon is. We have to get many more shows on stage, of all kinds, and only some of them hits, so that we remain comparatively sanguine in the wake of worthy flops.

I appreciate that, by suggesting more shows, of varying sizes, with fleet responses to audience feedback and flops taken in stride, I’m probably suggesting an Australian Music Theatre Foundation with a broader base and more funds than the one proposed by Senczuk. I will go further: rather than trying to match the success of writers from overseas, we should be trying to better them. For starters, we could do much, much more online. The chief trend in music, television, movies, and video games this century has been to get the product closer to the customer. Theatre has barely moved on this front, wedded to the idea that stage shows work better when they’re live (they do), and that audiences new to theatre, somehow knowing this, will attend (they don’t, and they won’t).

Whatever our shows are, we should be doing more to take them to the punters. Our Aussie songs and scenes should be on our radio stations, stages and screens, but also in our school halls, our shopping malls, our parks, and our nursing homes. This may seem an unattainably grand hope, but one of the smartest things any Australian Music Theatre Foundation could do is to start very small, by collecting all the Australian book, lyric and music writers, all of them presently hustling and producing and applying and struggling, separately, and put them to work, together, on musically fruitful properties for which the Foundation has acquired the stage rights. The Foundation could act as the seed, as Jerome Kern once did with a novel called Show Boat, or as Dorothy Fields once did with the life of Annie Oakley.

Then, how liberating for us, the writers, freed from the idea of competing with one another for some mythical brass ring called The Great Australian Musical, to labour instead, together, on creating magical nights in the theatre for people all over the world, present and future, as we decide what brass rings we really want, and forge them ourselves.

The Lizard Of Oz – photos, stories, the whole bewdy bottler

Late last year, I posted about the joy of writing music and lyrics for a new show, The Lizard of Oz, with script and direction by Peter Cox and Mark Grentell. If you haven’t seen their film Backyard Ashes, I highly recommend it.

We have only four performances left in our initial season, so here, courtesy of some fine photographers and our absurdly talented designer Aron Dosiak, is the next best thing to seeing the show live at Wagga’s Wollundry Lagoon.

The composer at the piano:

Kane Toad. Photo: Laura Hardwick, Daily Advertiser

My favourite shot of our heroine, Dotty:

Photo: Laura Hardwick, Daily Advertiser

Jacqueline Irvine, who plays Dotty, is way more savvy and much less naive than her character. She’s also physically fitter than the rest of us put together, although I do bring down the company average somewhat.

Andrew Strano is Leonardo de Emu …

Photo: Laura Hardwick, Daily Advertiser

… and Big Red the kangaroo:

Photo: Grant Harper, Livestream Australia

Apart from being talented and hilarious, Andrew is a lyricist, and he’s co-written, completely independently of my effort, a song about being inappropriately close with a family member. So I have a bit of a man-crush on Andrew.

Our villainess, Arachna, is played by Karla Hillam. She manages to belt it out from this balcony to the whole audience, totally unamplified:

Photo: Les Smith, Daily Advertiser

This moment of staging necessitated my favourite bit of songwriting in the show, because we needed something to cover Arachna’s move from the balcony down to ground level. So, in rehearsals, I pretended I was wearing Karla’s outfit, and took the elevator down one floor, with our stage manager Liz holding all the doors for me. That took 58 seconds, and we all thought that was a bit long. So I waddled down the stairs on foot, and that took only 38 seconds. I scrawled these ideas in an old diary while we were rehearsing other scenes:

That night, I wrote a tune, and we learned the vocals the next day. With Karla in costume, from balcony to ground level, it took 40 seconds.

“Karla,” I said, “I just totally Sondheimed your move downstairs.” Then I had to explain to everyone about the elevator in Company, on Boris Aronson’s original set, and then I felt old.

Arachna decrees that only one song can be heard in all of Oz – her song, “It’s All About Me”, an anthem of Idolesque genericness, with an appalling I-V-vi-IV chord progression.

Photo: Grant Harper, Livestream Australia

Jamie Way is Dodo the dog and Bitza the platypus (although he doesn’t know he’s a platypus until the end of the show):

Photo: Grant Harper, Livestream Australia

At this point, Bitza’s identity crisis has forced him to adopt an outrageous French accent. Jamie can do all the accents, while singing, and in celebrity versions if you request them. I haven’t heard him run out of ideas yet.

Michelle Brasier is PC Kookaburra, and Katerina Pavlova, the world-famous opera singer and desert dessert:

Photo: Grant Harper, Livestream Australia

Katerina’s entrance and exit music, a mishmash of a pavlova recipe and soprano warbling, is just my attempt to transcribe what Michelle improvised effortlessly at the first read-through. I could never have done any better, or any funnier.

The finale:

Photo: Grant Harper, Livestream Australia

By this point, Arachna has been vanquished, Michelle is PC Kookaburra, Karla has dressed up as Katerina Pavlova, I’ve been inside a Lizard’s head (and operated a Bilby rod puppet), and the sun is about to set. It’s a hoot.

Why We Don’t Need a ‘Dubstep’ Musical, a ‘Punk’ Musical, a ‘Metal’ Musical …

Many years ago, I was in the pit band for a production of Merrily We Roll Along. I played 2nd keyboard (meaning I sounded like woodwinds, strings, a typewriter), and one afternoon a substitute bass player sat in on the gig. He played the show deftly at sight – no mean feat – and said this of the score as he packed away his instrument:

Some nice lines, but no real grooves.

He’s right, of course: there are some cool bass lines in Merrily, but if you’re hoping to hear them settle in for a funky jam of three or four minutes, you’ll be disappointed. This is a show about time marching on, even if it does so backwards, and characters who change their minds need music that changes with them.

This is why, whenever someone remarks that stage musicals haven’t embraced a comparatively recent music genre like, say, dubstep, I always wonder “Well, what would that ‘dubstep’ musical be about?” The whole point to dubstep is intricate rhythms, forward drive, repetition, bowel-loosening bass notes. That might work really well for a scene, or a number, or part of a number, but for a whole show?

This genre problem with musicals, their “granny sound”, is always presented as a post-rock ‘n’ roll phenomenon: showtunes have failed to keep up with the kids, we cry. We’re guilty of generational blinkerism, though, because there’s no ‘jazz’ musical either. Oh, sure, there are jazzy musicals, with chords and riffs and ideas borrowed from jazz. But a bona fide jazz musical? With improvised, extended solos, different every night, and an over-riding focus on instrumental ability? Loose, spontaneous invention for ninety percent of the running time, eight times a week? Singers scatting, and trading fours with the band? Nup.

There aren’t many ‘rock’ musicals either, no matter how they’re marketed. Hair certainly isn’t rock. Yes, I’m serious. Compare the experience of listening to these two albums:

Hair – Original Broadway Cast
Disraeli Gears – Cream

For all the orthodoxy that has sprung up about Hair, about the devastating daring of the sound of electric guitars emerging from a Broadway pit, it’s a ‘folk-rock’ musical if it’s anything. That’s because composer Galt MacDermot is no dummy; he knows that folk-rock is far more emotionally flexible than rock.

Emotional flexibility is what theatre songwriting is all about, and I don’t mean flexible over the course of an evening. No, I mean flexible within a song, within a line, between two words. An actor should be able to take a theatre song lyric and do what every first-year actor is taught to do with every dramatic spoken monologue: mark the beats, the thought changes.

But a great rock groove is not about changing your mind. It’s not emotionally flexible, and shifting its mood is like turning a powerboat: it takes time, and it needs space. That’s why progressive rock sounds the way it does, and it’s also what most critics of prog-rock dislike about it. The more it progs, they say, the less it rocks.

What, then, to do about our granny sound? Could today’s writers of musicals, just as earlier writers pinched things they liked from jazz, borrow stylistic elements from today’s popular music genres, and use them in emotionally flexible ways? Yes. Here are Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jason Mantzoukas and Quiara Alegría Hudes, the writers of In the Heights, pinching useful things from rap and Latin dance, and moving briskly from character to thought change to plot point. Near the start of the show, Usnavi introduces himself to the audience:

Reports of my fame
Are greatly exaggerated
Exacerbated by the fact that my syntax
Is highly complicated cuz I emigrated from the single greatest little place in the Caribbean
Dominican Republic

[character right here]
I love it,
Jesus, I’m jealous of it
And beyond that,
Ever since my folks passed on,
I haven’t gone back

[thought change right here]
Goddamn, I gotta get on that

[plot point right here]
Oh! The milk has gone bad, hold up just a second
Why is everything in this fridge warm and tepid?

This is not a rap musical. This is a musical with characters who express themselves through rap, but they’re still being emotionally flexible and telling stories while they do it. Big difference.

So, which music genres are useful and which ones aren’t? That probably comes down to taste and craft, but I would argue that the more certain a popular music genre is, the less useful it is in the theatre. This is why, amongst many other considerations, it’s easier to write a Carole King bio-musical than it is to write a Spice Girls bio-musical. In fact, here’s a really broad, but useful rule of thumb:

Good popular music is mostly about certainty.

Good theatre music is mostly about doubt.

Like I said, it’s broad. Many exceptions. There are theatrical popular songs, like 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love”, Eminem’s “Stan”, Adele’s “Someone Like You”. Also, there are weirdly effective theatre numbers containing one, simple, unchanging idea, presented over three or four minutes. Turkey Lurkeys, if you will.

Nevertheless, we don’t need an ’emo’ musical, or a ‘progressive trance’ musical. Instead, we need songwriters with voracious listening appetites, routinely stealing useful things from all kinds of genres, and listening to more than just cast recordings.

And, as our musicals start to sound more varied and contemporary, whenever we see a show marketed as a ‘dubstep’ musical, we can think “Well, best of luck to all involved, but I really hope that’s just marketing guff.” Because if that description is literally true, the show is either bad dubstep or a bad musical. Probably both.