Hogwarts for Girls

To be honest I was a bit sniffy when I first heard the Wicked album. But the more I listened, the more I liked it. Finally caught the show last year in the West End and couldn't help but be impressed. Here's the review:

Wicked is a girly musical. It’s for girls and about girls. It has a devoted fan base, most of whom are girls. It’s about two girls, the Wicked and Good Witches from the Wizard of Oz, and re-imagines how they came to be. Elphaba is the freaky green one with magical powers and a vaulting ambition; Glinda is the popular blonde one with too many shoes. At first they hate each other; then they change their minds and become Best Friends Forever; then they fall out over a boy. Finally, they grow up, have a big heart to heart and agree never see each other again. Like I said - girly.

So naturally most of the creative team are men. The original novel is by Gregory Maguire (male) with songs by Stephen Schwartz (male) and the original director was Joe Mantello (male). Perhaps Winnie Holzman, as the token female, deserves more of a mention. Her book knits together a lot of plot but never loses sight of the girly relationship at its heart. This builds to a genuinely thrilling Act I finale, “Defying Gravity”. The setup, development and pacing are all beautifully handled to produce an appropriate climax. The composer can modulate like crazy and the singer can show off their high notes, but, in truth, it’s a book writer’s moment. For any musical song to really take off, it needs a good launching pad. Admittedly, in this case, some high-tension fly wire helps too.

Act II smartly keeps things moving by piggy-backing on the original story: the house landing in Munchkin High Street; the making of Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow; and a clever twist on the big witch-melting scene at the end. The familiarity creates its own momentum as inevitable events are explained or replayed from a different perspective. Occasionally the dialogue does misfire. In the big confrontation scene in Act II the estranged friends meet after Elphaba’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the East, has been flatted by Dorothy’s house. Glinda tries to prevent Elphaba from setting off in pursuit of the flattener who has also swiped her sister’s slippers:

“Oh, come on, they’re only slippers. Get over it.”

It gets a laugh but it’s too glib to ring true. Fortunately the next gag works better. The argument boils up and just as it looks as if the two witches about to have full-on magic-off, they chuck away their wand and broom and start pulling at each other’s hair. It’s funny not just because of the silly screeching and name-calling, but also because it feels true. Two childhood friends meet after years apart and all too easily slip back into childish behaviour. So we have one gag that is expedient and detracts from the drama; the other is illustrative and enlarges it. Musical books are tricky and, despite the odd duff joke, Winnie Holzman deserves plenty of credit and not just for being female.

On top of this Stephen Schwartz has written a remarkable score. Schwartz has always been more at ease with drum kits and electric guitars than most Broadway writers. But his sound, from 60s hippies (Godspell) to 90s bell-swingers (Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame), is still essentially musical theatre. And one of the best songs in Wicked is pure musical comedy, as Glinda chirpily explains to Elphaba how to be “Popular”:

"You’ll hang with the right cohorts
You’ll be good at sports
Know the slang you’ll need to know"

It’s full of fun and bounce, as well as exact and novel rhymes. Sometimes these run away with themselves (analysis/dialysis) but it doesn’t spoil the overall effect. What’s surprising is how far this kind of old-school songwriting is from the current pop charts. Yet it’s playing successfully to the same audience. It shows that musical theatre can hold its own.

Another surprise, given the target audience, is the sophistication of the score. There’s much more going on than soupy power ballads. There’s big choral writing in “No One Mourns the Wicked” with consecutive 5ths and juicy added 9ths on “Wick-ed!” to add a touch of unease. There’s thematic material and underscoring that recurs in various keys and guises. Or take the Act II opener, “Couldn’t Be Happier”. Glinda is trying to put a brave face on the fact that her fiancé’s not interested and her best friend has gone AWOL to become some kind of vegetarian terrorist. But the reassuring sentiment of the title is undermined by the shifting time signatures. The first section casually flips between bars of 5/8 and 2/4, followed by a few bars of 6/8, then rounds off with a 3/4 and 4/4. Then the mask drops a little:

“There’s a feeling that’s something’s...lost
There’s a kind of a sort of...cost”

Those musical pauses before “lost/cost” are precise: faltering, uncertain, confused. Forget the pop charts; this is terrific songwriting by any measure.

Less sophisticated, unfortunately, is the politics. Alarmingly the Wizard has become a metaphor for George Bush. Turns out he’s just another politician spinning the mob into a phoney war with a bunch of talking animals (the Iraqi Republican Guard, presumably). So in his big number, “Wonderful”, he takes to a spot of smug punditry:

"Is one a crusader
Or ruthless invader?
It’s all in which label is able to persist
There are precious few at ease
With moral ambiguities
So we act as though they don’t exist"

But family musicals really aren’t the arena to make smarty-pants statements about politics and historical revisionism. As for moral ambiguities Wicked isn’t quite the sophisticated fairy tale it thinks it is: “Are people born wicked or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?”. Hmm. The next time I’m caught with one hand in the biscuit barrel, I’ll give that argument a go: “Stealing? Me? No! The chocolate Hob Nob was thrust upon me”.

All of which makes the show’s conclusion a little weaker than it should be, as Elphaba and Glinda sing their tearful farewells:

“Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better?
But because I knew you, I have been changed for good”

It sounds like it should be some profound moral truth. In fact, it’s just word play.

Happily all the ponderous moralising doesn’t detract too much from the whole. The politics of Wicked may be fluff and nonsense. But there's still real depth in the girly stuff.

Putting the Content into the Concept

MusicalTalk’s Comedy Thos has been unmuddling my thoughts in the comments to my previous post about the Concept Musical.

There I waffled on about the Concept Musical in terms of THE SONGS and THE FORM. Aha, saith Thos, but what of THE CONTENT? It’s really the content (correct me if I’m wrong) that determines whether a show is a Concept Musical. So the Concept Musicals that I identified as such – Cabaret, Chicago, Catch Me If You Can – are really just traditional book musicals with “gimmicks” attached.

Plenty to chew over.

But thinking about it, Thos is absolutely right on the first bit. THE CONTENT is indeed a very good place to start. So we can distinguish between:

A) NARRATIVE MUSICALS – musicals with a story following the same character/s acting out a series of events
B) CONCEPT MUSICALS – musicals with little or no overarching narrative but held together by an common theme or idea

Doing a quick mind survey (i.e. “can’t be bothered to do any actual research”) I’d say that most musicals are A-type musicals. But, as Thos notes, under B-type musicals you could have:

Oh, What A Lovely War! (concept = the insanity of the First World War)

Hair (concept = hippies)

To which I’d add:

Cats (concept = er, cats)

I’d also be tempted to include Company. Although there is a central character, it’s more a collection of independent scenes based around a common theme (concept = couples’ relationships).

This is a useful distinction and far better than my waffly description of a Concept Musical. So far, so agreeable.

However when it comes to THE FORM (how a narrative/concept is told) I’m not sure that “gimmick” is the quite the nail-head hitter. More on this later. But for the moment I’m sticking with my original distinctions of Form which concentrate on how the songs mix it with the dialogue. And, thinking again, my original term to describe this - “disassociation” - was about as useful as a penny in a pound store. So let me try again:

1. THE SEAMLESS FORM – a mixture of dialogue scenes and songs where the songs arise seamlessly from the dialogue.
2. THE INTERRUPTED FORM – a mixture of dialogue scenes and songs where the songs in some way interrupt the dialogue, although are still integrated with the drama.
3. THE CONTINUOUS FORM – mostly sung from start to finish with little or no dialogue.

At this point, should the mood take us, we could combine our definitions of Content and Form:

A1 NARRATIVE SEAMLESS (Show Boat, Oklahoma, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, Guys and Dolls, Gypsy)
A2 NARRATIVE INTERRUPTED (Cabaret, Chicago, Catch Me If You Can)
A3 NARRATIVE CONTINUOUS (Evita, Phantom, Les Miz, Miss Saigon)
B1 CONCEPT SEAMLESS (Company [well, probably a mix of B1 and B2])
B2 CONCEPT INTERRUPTED (Oh, What A Lovely War!, Hair)
B3 CONCEPT CONTINUOUS (Cats)

So what of Thos’ “gimmick”? Well, dictionary.com is fine but I’m more of an OED man
myself:

Gimmick: a trick or device intended to attract attention rather than fulfil a useful purpose

The key here is the purposefulness. If it doesn’t serve a dramatic purpose, then it’s a “gimmick”. If it does, then what? Let’s just call it a theatrical “device”. So the cabaret numbers of Cabaret or the revue numbers of Chicago help to illustrate the drama and, as such, are useful devices.

My problem with Catch Me If You Can, then, isn’t, as I previously thought, to do with the content or the form. Instead it’s the particular choice of dramatic device. The central question of the story – how’d this teenager get away with it? – simply isn’t answered by presenting the songs as if they’re part a 1960s TV special. To say that multi-million dollar fraud can be perpetrated with a touch of showbiz razzle-dazzle is just too glib. The device doesn’t serve its dramatic purpose and so it feels, well, a bit gimmicky.

So that’s sorted that. Clear as.

Musical Eurythmics

Not the latest exercise DVD.

Instead it's former Eurythmics man Dave Stewart who has been talking musicals in the Independent. He’s the composer of the new stage version of the film Ghost. And he’s found the going tough:

“There's nothing quite like the massive onslaught that comes with pulling a musical together. I've made a lot of records, collaborated with different singers and worked on music for television and movies, but nothing prepared me for writing songs for musicals...sometimes you need to write songs that propel the story forward, sometimes songs that get an emotion across, and sometimes the songs have to weave in and out of each other”

And sometimes songs that do all these things at the same time. Tricky stuff, musical witing. But we can only be glad he’s trying.

In the good old days, the journey from pop songs (i.e. Tin Pan Alley) to theatre songs (i.e. Broadway) wasn’t such a long road (i.e. literally). It was the career move that many songwriters aspired to make. Not so the boomer rockers. Paul Simon wrote Capeman and, more recently, Bono and The Edge [of what exactly, by the way?] had a crack at Spiderman. But successes these were not. Only Elton John has made a real go of original musicals.

That’s a shame. And not just for musical theatre.

Musicals offer a natural path for a developing songwriter: solos, duets, choruses, writing in character, developing themes. I’m not saying that pop songs are easy. But rock ‘n’ pop is limiting (as is any form, that’s sort of the point). It’s essentially hooky 3-minute singles about lu-u-urve. It’s also a young person’s game which is why there are no rock equivalents to the elderly couple’s song from Gigi:

"We met at nine
We met at eight
I was on time
No, you were late
Ah, yes, I remember it well"

Instead the aging rocker has to rely on his back catalogue:

“Well she was just seventeen
You know what I mean”

From a pensioner, that’s just creepy. In fact Paul McCartney did end up branching out into orchestral works which is just fine. But it’s not songwriting. Only musicals offer the opportunity for songwriters to develop as songwriters.

So I hope that Dave Stewart gets his hit. Musical theatre needs songwriters like him. And, in a strange way, he needs musical theatre.