A Tale of Two TV Shows

Thinking back a bit, in November we were treated to two TV shows: Channel 4's series The Sound of Musicals and the Beeb's one-off Broadway Musicals - a Jewish Legacy.

The former was about current musicals in the West End, the latter about old musicals on Broadway.

The Sound of Musicals dealt mostly with revivals and jukebox shows and, as such, focussed on directors, producers and performers. No writers. That's remarkable. Musicals are primarily stories through song. You would think that the writers of those songs would be at the centre of any look at the current state of musicals.

Of course there is a reason. Even if the producers wanted to interview the songwriters of the featured shows, then they would have found it difficult. Most - Irving Berlin, Michael Jackson - were dead. And when they did find a real live theatre composer to talk to in the form of Marc Shaiman (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) they duly gave him two precious seconds to expound his thoughts on the chubby kid playing Augustus Gloop. Apparently he's quite good.

Meanwhile Shaiman also appeared on Broadway Musicals - a Jewish Legacy where he was given a bit longer to demonstrate the differences between minor scales, blues scales and Jewish scales (from memory, the Jewish scale is somewhere between the two). And he was not the token writer. The programme was full of writers, mostly Jewish. Even the Episcopalian Cole Porter sounded Jewish.

I think the lesson is clear. A musical theatre scene that relies on its directors, producers and performers will soon run out of things to sing about. The West End needs writers. And Jews.

Things Established About Stephen Ward Musical

"You'll be wondering what I'm doing here
Stuck between Hitler and the acid-bath murderer
Let me warn you, it's the consequence
If you get up the nose of the Establishment

If you give them what they're looking for
They'll be grateful, they'll be awfully nice
But if you should step across the line
You'll become a Human Sacrifice"

I do love a searing satire on the hypocrisies of the Establishment. I'm just not sure that I'd hire these fellas to deliver it:

Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber
Sir Richard Eyre
Christopher Hampton CBE
Don Black OBE

Interview with Verity Rushworth

Former Emmerdale actress and now Chicagoan murderess.

Interview now available over at the ever razzle-dazzling Musical Theatre Review.

Seriously Funny

Vanessa Thorpe over at the Observer has been calling for death and steamy sex. In musicals.

"A sombre topic, such as suicide or the dreadful progress of a serial killer, is often just what a musical needs to get an audience humming the tunes. Highly successful shows such as Sweeney Todd, Spring Awakening and London Road all make this unlikely point, despite the common assumption that taking in a West End show should be a frothy, feelgood experience."

Musicals should be "darker" and not in the sense of cheap lighting design. Apparently this is what lyricist and founder of a new musical award, Warner Brown, is calling for. Although he's not actually quoted as doing so. The nearest we get is this:

"Fortunately, in the last 10 or 15 years good directors have noticed the influence of the serious theatre on the musical since Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, which has quite dark themes."

Serious musicals with quite dark themes, then, such as the latest award winner Forest Boy, of which the show's composer, Claire McKenzie, says:

"There is light and shade in it. I certainly don't think musicals have to be bright and breezy."

So this whole musicals-need-to-be-darker theme may be a bit of journalistic spin. Nevertheless it's a familiar one, usually put in more general terms: musicals need to get serious, grow up and ditch the froth.

Actually, in the case of original British musicals, the opposite is true. If the stereotypical pose of a Broadway show is a big grin with jazz hands, then the West End equivalent is a look of earnest intensity into the middle distance. Solemn drama comes naturally to us, it's the comedy we find difficult. Let's forget revivals and jukeboxes for a moment and take a look at some of the big British musical comedies of recent decades:

Matilda
Mary Poppins (sort of)
Joseph and His Amazing Dooda Whatsit
Er, that's it.

Now compare that with the musical dramas:

Billy Eliott
Miss Saigon
Les Miz
Phantom of the Opera
Chess
Blood Brothers
Evita
Jesus Christ Superstar

This, I suspect, is largely down to Lord Andy and Super Mac, both of whom got burned early on in their careers with flop comedies (Jeeves and Anything Goes, respectively) and have since stuck mainly to the solemn stuff. Put simply, we're better at musical dramas than we are at musical comedies.

Interestingly the successful comedies are all kids' stuff. Nothing wrong with kids' stuff, I'm just making the point. You have to go back to Salad Days and The Boyfriend before you find hit musical comedies for adults. And that's part of the problem. We don't have much of a tradition of musical comedy. And the ones that we do have are as frothy as a bus station cappuccino.

Now, at this juncture, it's worth distinguishing comedy from froth. Guys and Dolls is a comedy but it's not especially frothy. It's a character comedy and, in dramatic terms, it's as compact as a rock. Salad Days, on the other hand, relies on wit, wordplay and imagination. In dramatic terms, it's free as air. The point is that, in the British tradition, musical comedy tends towards the frothy-style musical comedy. It's G&S and Julian Slade and Sandy Wilson and, more recently, Stiles and Drewe. But what's the British equivalent of a non-frothy comedy like Guys and Dolls?

Musicals don't need to be any darker or more sombre or grown-up. But they could do with getting serious about comedy.

Can Musicals Be Made Easier?

Much sagacity to be found in Mark Lawson's piece answering the eternal question: why are musicals such hard work?

"It is the crazed revision – there are entire albums of Stephen Sondheim songs that were dropped from shows – that is the constant and astonishing factor in accounts of the creation of musicals, regardless of whether they prove to be a hit or a flop."

Is this true? To be honest, I've no idea. I suspect that it may be more true for Broadway shows than British ones. Then again I suspect that there's more revising done for musicals than there is for plays. Why should this be the case? Too many cooks, apparently:

"Whereas a straight play merely demands collaboration between a writer and a director (with producers and actors sometimes also having a say), a musical usually requires co-operation between a minimum of a composer, lyricist, dramatist and choreographer and, given the huge budgets general involved, often several producers...the diversity of rooted interests almost guarantees disagreement."

There is perhaps something to this. It may also explain why most musicals look to a book/film/play for their source. A source at least gives everyone a fixed point of reference. An entirely original story is more susceptible to being monkeyed around with.

So the question arises, how do we cut down the numbers involved in a musical? Well, for starters, we could put a single producer in charge. We could encourage lyricist-librettists or even composer-lyricist-librettists. In short we could do with fewer cooks.

Theatre folks tend to like collaboration. Generally speaking it's an essential part of the theatrical process and, when it works, people tend to talk about it in a mildly utopian way as if all we need to improve things is more and more collaboration. I wonder if, perhaps, we need less.

Back to Mr. Lawson:

"But perhaps the fundamental reason for the prevalence of off-stage drama is that the musical is an inherently artificial form and therefore, as with attempts at non-mechanical flight, most projects are doomed to extreme difficulty and probably failure."

Nope, read it several times but can't make head nor tail of that sentence. As the kids say these days, wtf? Maybe this will help:

"Artificiality also applies to spoken drama, but the convention that invented characters are speaking made-up dialogue is rapidly established and accepted. Why does the protagonist make a long speech about his mother in act two? Well, because his mum died in act one, or because someone has just asked how she is. But for a character suddenly to burst into song about his mother is a development of a different order. Can the transition between spoken dialogue and song be achieved without disrupting the narrative flow or breaking the concentration of the audience?"

OK, I think I got it. All theatre is artificial but some is more artificial than others. It's harder for an audience to accept the artifice of a musical than it is the artifice of a play. Basically because people start singing in musicals. So a musical has to work harder in order to get the audience on side.

So, for the writer of a musical, this brings us back to the age-old question, why do people sing? This, I feel, is way more important than any question about content, structure or style. It is the musical's raison d'etre (or, if it's a flop, the reason it's in debt).

"Because the musical is an inherently illogical form – but with a greater craving for realism than its near-cousin, opera – there will always be someone suggesting a different logic."

Musicals may be inherently illogical (although not always) but the best ones are always internally logical. They make sense within their own artificial boundaries. When Nancy starts trilling about how she'll stick by her man as long as he needs her, there's no logical reason for her to be singing. But given the fact that she is a character in a musical, it is entirely logical that she should be singing that particular song at that particular moment.

"Some writers – for instance, middle-period Lloyd-Webber – tried to solve the speech-song shifts by through-composing shows, but this merely introduces the new artifice of people singing bald exposition ("I am his brother") or banality ("Will you want milk with that?") at each other."

"Middle-period Lloyd Webber"? I love that. Actually Lord Andy has pretty much been through-composing right from his early velvet suit period. By Jeeves and Sunset Boulevard were the closest he came to classically Hammerstein-ian book musicals. The first of these was a flop (maybe why he went back to through-composing) and even with Sunset he ended up dumping a lot of the dialogue for the Broadway version.

But Mr. Lawson is spot on with his analysis. Through-composed shows are a way of dealing with the shift from speech to song. Their answer is hardly ever allow them to stop singing. This works but has its limits. The trick with Lloyd Webber shows is to go for big melodramatic plots with big emotional impact and have as little exposition and banality as possible.

That's one way to solve the problem but there are others:

"The single consolation of the death of Fred Ebb is that at least – on Curtains and The Scottsboro Boys – he got to leave most of the hell of musical gestation to other people."

Bit extreme.

Musicals are hard. We should find a way to make them easier, for all our sakes.

Getting A Kick Out Of A Review

This is a bit old but what the hey - in response to this piece by the Evening Standard's David Sexton, Lyn Gardner over at the Guardian has been asking if it is too easy to kick musicals.

The immediate answer is no, if the musical deserves a kicking.

But really it's best to ignore this kind of criticism. In truth the Sexton piece is very far from being a kicking; it is a poke at best. It says nothing more than 'I don't like musicals'. Nothing wrong with that. I don't like thought-free opinion pieces by people called David. Each to their own.

However Ms. Gardner goes on to make some interesting points:

"Theatre criticism – largely because most critics come from a literary tradition – has always been short of critics who are really knowledgeable about the form, which may in part explain why musical theatre occupies such a fragile place in theatre culture."

Fragile, perhaps, within the theatre culture. Given that musicals are keeping most of the West End running, I wouldn't call their place within theatre as fragile. I suspect what is meant is that musicals don't receive quite the same cultural kudos as non-musical theatre.

"Popular doesn't always mean pap – and a form which brings such pleasure and joy to so many deserves to be celebrated and treated to the same informed critical scrutiny as the latest play by Tom Stoppard."

I'm all for informed critical scrutiny but it's of a different kind for musicals than it is for a Stoppard play. When it comes to musicals I'm not too interested in high-falutin' stuff like the socio-politico-philosophical context of Oklahoma!.

You can big them up or stick the boot in but, either way, musicals are broadly middlebrow. It's best not to pretend otherwise.

Can Do Kander

So what makes a John Kander tune sound like a John Kander tune? Let's a take a gander.

For one thing, John Kander is well known for his vamps. These are the little rhythmical intros that set up some of his best-known songs, such as "New York, New York":

Dah-dah-dee-dah-dah

Or "Wilkommen" from Cabaret:

Um-cha-cha-um-cha
Um-cha-cha-um-cha

At this point it should be noted that vamps are quite hard to record in words. Suffice to say that they are highly memorable and miniature musical ideas.

The interesting thing is that when you get to the songs themselves, they turn out to be quite vampish too. That is, they are often based on a small fragment of melody which is then repeated three times. This happens a lot with Kander.

So from Cabaret, we get several songs based on repeated melodic fragments:

Mein Herr ("Bye bye mein lieber herr")
Two Ladies ("Beedle dee deedle dee dee/Two ladies")
Maybe This Time ("Maybe this time")
Money, Money ("world go around")
Married ("How the world can change")

And from Chicago:

Funny Honey ("Sometimes I'm right")
When You're Good to Mama ("Got a little motto")
All I Care About ("expensive things")
My Own Best Friend ("One thing I know")
Me and My Baby ("Me and my baby, my baby and me")
Nowadays ("It's good, isn't it?")

Sometimes the melodic fragment is repeated exactly (as in "Money, Money") and sometimes slight changes are made with each repetition (as in "Nowadays" where the melody rises by a semi-tone each time). Of course, the lyrics will usually vary too.

What's interesting is the economy of it all: take a 4 or 5 note phrase, repeat three times and presto, you've pretty much got you're A section of a 32-bar song. And you might think that with all this repetition the songs would become, well, a bit boring. The fact that they don't is, in part, due to the musical and lyrical variations mentioned above. More importantly those 4 or 5 note phrases are so carefully chosen.

Let's take the thrice-repeated musical phrase from "Maybe This Time" from Cabaret:

Maybe this time (1)
I'll be lucky (2)
Maybe this time (3)
He'll stay

In this case the 4 notes that make up the phrase are repeated exactly each time (with an extra two notes on "He'll stay" to complete the basic tune). Those 4 notes are nothing remarkable (C-D-E-C). And yet they are well chosen. The feeling of those 4 notes is of moving away from the "home" note (C), reaching up for something new (D-E) and then quickly retreating home. The triplet rhythm also adds a bit of off-beat uncertainty. Musically I'd say those 4 notes are expressing a cautious optimism.

There's some musical variation introduced by the harmony as Kander employs one of his favourite chord progressions: tonic, augmented 5th, added 6th, added 9th. The same chord sequence is used in "Funny Honey" and "Nowadays" in Chicago. It's based around the tonic root so the chords feel as if they are changing incrementally rather than in any melodramatic way. Again, cautious.

Now let's consider the character singing: happy-go-lucky night club act Sally Bowles. She's got a new fella and this time he seems to be a good 'un. But she's a woman of the world and knows not to get her hopes too high. That's why the emphasis and musical downbeat is placed on the word "this" rather than "maybe". It's not that Sally is a cautious person, only that she has been through this before; maybe this time, as opposed to that time.

And all her cautious optimism can be summed up in those 4 notes. That's why we don't get bored with the repetitions. They reinforce the character of the song.

Songwriters and musical theatre composers never have the luxury of length. Theirs is the art of compression; saying a lot with very little. And Kander can do that better than most.

A Pah-ssion for Producing

Interesting article by agent-turned-musical-producer Stuart Piper in the Stage entitled "No New Musical theatre composers? Pah".

Firstly, based on the accompanying photo, how do you become an agent?

Secondly, this:

"Last week, I produced a rehearsed sing-through of a new musical. It was not based on anything. Not a film, not a piece of literature, not a jukebox catalogue of popular songs."

There is always some confusion around this, so let's clear it up. The fact that a musical is based on a film or a piece of literature does not make it unoriginal. If we took that line then producers of new musicals would have turned down A Little Night Music and Cats.

Musicals are dramas told through song, so the key thing for a musical to be original is for the songs to be new. The majority of musicals qualify in that they tend to have old stories but new songs. Jukebox musicals, on the other hand, tend to have new stories and old songs. So they can't really be considered original. All clear?

Excellent. Carrying on. Now here's where I get a bit worried:

"So feeling all inspired after last week’s workshop, I thought I’d share with you the bizarre turn of events that led to me unearthing musical brilliance."

OK, I'm sitting comfortably. Here are the bullet points:

"So I met actress Aoife Nally, when she shared Dressing Room No.9 with my partner at the time...it was during her run of The Light in the Piazza at Leicester Curve, that I got carried away and suggested she write a musical...So back to the bar at the Curve, and after a few too many G+T’s, I told her she should write a musical...I’m not going to give anything away about its content yet, it would be premature, but as I sat there listening to these incredible voices sing this heartbreaking story, I got that bubble of excitement that always make me do something wreckless (like, oh god, produce a musical)...I’ve lost money producing musicals in the past, and only really made money producing plays and representing talent. But this one is not about the money – it’s about art. And if I’m right about that, the rest may follow."

So, to summarise, this is a musical initiated by a gin-soaked conversation with no proven property, two first-time writers and a money-losing musical producer who thinks the whole adventure is comically wreckless. If I were an investor, I'd have given up by paragraph two.

Now I'm not saying that musicals can't have original stories or first-time writers or be good without making money. This show may turn out to be terrific. I genuinely hope it gets to stage. What I can't help wondering is what Mr. Piper hoped to achieve in writing this article.

His pah-ssion is evident but is it enough?

Interview with Ian 'H' Watkins

Stepping out from his popstar-dom-ness, Ian 'H' Watkins of Steps fame, dons the coat of many colours once more as he returns to the role of Joseph.

My interview with him is now available over at the ever-colourful Musical Theatre Review.

That You Would Find in a Statue

The great Don Black, for it is he, has suggested stoning Lord Andy with a formal erection (this can't be right? - ed). That is, in an interview with The Stage, he has suggested a statue:

“In America there is a statue in Times Square of [playwright and composer] George M Cohan and there are stamps with Jerome Kern on. There should be a statue on Shaftesbury Avenue [of Andrew] – something for what he’s done.”

Others, in the form of classical music critic Norman Lebrecht, have expressed some mild objections:

"If his bust goes up in my town, I’m outta here."

On the issue of a statue, I am neutral. My only thought is that one of Sarah Brightman would be prettier.

However, on the issue of musical theatre, I'll take Don Black's opinion any day. Lebrecht falls back on some pretty hoary criticism:

"His Lordship may be a genius at selling a show..."

Nice of you to say so but I suspect that much of the genius belongs to the Super Mac, Cameron Mackintosh. Lord Andy is more Boheme than businessman.

"...but he has trashed down the genre to a series of musical clichés and pop tunes." 

Musical cliches like title songs like in 5/8 ("Sunset Boulevard")?

"What was once a halfway house between grand opera and lowbrow music-hall has become, in Lloyd Webber’s proficient hands, a brand for safe entertainment..." 

Safe entertainments like shows about the Son of God, fascist dictators, cats, trains, a freak in a sewer and, oh yes, the IRA.

"...and stage technology..."

Like the stage technology it took to create the successful double-albums of Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita.

"...that barely engages the brain."

Unlike really original and perceptive musical theatre criticism like Lebrecht's.

Black, on the other hand, hits the nose on the head, so to speak:

"The lyricist also claimed critics should try to write a musical, claiming only then would they 'realise how well Andrew knows the structure of musicals'". 'He’s studied it in a forensic way,' Black said."

This is why the music critic never quite gets to grip with Lord Andy. They treat him as a composer. In truth he is a dramatist. And that is why he has been so successful.

You really don't need a statue to work that out.

Lofty Conversions

There's been a dust-up over at Music Matters (14th Sept) on Radio 3.

In the blue corner and  representing Italian opera, the Verdistas have been declaiming in high pitches about the wonder of their man's music. In the red corner and representing German opera, the Wagnerites have been intoning menacingly about the importance of the Tristan Chord (let it go, it's just a chord). 

OK, it's not exactly Mayweather vs. Pacquiao. This is Radio 3, after all.

As far as I could tell the general conclusion was that, whilst Wagner was probably the more innovative and influential artist, it would have undoubtedly been preferable to share a pint and a sing-song with Verdi. 

But one interesting point about myths and music was made by singer Robert Lloyd (around the 34 minute mark).

"The relationship between myth and music is a very interesting one. It goes back all the way to the origin of opera. In the earliest operas - Monteverdi and so on - all the people were mythical characters because there was a feeling that people didn't go around singing. Gods did that. And the thing about using Gods and myths is that it frees up the composer not to have to be so specifically mundane."

It reminds me of that scene in Peter Schaffer's Amadeus where Mozart dismisses the old Italian opera of his rivals as only being concerned with "people so lofty they sound as though they s**t marble". Mozart, of course, goes on to write operas about thoroughly non-lofty types like barbers.

What has this to do with musicals? Well, there is a parallel.

The loftiness of European operetta (all Princes and Duchesses in far-off lands) was brought low by the Broadway musical. On the comedy side, Rodgers and Hart wrote about showgirls and gamblers. On the drama side, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote about farmers and cowboys.

Now I have a little theory (it's not going to harm anyone): that the key question for any musical is, why do people start singing? Answering that successfully goes a long way to making a successful show.

If you're dealing with the lofty and the mythical then you're already sufficiently removed from reality that characters bursting into song doesn't seem that odd. Frankly, if you're a god or a prince, you can generally do as you please. On the other hand, if a musical is dealing with the non-lofty, this is a problem. How do you make the non-lofty do something lofty like sing?

No doubt there are many answers but let me suggest one: optimism.

It is generally the case that musicals are optimistic things. Genuine tragedy is rare (West Side Story and the Cliff Richard show Heathcliff are obvious examples, although tragic in very different ways). Perhaps then this optimism is inherent in the form itself, driven by the need to make non-lofty characters act in a lofty way, and producing a kind of upward movement in the story. To put it another way, musicals by their very nature set out to find the marvellous in the mundane, the godly within the gambler.

If that isn't being too lofty. 

Interview with Colman Domingo

My interview with Broadway star and Tony award nominee Colman Domingo now available in issue 3 of the ever-absorbing Musical Theatre Review (subscription required).

Colman Domingo will be repeating his Tony nominated role in Kander and Ebb's swansong musical, The Scottsboro Boys (directed by Susan Stroman). The Broadway show will receive its UK premiere at the Young Vic in October.

Very interesting fella, very interesting show.

Interview with Frances Ruffelle

Short interview with Frances Ruffelle over at the ever-endearing Musical Theatre Review about her new cabaret show, Paris Original.

Call the Police

Another rock 'n' roller is swopping his leather trousers for a Les Miz souvenir t-shirt. Joining the queue behind the likes of Paul Simon, Elton John and Dave Stewart, The Stinger himself is having a crack at an original musical.

"Known for his explorations into jazz and classical, Sting incorporates traditional Northumbrian pipes, shanties and reels into a score influenced by Gershwin and Sondheim."

Personally I would love to hear Sondheim done on the bagpipes.

"Sting said he wanted the songs 'to reflect the traditional music of the north-east of England where I grew up, as well as tipping my hat to the great music of the theatrical tradition – Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Brecht and Weill'” 

Interesting that, for him, the theatrical tradition lies somewhere between Broadway and Berlin. Nothing closer to home?

Well, nivvor mind and canny good luck. Musical theatre probably needs him more than he needs it. So let's hope for a good 'un. It is interesting, 'though. I've said it before and I'll say it again: rock 'n' roll has its limits and musicals are the natural home for the mature songwriter.

Things Can Only Get Meta

So says Mark Shenton over at The Stage:

"The Book of Mormon and Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell’s [title of show] couldn’t be further apart in terms of scale or budgets, but they’re both cut from the same ‘meta musical’ cloth."

And he doesn't just mean the good old fashioned boy-met-a-girl kind of musical cloth. Oh no.

"These are musicals partly or entirely about musicals themselves, whether as a hilarious pastiche of the form in the case of The Book of Mormon or a sweet but rather sad paean to the struggle of putting them on in the case of [title of show]."

Now I suspect this is a bit of a non-comparison. The Book of Mormon isn't a musical about musicals. It is, in fact, about Mormons. More broadly it's about the nature of religious belief, the function of storytelling within that belief and the cognitive bias in popular representations of a post-colonial African culture. There's also some rude songs about frogs. From what I can gather, [title of show] is a show about two people writing a show.

The point is that in The Book of Mormon musicals aren't really part of the story. It's only that certain musical forms and traditions are used in order to tell the story. So when Elder Price tries to convince the native Ugandans of the Mormon founder Joseph Smith's story, he pitches it to them in the manner of The Music Man's 'Professor' Harold Hill flogging non-existent band uniforms to gullible townsfolk. It works, not because the audience has to reference The Music Man, but because that style of song (the smooth patter-talk of a slick salesman) fits that dramatic moment.

Back to The Shentonian:

"But I also can’t help wondering if, in the midst of the onslaught of generic and formulaic musicals designed to appeal to a more general demographic, it is any wonder that original musicals have therefore reached a dead end? Just as Sleuth and then Deathtrap finally put paid to the stage thriller as a viable form, since both revealed the workings behind the thrills, so [title of show], by taking the lid off the painful process of writing new musicals, may have killed the thing it loves, too."

Could be wrong but I doubt that [title of show] will prove to be that significant. But there is a good point here. There is a tendency for musicals to be inward-looking. I think you can see it in the exclamation mark musicals (that is, shows with titles like "Unlikely Subject for a Musical! - the Musical"). They are part of a cul-de-sac culture. There may be some exceptions but, on the whole, shows about shows are really only for show people.

And musicals should be for everyone.

Theatre Criticism Going Critical

Emily Hardy is none too optimistic about The Future of Theatre Criticism:

"Opportunistic bloggers, tweeters, and rapid-response reviewers, have filled the information vacuum created by the impartial internet, and whilst these unpaid, unqualified, unknowledgable writers slather the web with their opinions, informative, measured and witty criticism slips into the archives of yet another lost art form."

Here at the Middlebrow Musicals, we aim to please. Personally I would be quite happy to be paid to slather less.

"However, if the horizon continues to darken, traditional theatre critics, artists as they are, may continue to suffer, reminiscent of where it all began – Grub Street and the impoverished, bohemian neighbourhood of hack writers."

Welcome to my world; make yourself at home.

On the other hand if traditional theatre critics truly are suffering "artists", maybe they could apply to the Arts Council.

Touche Suchet

Over at the Telegraph, Classic FM presenter and musical detective John Suchet has gathered his audience in the drawing room in an attempt to answer the Conundrum of Broadway:

"When I texted my friend that I was writing an article about West Side Story, she texted back, “My favourite modern musical-opera”, neatly encap­sulating the conun­drum: when does a musical become an opera?"

Musical-opera, eh?

"There is no definitive answer, of course, and you are entitled to your opinion. My view concurs with my friend’s. For me, West Side Story is a musical that qualifies as an opera"

Or is it an opera that qualifies as a musical? Come on, man. Poirot never sat on the fence like this.

"Interestingly, West Side Story’s composer, Leonard Bernstein, addressed a similar question himself in a television programme he made for CBS in the mid-Fifties. It was for the Omnibus series presented by Alistair Cooke, and it was a history of American musical theatre. In it, he asked: 'When is a particular work an operetta, and when is it an opera?' He took the example of South ­Pacific, and said when Emile sings Some Enchanted Evening we are hearing a musical, but when Bloody Mary sings Bali Ha’i we are indisputably in the world of opera."

Well, if he's talking about this Omnibus programme (South Pacific is discussed at the 6-minute mark) then he's not quite on the button. What Bernstein actually says is that "There is Nothing Like a Dame" and "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair" belong to musical comedy, whereas "Bali Ha'i" is more romantic operetta. The point being that South Pacific represents a seamless mingling of the two forms.

"It’s to do with the tone, the sound, and most importantly the nature of the story. My Fair Lady could never be an opera..."

True, inspector, true. As the big fella goes on to explain, American musicals lie on a spectrum between low-brow vaudeville and high-brow opera. My Fair Lady, due to the high romance of its plot, tends towards the operetta end. But it's still a musical.

"Apply those criteria to West Side Story. The plot is deadly serious: two rival gangs on the streets of New York, two families at war, two lovers, one drawn from each family. You just know people are going to die."

Yes, and we call this tragedy, not opera.

"Using Leonard Bern­­stein’s analysis, the songs Maria or Somewhere belong in opera, whereas America and Gee, Officer Krupke belong in the world of the musical."

Using Bernstein's analysis, the songs may tend towards operetta or musical comedy but they are all part of the American musical theatre.

"The lyrics, too, support the musical genre – serious and they belong to opera; humorous and they belong to the musical."

Er, right. So Marriage of Figaro is a musical and Heathcliffe should play Glyndebourne? By the way, I think the good detective means "solemn" rather than "serious". Comedy, as everyone knows, is a very serious business. Especially lyricists like Big Steve:

"On the subject of lyrics, a few years ago we honoured one of the world’s greatest lyricists, Stephen Sondheim, at the Royal Academy of Music...I don’t think he would disagree if I said he was not in the most amenable of moods. He had had a bout of ill health and the trans­atlantic journey took more of a toll than it used to.

I said to him, rather too syco­phantically, that I regarded his lyrics as poetry. I quoted my favourite couplet, which happened to come from West Side Story: 'Say it loud and there’s music playing / Say it soft and it’s almost like praying.' He said he had never been happy with that couplet. 'The rhyme is too obvious. Banal. I wish I had rewritten it.' I wonder if he really meant it."

I suspect he really, really did. Unless he was still jet-lagged when he wrote the notes for his collected lyrics, Finishing the Hat, in which he describes the praying line as contributing to the "overall wetness of the lyric". Not only that but Tony, the character who sings "Maria" in the show, was originally intended to a Polish Catholic which would have given the whole thing an interesting religious overtone. But the ethnicity of Tony was later changed which made the praying stuff wetter still.

Talking about Big Steve, it's worth pointing out his own general assessment of the show: "For most people West Side Story is about racial prejudice and urban violence, but what it's really about is theater: musical theater, to be more precise" (Finishing the Hat, p. 25). And the more musical-comedy type numbers like "America" and "Gee, Officer Krupke" served "to remind the audience that this is an entertainment, not a sociological treatise". So I suspect that he'd be on the musical side of this debate.

As an aside to this aside, it's also an interesting way to think about Sondheim's work. The conventional line is that he expanded the kinds of subject matter that musicals dealt with, from gang violence in West Side Story to French surrealist art in Sunday in the Park with George. But, in another and more curious way, I sometimes think that his work has narrowed the outlook of musicals. A lot of it is theatre about theatre.

Anyway, back to the DI Suchet:

"So if West Side Story, like South Pacific, is opera in parts, musical in parts, does the standing of the composer have any bearing on whether we can class either as classical music?"

No. Bernstein was a posh symphony conductor, Rodgers was a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith. Doesn't matter. Musical theatre has room for both which is part of its wonder as an art form.

"If West Side Story were to be staged at the New York Met, or at the Royal Opera House, who would argue against it?"

Not me. Then again, if Jose Carreras' version of "Something's Coming" is anything to go by, who would want to see it? Although Bryn Terfel having a crack at the opening dance would be interesting.

But the broader objection to the article is the assumption that musicals get some kind of legitimacy by being called opera. As the sub-heading puts it, does West Side Story deserve a "promotion"? No, it doesn't. And it doesn't need one. Bernstein may have written symphonies, concertos and ballets but, as a composer, it is West Side Story that has proved to be his most enduring work.

Case closed.

Possibly the Shortest Musical Ever Written

Very edible post from The Larder promoting the idea of a Festival of Tiny Musicals with each lasting around 6 minutes. The idea is that writers, rather than doing a 15-minute showcase of a larger work that struggles to get produced, should think small. New writers in particular need to start somewhere and, if it's your first time in the kitchen, then it's far easier to bake a cupcake than a triple-decker marbled chocachino sponge.

Personally I like the idea. I have no clue as to the kind of a musical that would last 6 minutes and that's precisely why I like it. It offers something new. That's not to say that I have a problem with the traditional two-act book musical. Some of my best friends are traditional two-act musicals. But that's a tough ask for a new writer. And, as with any tradition, the past can be a burden on the present. 

Comedians have sketch shows, novelists have short stories, poets have haiku. Bring on the miniature musical.

With this in mind I present "Mouse and Cat", a home-made musical straight from the oven which may possibly be the shortest musical ever written (although I'm open to correction).

 

Big

This is extraordinary:

"On the studio lot below, along a route where trams of tourists roll by, is a black-and-green poster for the hit musical “Wicked.” Universal is the majority investor in the show, which has grossed $3 billion since 2003 from productions in New York, Chicago, London, Tokyo, and dozens of other cities. More to the point: “Wicked” is on track to become the most profitable venture in the 101-year history of Universal, Mr. Horowitz acknowledged in an interview, more lucrative than its top-grossing movies like 'Jurassic Park' and 'E.T.'"

Think about this for a moment. One of the oldest of Hollywood studios and the studio behind Steven Spielberg's box office smasheroos and its biggest money-spinner is a piece of musical theatre.

When musicals go big, they really do go big.

Are Musicals Cool?

Interesting discussion notes from last year's Musical Theatre Network conference during which Eliott Davis, co-writer of Loserville, answered a question on how to make musical theatre cool (page 7):

"I was asked to give a talk to disadvantaged young people just before a performance of Loserville. Really excluded, hard-core, never been in a theatre and they were coming to see Loserville in Leeds and I thought this is going to be a disaster. What was amazing to me – I think what’s cool is knowing what you are and not pretending to be something that you’re not. So if you’re trying to be cool, that feels very uncool to me. And for those kids sitting in front of me, I was absolutely touched; they thought it was a rock concert and then when it was quiet and when it was dramatic they shut up, they listened to the play. And to me, that was cool. They had a great time and the feedback afterwards was that they genuinely had a great time. They’d never been in a theatre before, they’d never seen a musical before and it didn’t matter, they had a good time. And so I think it’s not about rap or hip hop or any genre, it’s about presenting your art in the truest possible sense and not talking down to your audience. That seems to be cool."

Well said.

It's an elusive quality but musicals are, on the whole, not cool. If musicals appeared on Top Gear's Cool Wall most would be positioned somewhere near the Fiat Panda.

So what is cool? Well, it isn’t respectability (Sondheim isn’t cool) and it isn’t popularity (Lord Andy is far from cool). On the other hand, I'd say that George Gershwin and Cole Porter are pretty cool; less so Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Richard Rodgers was cool with Lorenz Hart but not with Oscar Hammerstein II. Urbane wit is cooler than popular sentimentalism.

And what of the shows? Some recent attempts have been made to invert the principle of cool by ironically revelling in geek chic (Glee), soap opera pop (Mamma Mia) or liberal sixties nostalgia (Hairspray). But these examples are merely the defiance of cool, not its attainment.

By my count there is only one genuinely cool musical and that is Chicago. What makes it cool? For one thing, it’s sexy and involves a lot of people dancing around in their underwear. For another, it’s funny and not in a Michael McIntyre way but in a more cynical kind of a way (McIntyre is funny but definitely not cool). The only other partially cool musical is Cabaret in its film version. The coolness of the stage show is seriously compromised by the fact that it contains a song about a pineapple.

So the initial conclusion from this staggeringly comprehensive and scientific survey is that, in order for a musical to be cool, it has to have cynicism, jokes, underwear and Kander and Ebb songs. That sounds like a pretty cool way to spend an evening.

The real conclusion, however, is Mr. Davis'. No amount of rap or hippity hop will make musicals cool. New musical writers shouldn't worry about being cool and should instead seek to be authentic. Authenticity is where it's at.

An Interview with Mark Carroll

Short interview with musical actor/writer Mark Carroll over at the ever excellent Musical Theatre Review website.

The Soul Purpose of Oomph

What is the essence of a good musical? Domenic Cavendish has the answer in the Telegraph:

"What is essential – antiquated and quasi-religious though it sounds – is something underpinning it all called 'soul'"

OK, drilling down. By 'soul', are we talking about:

(1) the religio-philosophical concept of the immortal and non-corporeal essence of human nature, most notably expounded in the Thomist tradition or

(2) a central component in twentieth century African-American popular music born out of the convergence of gospel and rhythm 'n' blues or

(3) a vaguely indefinable quality attached to the musicals I happen to like?

 Now, now. Let's be fair. He does go on to explain:

"It doesn’t matter how much money, time and effort is thrown at a musical; if it doesn’t offer, at least in significant part, some profound sense of expressing our innermost being, then it’s money, time and effort largely wasted."

I don't know about you but the last time I expressed my innermost being was when I ignored the use-by date on that sushi mix. Sorry, cheap gag. Carrying on:

"These are transcendent moments, and no amount of technical skill can mask a deficiency in that department."  

It's also an interesting way to think about writing a musical: less about telling a story and more about creating moments. Like threading pearls on a string.

"The best musicals trade in the same gold as the best opera, but they tend to obtain it by unwrapping something apparently ordinary – the grandeur is hard-earned, not a given" 

Now this I like: unwrapping the ordinary. There is definitely something more down-to-earth about musicals compared to the abstractions of opera; Fred Astaire dancing with a hat stand or Gene Kelly splashing in puddles with an umbrella come to mind. Alternatively try and imagine an opera where somebody's doing the ironing.

"I’m aware that this 'thesis' can’t translate into hard and fast rules" 

Not to worry. I suspect most arts theses can't. However I think I understand the general ball park into which Mr. Cavendish is aiming. Personally I wouldn't use the word 'soul'; I would opt for 'oomph' instead. Musicals must have 'oomph'. 

The thing about 'oomph' is that it comes from the gut, literally - just try saying the word without moving your abdomen. And musicals must come from the gut. As one writer said about ancient peoples, they thought with their hearts and felt with their guts. So too for musical peoples.

For soul, think oomph.

How Musicals Work IV

Finished. Great book.

One general consideration. Mr. Woolford focuses on the mechanics of musicals. As he puts it in this blog post, he's tried to write the Haynes manual of the musical. Really he's trying to get writers to write more efficient musicals; ones with proper structure, consistent theatrical language, appropriate song forms and so on. All of which is well and good. But is efficiency sufficient? To put it another, you can check the oil, fine-tune the engine and spiv up the hub caps; but, if you're dealing with a Robin Reliant, is it really worth the effort?

What's missing is a discussion of creative instinct. Analysis necessarily comes after the fact, so where do creative ideas come from in the first place? The 'I Wish' song may be correctly sung by the hero and correctly positioned in Act I and correctly fulfilling the 'call to adventure' function in the story. But that doesn't give you "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" from My Fair Lady. To get there, I think you need something else.

In this case, Alan Jay Lerner needed a trip to the opening of Covent Garden market at four in the morning. It was freezing and a group fruit sellers were warming their hands over a fire. That sparked the idea of writing about Eliza's wish for creature comforts. And why did he pick up on the fire, rather than anything else that morning? Why did it spark that particular idea rather than any other idea? I suspect it was simply a matter of instinct; it just felt right.

So the next step: what exactly does Eliza wish for in the song? Roughly in order:

Room
Warmth
Big chair
Chocolate
Warmth
Doing nothing
A fella to look after her

In terms of the story, it's only the last one that's strictly important. And, as it turns out, she doesn't really want a fella who will merely look after her (as Freddy would); she wants someone to love and someone who loves her (as Higgins eventually does). So what about the rest of the list? Well, they all make sense. Eliza is a poor working-class gal. Rather than stumping up and down the streets hawking flowers for a pittance, she'd prefer a bit of comfort (warmth/chair) and a modest bit of luxury (chocolate) and the chance to put her feet up (doing nothing).

But why these particular images and ideas? Why couldn't the song be about wanting the comfort of a warm blanket, the luxury of Victoria sponge and a weekend break for two in the Cotswolds? Maybe it could have been. Writing is about making choices. Logical analysis of plot and character only get you so far. They take you to the edge of the proverbial cliff but they can't force you to jump. When the choices are equally efficient, something else makes a writer choose one idea over another. What is that? Again, my best guess is instinct.

This is where the car analogy breaks down (but the puns are still working - wahey!). There's only one solution to changing a spark plug; with a musical, there are any number of solutions. If we analyse how musicals work by looking at musicals that have worked, then we get a false sense of inevitability. We feel as if the story had to resolve the way it did or that the song had to be written the way it was. In truth, it could have been very different and worked just as well.

It is, then, not just a question of how musicals work in the sense of efficiency; it is also a question of their worthiness. What makes this story, as opposed to that story, worthy of the telling? What makes this idea, as opposed to that idea, worthy of the choosing? This, I think, is a deeper question and one that can't be answered using mechanics or analysis. It requires something closer to instinct, a gut feeling for what is important and funny and beautiful and, above all, true.

I'm a big fan of Don Black and the song cycle Tell Me on a Sunday, which was later turned into Song and Dance for the stage. There's a funny line where the English heroine, who has hooked up with a Californian film producer called Sheldon, is describing him in a letter to her mum:

"Sheldon has a lot of meetings
Well, he's terribly ambitious
He's working on a musical 'bout Rommel as a boy"

The audience instinctively gets the joke. No matter how much you try and make them work, some musicals are never really roadworthy.

How Musicals Work III

Getting there.

On the "Lyrical Matters" chapter, Mr. Woolford has sections on the following:

Rhyme
Scansion
Sounds that Sing and Sounds that Don't
Character

All good stuff. Can't disagree with any of the sections, only the order in which they're placed. I think I'd go for:

Sounds that Sing and Sounds that Don't
Character
Scansion
Rhyme

Actually I'd probably shove Scansion in with the first category under the general heading of Singability or Singableness (neither of which are probably real words but, hey ho, that's why I don't have a book deal). And I'd put the Lyrical Idea ahead of everything (although Mr. Woolford calls this The Hook and deals with it in the previous chapter).

My point is that rhyme is nearly always the first consideration when most people think about lyrics and, really, it is the least important. It's the thing that usually comes up in first-night reviews. If a critic likes the lyrics they'll call them witty and quote a clever rhyme. If we think of the great lyricists, we tend to think first of the great rhymsters: Hart, Porter, Sondheim. But often it's the less flamboyantly rhyme-y ones that prove to be more popular: Berlin, Hammerstein, Loesser.

I think that's because clever rhymes tend to stand out and stick in the memory (indeed that's one of the functions of rhyme, to make something memorable), whereas making a lyric singable and writing in character, if done well, are trickier things to appreciate. Clunky lyrics draw attention to their clunkiness; singable ones don't draw attention to their singability, they just sing well. Similarly a character lyric draws attention away from the author and towards the character singing, so the author's skill is less conspicuous.

Mr. Woolford peppers his excellent book with little exercises for potential musical writers. I'd add this one: write a song without any end-of-line rhymes. I think this could be a useful way to force writers to think about their lyrical ideas, singability and character before worrying about rhymes.

Sometimes
The rhymes
Should be
A non-priority

How Musicals Work II

Still reading.

Some further thoughts on the section "Why Do Characters Sing?" (p.251). This, it seems to me, is crucial and probably deserves a chapter on its own.

Mr. Wooldford identifies the main reason:

"There is a cliche that the characters sing when the emotional pitch reaches a level at which speaking is no longer appropriate"

But:

"This is only true of some emotional situations...The actual reasons why characters sing are the most clearly defined by the theatrical language the writer is using. Your characters can sing only the most rapturous emotions, or the most mundane banalities, but as long as it is consistent with the theatrical language of the piece, then the audience will accept it."

Not sure. Except for the most modern, experimental, serialist, plinkety-plonk stuff, music is inherently emotional. More than anything else, music makes us feel feelings. So in a musical there must always be enough emotion in the drama to make the characters sing. The words may be banal but the song shouldn't.

My favourite example is from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Coy romancers, Finch and Rosemary, meet at the office lifts (aka elevators) and exchange small talk ("It's Been a Long Day") whilst Smitty translates their thoughts for the benefit of the audience:

Smitty: Now she's thinking
Rosemary: I wonder if we take the same bus?
Smitty: And he's thinking:
Finch: There could be quite a thing between us.
Smitty: Now she's thinking:
Rosemary: He really is a dear.
Smitty: And he's thinking:
Finch: But what of my career?
Smitty: And she says:
Rosemary: (yawning) Ah.
Smitty: And he says:
Finch: Huh?
Well, it's been a long day.
All: Well, it's been a long
Been a long, been a long,
Been a long day

You really can't get more banal than a yawn followed by a "huh?". But even if we didn't have Smitty, the sheer fact that the whole thing is sung, with the musical to-and-fro gradually shortening and rising in pitch, tells us that something more is going on. Something emotional.

This question about why characters sing is also one of the major problems for sung-through musicals. If everything is sung, at some point the characters inevitably end up singing trivialities. Woolford points to the critic who complained that the characters in the through-sung musical Aspects of Love spend a chunk of their time singing their drink orders. If I'm not mistaken that critic was Mark Steyn who also wondered if South Pacific's "Some Enchanted Evening" would have been half as successful if it turned up later in the show as "Would You Like a Biscuit?", which is effectively what happens to the big tunes in Aspects of Love. For my money, Aspects one of the greatest book musicals never made; strong story, great score but hamstrung by drink orders and the sung-through format.

The broader point is that if you are going to have continuous singing, then the music must distinguish between the emotional highs and lows (in a similar way that classical opera uses recitative). That's because when you have music, you have emotion. So when you have an emotional low in a musical, it's probably best not to sing at all.

How Musicals Work

Currently enjoying "How Musicals Work" by Julian Woolford (available from Nick Hern publishing). Haven't quite finished but one small thought thus far.

In a section about theatrical language, Mr. Woolford makes a passing point about film musicals:

"The various theatrical languages that musical-theatre creators have utilised over the years have translated with greater or lesser success to the more naturalistic medium of film...I mention this only to point out that in the transfer to a movie version, any musical necessarily has to change its theatrical language to a cinematic language" (p.193)

Which is, I think, a much better way of saying what I was trying to say about Nine: film musicals need to be conceived as films, rather than merely being filmed.

Must All Have Prizes?

This sounds a bit iffy:

"Musical supervisors and orchestrators have secured a victory in their campaign to be honoured at the Olivier Awards, with next year’s ceremony set to include a brand new prize category for which they will be eligible.

Campaigners have been calling on the Society of London Theatre to honour musical directors/supervisors and orchestrators since 2011, with leading figures – including Mike Dixon and Gareth Valentine – calling the lack of a category honouring their peers a 'serious oversight'"

I'm all for honouring good musos. But isn't there a problem in campaigning for the instigation of an award when you're very likely to be a recipient of it?

"Now, SOLT has revealed plans to introduce an outstanding achievement in music category at next year’s ceremony, which it said 'will bring together potential nominations across the music fields' including 'composition of original music for plays, orchestration and musical supervision/direction'”. 

I suspect the looseness of the category will mean that this will become a kind of "special achievement" award, given to notable theatre musicians more for their body of work, rather than a genuinely competitive category. I'm not sure how a judge would weigh the comparative merits of orchestrations vs. musical direction vs. playing second fiddle. On the other hand, if it does end up raising the profile of these professionals, maybe that's no bad thing for musicals.

Then again when it comes to musicals I'm never sure how much the Oliviers actually matter (I suspect they generally matter more for subsidised than commercial theatre, hence the dismal lack of a Best Pantomime category). The return of Miss Saigon to the West End reminds me of how that show was inexplicably overlooked by the Oliviers in favour of Return to the Forbidden Planet, a jokey jukebox piece of campery set in outer space. What I didn't realise was that Les Miserables was also overlooked a few years earlier in favour of the 1930s musical retread Me and My Girl.

So, in summary: at the height of the global success of the West End musical, the main prize-giving body in the West End was bravely honouring pop nostalgia and half-a-century-old scores.

With a track record like that, who needs a Larry?

Bullets, Daffodils and Dean Johnson

A short feature by your humble blogger on a new musical, Bullets and Daffodils, and its creator Dean Johnson. Available now at the very interesting Musical Theatre Review website (issue one of the digital magazine is really rather good. And it's FREE).

The musical is based on the life and work of the First World War poet Wilfred Owen and runs at the Tristan Bates Theatre, 1st-6th July.

Accounting For Stars

In the Stage, the original (and best?) Jean Valjean, Colm Wilkinson, is sounding a bit miserable about musical stars:

"A lot of shows are star-driven. It’s because of the precarious nature of musicals now – it’s always down to the bottom line. They [producers] want insurance all the time. They want a big name to ensure a show will happen"

I'm sure he's right. Stars are, almost by definition, those who get top billing for protecting the bottom line.

"And there is so much money involved and invested that they don’t want to take chances anymore. In those days [the time of Les Miserables opening] there was more of a creative force behind a show, rather than guys in suits crunching numbers."

Quite. I've heard Russell Crowe sing and, man, can he crunch some numbers.

"Unfortunately, it dumbs down everybody. And it doesn’t do any favours to musicals or plays or creativity involved in the arts.”

The artistic complaint about the vulgarity of money is a common one. The complaint about using stars is more interesting.

Stars are a natural and necessary fact of commercial theatre. In fact, there are precious few genuine musical theatre stars here in the UK. As I've mentioned before, in order to become a bona fide musical star (as opposed to a star who does musicals) you need two things: (1) to be the original lead in an original musical and (2) to have a hit song from the show. Really, only Elaine Page, Sarah Brightman and the two Michaels (Ball and Crawford) fit the bill.

That is why we've had all those reality TV search-for-star Maria/Joseph/Jesus formats; there were no ready-made, off-the-shelf musical stars from which the producers could choose. So they had to create one. That's fine for one show but then there is the question of what happens next. After the initial production and the national tour and the limited-release album, what do these newly-crowned stars do with their stardom? I'm sure they could continue in revivals or do the rounds in the long-runners. But if they want to be bona fide musical stars, what they really, really need is an original hit show and an original hit song.

What they need are writers.

Whilst opportunity was knocking for those Marias/Josephs/Jesses, some wondered why Lord Andy couldn't knock up some similar opportunities for writers. Well, there's no shame in writing for a star. Indeed there are plenty of precedents: Gypsy, Funny Girl, Phantom, to name but a few. I'd have thought that writers would be lining up to provide material for these freshly-minted stars.

Maybe this is being done, maybe not. My point is that there's no intrinsic reason why a star-driven musical theatre should be an uncreative one. Stars need writers to help increase their stardom; writers need stars to get their work put on. It's a deal to be fostered, rather than Faust-ed.

Passing By the Hit Parade

Further to the post and podcast below on the question of why musical theatre songs gradually disappeared from the pop charts.

There is, of course, one obvious answer not explored by Messrs. Thos and Tim: musicals got less popular.

OK, let's tweak that a bit. From the mid-sixties onwards the popular musicals got fewer and farther between. In the West End the megamusicals could still throw up a big song or two (Phantom begat four top ten hits) but there were precious few shows to do the throwing up. And on Broadway the golden age had well and truly passed. By the eighties the biggest home-grown show was 42nd Street which, admittedly, included several hit songs in its score. Hit songs from the 1930s, that is.

So what about today? Could songs from original musicals compete with the techno-urban-hippity-hop stuff in the modern pop charts? I don't see why not. If a bunch of munchkins can get to number 2 with little more than a Facebook campaign, then surely a savvy theatre producer with a decent song could manage a top 10.

But given that there's generally more money in live performance than digital recordings these days, the real question is: why would they want to?

Musical Talk Episode 345: Backbiting the Backbeat

Comedy Thos and Sage Tim of MusicalTalk are back beating about the backbeat bush. Plenty of chew-worthy fodder here on why musical songs have mostly disappeared from the pop charts.

Also an honourable mention made of your humble blogger. For the curious, the post cited in the podcast is available here.

Nine Things About Nine

1. Nine is the 2009 film musical of the 1982 Broadway show which was based on the 1963 Frederico Fellini film 81/2 which is about a film maker making a film.

2. I caught the film last night.

3. Here are some thoughts.

4. Stylistically the film is best described as an extended lingerie advert.

5. Judi Dench has apparently mastered the technique of shout-sing. She'd make a decent Al Jolson if ever given the opportunity.

6. Actors not stars. Daniel Day-Lewis is inch-perfect as the egotistical director Guido Contini. However something felt missing: he is credible but not charismatic. I could believe that this man was adored by women; I just didn't care. To be fair, there's not much to care about. The character is rich, handsome, successful, bags a series of glamour pusses and whose only problem seems to be a touch of writer's block. Not one for bleeding hearts.

Charisma is really his only redeeming feature and I suspect (and it is merely suspicion - I've never seen the stage show) that this is partly a problem of moving from stage to screen. It's much easier to get caught up in the sheer charisma of an actor on stage. If they're good, a musical performer can sing and dance their way into the audience's appreciation whatever the character. Screen charisma is something else, not always determined by talent. Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the finest screen actors. My feeling is that this part doesn't require an actor; it needs a star.

7. Stars not dancers. Where's the dancing? OK, there's quite a bit. But there's nothing that really strikes you with its physicality (with the possible exception of Marion Cottilard's "Take It All"). There's no routine which makes you say, "Wow! I didn't know the human body could do that". As I recall, I didn't care greatly for Chicago but at least there were some stunning dancers (mostly in the chorus) who were given the chance to shine. As much as I enjoyed Kate Hudson wiggling I can't help feeling that some of the chorines would have made a better fist of it. A film musical needs dancers even more than it needs stars.

8. Augmented theatre. With the exception of Guido's final song, all the numbers are set in his memory or imagination. So whenever the music cues, we generally cut from the story to a number set in the film's sound stage. The cut isn't really the problem (although I suspect, again, this is something that works more effectively on stage). The real problem is the sound stage, which is essentially a cavernous theatrical stage. So instead of eight dancers draping their legs over bits of furniture, we get eighty. Instead of a two-tiered stage, we get multi-storey scaffolding. Instead of the romantic lighting effect of a few dozen candles, we get a few thousand.

Sometimes these are good effects. But Guido's character is an obsessive film director. He eats, sleeps, drinks, thinks, dreams in film. The musical numbers, above all, should be filmic. Setting them in a big space with spotlights and half-finished sets and lots of well-spaced dancers doesn't really make this an imagination on film. Rather it is theatre augmented.

9. Redemption through Art. What does Guido want? Ostensibly it is to finish the film. What he really wants is a kind of redemption or, at least, the forgiveness of his wife, Luisa, whom he has wronged. At the end of the story, with his creative forces exhausted and unable to complete his film, he becomes a recluse, grows a beard and watches the world go by. A couple of years later his friend and long-term costume designer, Lilli, tracks him down. She reminds him of all the people he has touched through his films and encourages him to return to his film making. The final scene shows him in the studio making a film about a man trying to win back his wife. Meanwhile Luisa sneeks onto the set unseen. She sees Guido at work and smiles.

This is bunk. Artists tend to have a very high regard for Art and I think it catches them out sometimes. Guido is a monster. The story here is trying to redeem him merely by the fact that he's a great artist. Any amount of cruel and narcissistic behaviour is apparently forgivable as long as you can make a great movie. 

Well, I'm not buying it. It doesn't happen in any other profession. We don't forgive plumbers their infedility on account of their copper pipework. We don't give a moral carte blanche to accountants who never misplace a decimal point. What makes the artist so special?

Ultimately I suspect that's why the film, despite the extensive lingerie and a galaxy of star names, never really became the hit in the way that Chicago was. For the non-artist, there's limited appeal. Nine is basically Sunday in the Park with George in frilly knickers.

Yes! We Have a Big Monkey

Monkey musical King Kong arrives in Melbourne.

Tucked away at the end of this report by Alison Croggon in the Guardian is something about the score, which apparently is an eclectic mix of old and new songs:

“We want to create a show for a new generation of theatregoers,” says director Daniel Kramer. “And we want to create a piece of music theatre that pushes the art form forward.”

If by "art form" he means musical theatre, that might be difficult with a bunch of old songs. If, on the other hand, he means simian spectaculars I think he's onto something. I only hope the eclecticism of the score stretches to "Yes! We Have No Bananas":

Burning and Yearning for Ivor

Speaking as I was of Ivor Novello, I've been listening to a few of his songs. To be honest his kind of romantic sentiment is a bit too flowery for my bread basket.

I think the problem is in the lyrics. They are mostly rearrangements what seems to be fairly standard operetta imagery:

Fire
Desire
Heart
Part
Moon
Dreams
Light
Night
Clouds

This kind of thing hasn't aged too well and is, I suspect, the reason why we don't hear much from Ivor's catalogue these days. No doubt this was once popularly accepted as part and parcel of the operetta genre and audiences accepted the generic lyrics in return for the draw of the music and spectacle.

But one song does stick out:

"Keep the Home Fires Burning
While your hearts are yearning
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home" 

Nowadays the lads are even further away and most of us have central heating. But as a war song it still packs an emotional punch. Why? Well, the generic imagery has been given a more specific context - a soldier's family - which makes it more potent. We are not just dealing with the general emotions of loss/worry/heartache. Now these emotions are embedded in people and a situation.

Another reason is that the music and words in this song are working well together. (Old song sheet available Duke University library. It's amazing what you can find.) In particular, the "burning" and the "yearning".

On the two syllables of "bur-ning" the melody is two notes, A to G. This is played over a C7 chord. Now the second note G belongs to the C7 chord (i.e. it's one of the notes that makes up that chord). But the note A doesn't belong to a C7 chord. So what we have when the melody moves from A to G is a suspension. The melody wants to resolve onto a G but by placing the A before it, the composer effectively suspends the resolution of the melody. That's why we feel the extra tension on the first syllable of "bur-ning".

For "year-ning" the composer ups the ante. The melodic phrase is repeated but this time "year-ning" is an F to an E over an A7 chord. This is another suspension but whereas the first one (A to G) was a whole tone, this one is a semitone (F to E). This makes that first syllable of "year-ning" even more tense. You can literally hear the yearning in the singer's voice.

As well as the suspensions in the melody, the music also mirrors the "home" bit as well. The song starts in the home key of F major, modulates into D minor and only really comes back to the home key with the final bar when we get to the word "home". The effect is to make us feel that we've gone on a journey and have now made it home. For the soldiers and their families it is not only a literal return to home but also a return to hope:

"There's a silver lining
Through the dark clouds shining
Turn the dark cloud inside out
'Til the boys come home"

With the right music, even these cloudy old operetta images can still shine through.

Is Calvin Harris the New Ivor Novello?

Apparently so. Mr. Harris has picked up the Ivor Novello award for Songwriter of the Year. The award was presented by Radio 1 DJ Pete Tong who said:

"Dance music and DJs never believed they belonged in this room before. Now we have a role model."

Now when someone mentions "dance music" I generally think of the Charleston and the Lindy Hop, so I'm probably not the best person to comment. Fortunately music critic Neil McCormack is a bit more up to date:

"But is Harris actually a songwriter at all? He has been one of the most successful hit-makers of recent times, building techno-electro club pop tracks that smash it in the charts and the on the dancefloor. But if you strip his hits back to melody and lyrics, you’re not left with very much."

And strip back he does:

"If you take We Found Love back to its basic musical structure what you are left with is the same four-chord sequence repeated ad infinitum (D sharp minor / B / F sharp and C sharp), over which floats a sweet verse melody which shifts to the single repeated chorus phrase, with some vague impressionistic verses about “yellow diamonds in the light” and feeling “the heartbeat in my mind”. There is no bridge, no middle eight, nothing but rhythm, verse, chorus, sound and that incessant two-note keyboard hook. It doesn’t take anything away from its effectiveness as a sonic experience. But as songs go, it’s about as basic as they come."

The charge here is that there is a distinction to be made between the song and the production. Producers are essentially knob-twiddlers with an ear for hooks, backing tracks, instrumentations, textures, balance and so on. But the song material itself is the basic building blocks: melody and lyrics. By law:

"The legal definition of a song (as tested in many plagiarism suits) is melody and lyric. Everything else is track, or production."

I hadn't appreciated the legal issue before although if I were ever hauled before the courts I'd be tempted to argue that the harmony (or chord structure) was an integral part of the song as well.

So how do we tell a good song from a merely well-produced one? Composer/songwriter David Arnold has the answer:

"A lot of the time the litmus test of a song’s worth is how it plays when being performed just at a piano. It's not the only test but it's a very good one.”

This is interesting and certainly true for musical theatre songs. The only downside is that you can end up with very "pianistic" songs, i.e. songs which sound good on a piano. That's fine as far as it goes but it's also limiting and can be a big problem if you're trying to make new musical songs that sound different from the old musical songs.

Mr McCormack continues:

"Is there a higher plane of songwriting? A place where melodic complexity and lyrical depth combine to create an emotional or philosophically transcendent experience? I would like to think so. It’s the corner of a record collection where you will find Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello, Kate Bush and many, many more, the kind of musicians who approach songwriting as an art, not a craft."

Alas, here I suspect that we must part company. If the art of songwriting is reaching up for some transcendent beauty or truth, then the craft is the step ladder that helps you get there. In other words, it's not either/or. From a craft point of view, Calvin Harris may be no Bob Dylan; but then Bob Dylan is no Cole Porter.

Or even an Ivor Novello.

Carry On Sweden

Ah, Eurovision.

As ever the best entertainment was saved for the interval act which was a veritable "Swedish Smorgasbord" of delightfully daft musical comedy. It's as if Mel Brooks had been employed to pep up their national anthem.

And who knew we Brits had so many national stereotypes in common with the Swedes? Queuing, ignoring other people on the train, not being able to assemble Ikea products and singing daft songs in English.

Cultural exchange at its finest, I'd say.

Why Musical Writers Should Watch Nashville

Mainly because it's better than 99% of the stuff that makes it onto the telly.

If that's not a good enough reason for musical writers, then they should at least watch it for the songs which are not only very well written but also dramatically interesting.

This is, of course, the American TV show Nashville currently airing on More4. It is unsurprisingly set in Nashville and centred around the country music industry. Now my knowledge of country music is about as extensive as The Man in Black's wardrobe. So I can't tell you if the show's depiction of either the music or the industry is particularly authentic but it certainly makes for a good drama. 'Tis all I know.

The series was created by Callie Khouri who said some interesting things in an interview for Salon. Here's the interesting bit for musical writers:

I’ve been really impressed with how much Juliette’s songs sound like Taylor Swift songs. Well, more than going, “Okay, we need a song that does this,” we find these great songs and go, “Oh my God this could be so perfect for so and so, and this would have to happen for her to write that song.” Because it’s just not that easy to get somebody to write a perfect song, that says everything you need it to say. Sometimes everyone will do their pass on the script and it will be, “It would be great if we could get a song that said something like this.” And I’m just like, “Yeah it would, but we’re not going to get that.”
So you have music way ahead of having scripts?We start looking for the music way ahead, yeah. Because we have to record it all. And we want to be the first one to get our crack at the great song, so we’re listening all the time.
Does that mean you hear the songs, and you start to imagine how they would work in the script before the script exists? Even though you haven’t written it yet, the songs must give you some sense of where the story is going to go.Yes, exactly. You hear the song and it just evokes something, and you just start kind of writing toward that.

The age-old question for songwriters is which comes first, music or lyrics. The conventional answer for musical theatre writers is the story. In other words the songs are written in response to the drama. What Ms. Khouri is saying is that, at least in part, they were writing drama in response to songs.

This isn't entirely new. This is essentially what all those jukebox musicals - Mamma Mia and We Will Rock You - have been doing for a while. But these shows write a story around an already established back catalogue of songs. The big difference with Nashville is that the songs are generally not well-known and, in some cases, first heard on the TV show itself.

This doesn't make Nashville a musical. I'm sure that many of the characters and plot lines were in pace long before the songs. But clearly, at times, the songs inspired the story. And it's undoubtedly a good story rather some hodge-podge of nonsense simply there to string a few tunes together.

So this offers a different approach for musical theatre writers. There's no reason why the songs shouldn't come first. Especially when they sound as good as this:

Blame it on the Backbeat

Way back in MusicalTalk episode 328 Comedy Thos was mulling rhythmically (around the 43 minute mark).

The Thos Thesis is that the 1950s saw the beginning of the dominance of the backbeat in popular music. This inevitably had an adverse affect on the lyrics. The insistent rhythm left no room for singers to fully get across the meaning and inflection of the words. Lyrics became mere ornaments to decorate a song rather than an essential part of it.

But in musical theatre, lyrics are essential. Lyrics explain and reveal the what and the why of stories and characters. They cannot be subordinated. So over the following decades a gradual but inevitable split developed between theatre music and chart music, a tragedy from which the civilized world has yet to recover.

I exaggerate a little.

Exhibit A in this thesis is two versions of the song "Tonight You Belong to Me". The first is from 1920s crooner, Gene Austin; the second is from the 1950s sister hit-sters, Patience and Prudence (Spotify 'em for a listen). The Austin recording has the full verse and chorus and enough rhythmic flexibility to allow the singer to bring out all the nuances of the lyric. The sisters, on the other hand, drop the verse which confuses the meaning of the chorus and the singers are straight-jacketed by a fixed and dominating rhythm. The different approaches demonstrate how the lyric has lost its significance in chart music. And frankly m'lud, it's the backbeat wot done it.

If you have a listen, it's certainly a well-judged example.

And Thos is in good company. Richard Rodgers was none too keen on the newly-enhanced backbeat in pop music. I can't now find the reference but I'm sure I remember reading about a letter to a newspaper that Rodgers once wrote complaining about the latest hit parade and how he was taught that music was about melody, harmony and rhythm and why reduce it to just the latter.

And yet, and yet. There is a case to be made for the defence:

1. Most chart music doesn't subordinate the lyric with a backbeat. Even where the backbeat is absolutely fixed, the singer will still sing the melody in a very flexible manner, anticipating the beat fractionally (as is done in Latin music) or delaying it (as in swing music). The inflexible interpretation of Prudence and Patience is really an exception, not the rule.

2. Even if the rhythm is inflexible and dominating that doesn't necessarily make it unsuitable for musical theatre. Let's say that we re-wrote the King and I so that, in an expected plot twist, Yul Bryner and the entire court of Siam are mercilessly wiped out by a Terminator robot sent back from the future to kill Anna. And if Richard Rodgers were writing the Terminator's big number towards the end of Act II, I suspect he'd want a song with an inflexible and dominating rhythm to express the robotic and unrelenting aspect of its character (and to compliment Arnie's general acting range). It's not the musical style that makes a song a theatre song, it's the context.

Despite these objections I'd say that the Thos Thesis is basically sound. The predominance of rhythm will inevitably diminish the importance of the lyric which is problematic for musical writers (although I'd say it's not the only reason why lyrics are less important in chart music).

Then again I can't help but wonder if this is less to do with rhythm and more to do with the difference between a romantic and a modern sensibility. There's an interesting parallel in classical music which (very, very broadly speaking) moved from the nineteenth century romantic focus on melody (e.g. Tchaikovsky) and harmony (e.g. Wagner) to a twentieth-century focus on rhythm. Just as musical theatre has always been a bit uneasy about the heavy backbeats of rock music, it has also never really tried to adopt the cross-rhythms of Stravinsky or the minimalism of Steve Reich.

Perhaps that's because musical theatre is essentially a romantic form. Or perhaps there's just never been a truly modern musical.

Yet.

As the song says, eventually the rhythm's gonna get ya.

A Right Old Ding Dong

It's really no surprise that a certain nest of lefties should celebrate in song the death of a working-class woman and by choosing "Ding dong, the Witch is Dead", it does make them a bunch of munchkins. Analogically speaking.

It's also a reminder of just how striking the Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg song is. The tune is nursery rhyme simple, based around the three notes of the simple triad. In the key of C major these notes are C, E and G. Each phrase begins and ends on one of these notes, like so:

"Ding (G) dong, the Witch is Dead (E)
Which (E) old witch? (C)
The wick(E)ed witch (C)
Ding (G) dong, the wicked witch is dead (G)"

This (and the repeated phrasing) is what gives it a childlike feel.

At the same time it's an exultant death chant. That's pretty striking for a family musical. Frankly it makes the sophisticated re-interpretation of Wicked look like a sentimental chocolate box for girlies (which it mostly is).

Whenever I hear someone talk about how "grown-up" the current culture is in comparison to the "innocent" entertainments of the past, I'll think if this song. Say what you like, those munchkins were hard-nosed little mothers.