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.