"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.
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