Jennifer Toksvig's Twitter Thread

Got nothing to say about this. Just found it fascinating and wanted to put it in a more readable form for myself. Jennifer Toksvig is a lady worth listening to, having previously written one of the most interesting things I've ever read about lyric writing. 

This is one about the current state of musicals (and also employs the word 'smooshing' on several occasions, which can only be a good thing). 

Enjoy.

"A friend of mine recently posted on FB: "I’m confused. If we all love Sondheim so much, why do we tacitly accept a music theatre landscape almost entirely comprised of movie musicals, jukebox musicals, and frivolous drivel?" Here are some things I want to say about musicals.

It's complex. The man literally perfected the form. That specific form, the two-act, fourth wall, American scene-to-song book musical about contemporary life in his lifetime.

He was able to do that because of those who perfected their own specific form before him, like Oscar, who was weaving together other forms to create a new one that Sondheim then took and perfected.

Arguably, there is nowhere left to go with that form, the actual form, other than to keep the stories contemporary, which also involves contemporary music styles.

So things like hip hop musicals are made and people call it “new” but it isn’t new. It’s still the same American style that he perfected. The industry and the fandom are reluctant to admit that it isn’t NEW new, but there is an underlying sense of ennui, a frustration that new work is not plugging into something that feels excitingly new, not just stimulating but electric. Because it is electricity that creates buzz. And buzz creates demand. And demand creates income.

Producers smartly turned to existing sources of electricity: popular catalogues of music. There's some genius in truly weaving together existing hooks, existing emotional drives, to create a naturally flowing narrative. It's one of the most difficult tasks I've ever faced.

It can be infuriating and thrilling if you nail even one moment. I have often described a musical as a string of coloured lights. The songs should light up, but they can only do so if the book acts as a strong source of the power they need to do that.

A good cable plugged into a reliable emotional outlet in the power network of the human condition. Without that cable, the songs don’t light up.

Even in a catalogue musical, whilst individual songs might still light up inside the audient, you will never get the coloured lights that enhance each other’s brilliance as a whole string without that power cable.

So many catalogue musicals use the life story of the songwriter / performer to power the songs. In my view, this is like the difference between non-fiction and fiction. The former can be interesting and engaging. It can be a joyful or scary read, and you can get lost in it but anything based in fact has actually happened. You are always going to be revisiting it, even if you didn't know about it before. It will always be a re-presentation, a copy. Fiction, on the other hand, is brand new. You cannot have visited it before. It's unexpected.

Within your personal existence, that story has never existed until this moment. Those people, those events, they are new and fresh. Exciting. When a brand new story first emerges into the world, there aren't even many other people for whom it will have existed.

And that? That is electric. With a catalogue musical about the actual lives of the songs, you can feel electrified by a song you already know and love outside the context of the story, but that's not a string of coloured lights. It's just sparklers.

Nothing wrong with sparklers. I love a good New Year's Eve celebration as much as anyone: the crowd in Times Square, the ball dropping.

The story of that experience is one you know and will love even if it's your first time experiencing it, at least partly because others around you already love it. This is also true of being in the audience of a catalogue musical of music you all already love.

It has that kind of shared experience. I'm not saying it won't feel electric, but I am saying that the story is far less likely to be the thing providing the power.

So catalogue musicals are refreshing the form that Mr Sondheim (may his memory be a blessing) perfected, but they are not renewing it, and mostly they bring with them that sense of ennui. We long for electricity.

Some people nail the form as near as dammit. @Lin_Manuel has that genius. He makes it feel electric because he gets it from the inside out, and he refreshes the form with music genre, updating the histories to make them newly accessible.

Those people are rare, though, and producers need to fill theatres as often as possible, for as long as possible, to gain the most income with the least expenditure. Running costs are far lower than production costs.

What that does to the form is evident in the history of musical production. By going global, Cameron etc essentially changed musical theatre, made it be about income first and foremost, but they also made musicals be something like Les Mis that you know and love. Familiar.

And nonetheless moving for that - in fact, often more so because of the familiarity. But now they are the Christmas lights you get out every year. You know and love them. They light up the tree and it makes you feel good to see that. Cosy. 

But some bulbs are out, and the ones that look like icicles are scratched now, you notice, as you fetch a gift from under the tree. Every time you put them up, they look a bit more worn but you don't mind. 

You don't mind losing some of the chandelier, some of the orchestra, some of the lavish set pieces because it's still the string of lights that you know and love. Still a sparkle on the tree for Christmas.

Then one year you get a new set of lights and you don't put them on the tree. You put them over the fireplace and suddenly you've used the same principle to frame a new area, and now you're actually hanging some stockings on the mantelpiece because damn, that looks festive.

And even though there are no kids in the house and you haven't even thought about doing this before, you actually put out a carrot and a cookie and some milk before you go to bed. And then your partner gets up earlier than you, drinks some of the milk, takes a bite of cookie and gives the carrot to the dog, and you come in rubbing your eyes, see the new lights shining, and look down to see that Santa has actually visited and suddenly there is a story... and it's unexpected and it's... electric.

We don't need new musicals. (Alright, don't shout, we love new musicals, but...) We need new musical theatre. Not new 'musical theatre'. New. Musical. Theatre.

Look, here is the really exciting part. Right now, all over the world, writers and composers are experimenting. They're taking that perfected form, and they're smooshing it together with other storytelling forms.

Me? I'm smooshing it together with immersive theatre where the audience can be fully included if they want to be, and with the way that folk storytelling has always worked.

Not just through collectively sung folk music, but also in ways we have always gathered to share stories: over the breaking of bread, and so on.

These things have their own rhythm, not scene-to-song but the walking, the greeting, the talking, the eating. Maybe songs are not emotional highs but moments of shared memory or understanding. Maybe songs are not three minutes long, but the length of a hook and nothing more.

Maybe we don't sing when we can no longer speak, but rather, sing when we want to connect, to come together. Perhaps the soliloquy is not ourselves internally, but ourselves being invited by the community to be seen and heard.

Look, this isn't just about what I'm doing. What I know for sure is that some people all over the world are smooshing and making a mess, and much of that will fail but hopefully some of it will nail.

And sometime, in the future, some day, there will be a moment when someone takes the stuff we've nailed, no matter how small it is, and somehow makes it perfect.

So here is what I want to say to that person, if they exist anywhere near my work, and also to Sondheim. Dear genius, for the record: thank you. You did what nobody else could have done, and the form would not be the best it can possibly be without you.

(But forgive me for trying to make something else, something more, with sung storytelling. Gonna make a mess. Gotta make a mess again.)"

Narrative Songs and Story Songs

So I was listening to a fascinating episode of Aussie podcast Thrash 'n' Treasure and a discussion about The Book of Mormon. One of the presenters liked this musical and offered up his reasoning:

"It [The Book of Mormon] tells the full narrative within the lyrics. Most musicals, so far, that I've listened to will ramble along and the character will go about how he's sad about something. And they'll sing for four and half minutes about being sad. And four and half minutes later, all that's progressed is the fact that he's sad. Nothing's moved forward. They've just sung about a moment in time and shoved a play in between. Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] have managed to advance the story with every song and within the songs, rather than just have a play broken up by music."

I think I know what he means. But I also think that it's a common misconception about musicals.

Yes, musical theatre songs often contain narrative. That is, they give you the plot points in song. And that's true for some of The Book of Mormon songs. "Two by Two" shows us how the newly-minted Mormons are getting assigned to their various missions all over the world. "Baptise Me" shows us Nabalungi getting "baptised" by Elder Cunningham, albeit in a Fifty Shades kind of a way.

Songs can also be interspersed with dialogue and scenes. The narrative continues, not so much within the song, but around it. So, when Elder Price tries to gee himself up in order to convert the local Ugandan warlord, he does so by singing a little gospel number to himself, "I Believe". Halfway through the song, the scene changes. He enters the warlord's camp and picks up the song again in a cheery singalong with the gun-toting chief.

So theatre songs often have this narrative element. However - and here's the point, so I may just write it in caps - THEY DON'T HAVE TO. 

That's because musicals aren't really 'narrative through song'; they are 'drama through song', and drama is more than narrative. It's also character, tone, theme and all those other things that your tweedy English teacher droned on about at school. 

So, for a song to be dramatically integrated, it doesn't necessarily have to drive the plot. Take the opening number from The Book of Mormon, "Hello". That doesn't do much narrative apart from introducing a few names. It does, however, set the tone of the show. The same goes for "I am Africa" where a bunch of fey white boys express their new-found love of the Dark Continent. It doesn't really advance the plot. It's more an exposition of the musical's thematic concern for inter-cultural exchange ("Africans are Africans, but we are Africa!").

Any which way, it's pretty funny.

So, in musicals, there are some songs that advance the narrative and some songs that don't but advance the story in other ways.

Still, a fair dinkum discussion about a beaut of a show. Well worth a listen.

TATAR #14 She's Leaving Home

by Paul McCartney and John Lennon (1967)

It always seemed a pity to me that one of the greatest pop writers never had a pop at musical theatre. Paul McCartney branched out into classical works and painting and poetry but never, as far as I know, even attempted a musical. That's a shame and not just for us.

Trying your hand at an oratorio or two will stretch you as a composer. A musical, on the other hand, gives you the opportunity to write songs, duets, trios, choral numbers, songs in character, songs with specificity, songs in a dramatic context. Musicals allow songwriters to develop as songwriters. 

And, if this song is anything to go by, McCartney would have been a great musical theatre writer. You only have to look at the time signature to know that this is a different kind of a Beatles number. They didn't write much in 3/4, which is more for waltzing than rock 'n' rolling. So there's no heavy backbeat. It's really a story song but it's the brief character portraits that make it so interesting. 

There are three characters involved. Firstly, the young girl who's leaving home:

"She goes downstairs to the kitchen 

Clutching her handkerchief"

Nice visual detail that. The kind that says a lot without having to say much. I also love the way that the final phrase of the first verse ends with "leaving the note that she hoped would say more". Then, in the second verse, the same phrase gets shortened to "stepping outside she is free". That shortening puts the emphasis on the word "free" and leaves more of a gap after it, before the chorus kicks in. It feels like she's opened the door and paused as the cold air hits her face.  

Secondly, there are the parents.

"We gave her everything money could buy"

Finally, there's the narrator who plays the neutral observer and only hints at his point of view towards the end when he sympathises with the young girl:

"Something inside that was always denied

For so many years"

Then again, the parents have their sympathetic moments too:

"We struggled hard all our lives to get by"

And, frankly, the girl's decision is hardly looking like a bed of roses:

"Waiting to keep the appointment she made

Greeting a man from the motor trade"

Running off with a car dealer is what you might call a sub-optimal solution. And that's the image that we're left with: the young girl waiting. We're not sure the fella ever turns up.

So we have three distinct character voices. But here's the trick with this song: in th chorus, we get to hear all three at the same time. So the chorus' words are the narrator's matter-of-fact description:

"She is leaving home"

But that long high note on "home" speaks to the young girl's bid for freedom as she tries to release herself from her domestic prison. Then underneath, we get the the voices of the parents, lower and more dirge-like and full of overdone self-pity:

"We gave her most of our lives

Sacrificed most of our lives"

We can actually hear something of all three characters simultaneously. And, even though we're only getting small hints about the characters, it's enough to tell us that they're more ambiguous than mere caricatures. That's quite an achievement for a three-and-a-half-minute song. 

And, frankly, it's very musical theatre.