It's Not Easy Being God

He should try writing a musical. As Mathilda man of the moment, Tim Minchin, points out in the Evening Standard magazine (p.42):

“Bad musical theatre seems to be the vast majority – but good musical theatre is transcendent”

Transcendent indeed. Even more interesting is his description of Jesus Christ Superstar as a “radical atheist musical”. This seems worthy of some head-scratching. Here’s how the argument might go:

ATHEIST: Crikey, did you see that JCS? Really stuck it to you theists, eh?

THEIST: Not really.

ATHEIST: But it’s hardly gospel truth.

THEIST: Certainly not. It’s a secular take on a religious story. Whilst each scene has its origin in the New Testament, the interpretation is distinctly non-Christian. But that doesn’t make it atheist.

ATHEIST: Yes, but it doesn’t make any claims about Jesus’ divinity.

THEIST: No, but Jesus does address God directly in “Gethsemane”, usually as if He’s sitting front and centre of the lower balcony (His favourite seat, apparently):

“Why should I die?
Would I be more noticed than I ever was before?
Would the things I’ve said and done matter any more?”

Then at the climax of the song, Jesus submits to His fate with typical Tim Rice contratemporaneity:

“God, thy will is hard
But you hold ev’ry card”

ATHEIST: Contra what? You made up that.

THEIST: Yes, I think I did. But my point remains.

ATHEIST: Surely the whole point of that song is the one-way nature of the conversation. Jesus cries out for help but there’s no god to help him. The god he calls upon is the product of his mind. On this reading Jesus is the ultimate celebrity: gripped by the “superstar” delusion right to the end: “My God, why have you forsaken me?”. There is no answer; he dies alone.

THEIST: That’s true. On the other hand, if God isn’t merely a delusion and is actually on the other end of that cry for help, the drama still makes sense. Jesus must submit to His will, however desperate, afraid or alone he acts or feels. In other words, the authors are playing a very straight bat: we can’t infer either atheism or theism from the way it is written.

ATHEIST: So it’s stalemate?

THEIST: Not quite. I think we also have to ask where the audience’s sympathies lie. The drama (incidentally, just like Joseph and Evita) revolves around two characters – one with ideas of grandeur, the other acting as a cynical counterpoint. In JCS this climaxes with Jesus being nailed to a cross whilst Judas mocks and sneers at him with a smugly catchy refrain: “Jesus Christ Superstar/Do you think you’re who they say you are?”. At this point I think the audience’s sympathies lie with the victim and, as such, tips the balance in favour of theism. If there no God then Jesus is clearly being presented as a madman and would we really sympathize with a madman? Genuine madness excludes genuine sympathy. Jesus isn’t mad; he’s terribly sane and that’s his tragedy. And, if he isn’t mad, then there is a God.

ATHEIST: Hm, I don’t know. Sounds like over-interpretation to me. To be honest, I just like the funny song about Herod...


Now I’m not quite as bold as my theistic friend but I do maintain that JCS can’t really be considered an atheist musical.

My verdict: transcendently agnostic (with a very funny song about Herod).

Phantom Rides Again (and Again)

I caught Love Never Dies in the original London production. Since then there have been a lot of changes. According to my calculations by the time it closed in the West End it was on version 3.1 with Aussie-compatible Bill Kenwright plugins.

So this is a bit out of date but here’s a review.

**SPOILER ALERT**

One common misconception about Lord Lloyd Webber is that he’s a commercially-motivated writer. In truth he’s more Boheme than businessman. This is nowhere more evident than with Love Never Dies, a sequel to Phantom of the Opera, the most commercially successful entertainment in the history of the word ever. It’s taken 18 years. If it was all about the money, money (ch-ching, ch-ching) then, by this time, we would surely be on Phantom XII: Return to the Sewers.

But something finally drew His Lordship back to the characters of the original. So it’s 10 years on and the Phantom has donned his mask once again, skipped the Atlantic and become a mysterious genius who lords over a mini-empire of circus freaks and showgirls in Coney Island, New York. The star turn is Meg, a dancer from the days of the Paris opera house and the old ballet mistress, Madame Giry, has become Head of Light Entertainment. The Phantom hatches a plan to lure his old flame Christine, now an internationally-renowned singer, to perform in New York. She arrives along with hubby, Raoul, who, having gambled away the fortunes of his more successful wife, has turned into grouchy embittered drunk. So the gang’s all here.

Ah, but there’s also the boy. Yes, Christine has a 10-year-old (hint!) and it soon becomes clear that this fella is, in fact, the product of an illicit rendezvous between the Phantom and Christine on the night before her wedding. Well, I say “soon”. That’s truer for the audience than most of the characters. For Raoul the penny doesn’t drop until this exquisite exchange in the Act II:

PHANTOM: Such a child, strange to see, different, musical?
RAOUL:Huh?

That was pretty much my first reaction to the little tinker too. But, in fact, the boy is a necessity. The Phantom needs to be unmasked and that requires a character to react to the unmasking. In the original, it’s Christine. On the first occasion, she faints with shock; on the second, she accepts him, warts and all. The story revolves around these two points and the same points occur in Love Never Dies. Only this time it’s the boy, not Christine, who’s on the other end of the Phantom’s mug.

All well and good. But it does change things. The show begins with the Phantom still obsessed with his desire – romantic, artistic, erotic - for Christine. But as soon as he is revealed as daddy dearest then his focus shifts from her to the boy. This would be fine if his obsessive desire was enlarged too. Instead it seems to diminish. The Phantom has spent 10 years patiently building an empire and amassing a fortune half way across the world so that he can bring Christine to him. That’s obsessive. When he learns about the boy, what does he do? He tries to bond with him by showing him some freaky Phantasma inventions (“The Beauty Underneath”); he challenges Raoul during an early morning sing-off (“Devil Take the Hindmost”); and he forces Christine to sing a song (“Love Never Dies”). None of this really ramps up the obsession factor.

It also makes the Phantom far less dangerous. What is the Phantom story about? Essentially it’s a monster story with a twist of romance. In the original the monster isn’t slain by the swashbuckling hero, Raoul. Instead it’s the heroine, Christine, who does so with a sign of affection, a kiss. But the point is that the Phantom is a genuine (although pitiable) monster. He frightens, humiliates and murders. His obsession pervades the entire show as he manipulates events like a villainous puppeteer. By comparison the Phantom of Love Never Dies might as well be changing nappies. Not only is he a monster who’s less monstrous, his final “slaying” (being accepted by his son) is trumped by the actual and accidental slaying of the heroine. The result is a more domesticated and less fulfilling kind of drama . Where the original Phantom was a rock opera, Love Never Dies is closer to soap opera.

And yet and yet, despite the plot problems, it’s still worth the effort. There is one wonderful musical theatre moment. Christine is caught between Raoul and the Phantom. Her decision whether or not to perform the Phantom’s song becomes an ultimatum. The build-up is slow and methodical as the stage revolves and the characters wait backstage. Suddenly the lights are on her and she sings:

“Love never dies
Love will continue
Love keeps on beating when
you’re gone
Love never dies
Once it is in you
Life may be fleeting,
love lives on”

Now, like much of the show, the lyrics by Glenn Slater may be a little purple. But they are very singable and allow the swooping rangy tune to do its work. At the climax the lighting on Christine switches to theatrical footlights and it’s clear that Christine has made her choice and, once again, succumbed to the lure of the Phantom’s music. As the audience applauds it becomes the Christine’s audience of the play itself. We, too, have been lured into the drama.

The two leads, Sierra Boggess and Ramin Karimloo, are star turns and have the kind of voices that it’s a privelege to hear. The direction by Broadway veteran Jack O’Brien is slick and the designs are suitably romantic and outlandish. But this is Lloyd Webber’s baby. Something about this story brings out an open-throated, heart-on-the-sleeve honesty in his music and, when it comes to emotional truth, sincerity is a powerful thing. Phantom made him a fortune; a more poorly plotted Love Never Dies may lose him one. But it wouldn’t matter: it was never about the money.

Bye Bye Betty

So Betty Blue Eyes has come to close. I blame the bankers:

“It seems that the prevailing economic uncertainties nationally are leading audiences to take less risks on spending their money on new and unknown work and to seek refuge in safe and familiar titles and material”

But deep down it's still a mystery:

“It is very curious — after such amazing reviews and positive word of mouth, no one knows the real reason why Betty couldn't find a bigger audience”

So says Super Mac and that’s a worry. If he doesn’t know, then nobody knows. For a good couple of decades Sir Cameron seemed to know exactly what made a musical a hit: “safe and familiar” material like people pretending to be cats, a lengthy French novel and a weirdo in a sewer. By comparison adapting a well-loved Alan Bennett film should have been a doddle.

Now I claim no knowledge of the show: haven’t seen it, haven’t heard it. So speaking from the twin authorities of ignorance and prejudice, I can only agree with the assessment of the Guardian’s Alistair Smith:

“Stylistically, it feels like it could have been written at any point over the last half-century”

This is generally true of Styles and Drewe shows. They’re new shows but they feel like old ones.

“In the golden age of musical theatre, it was the popular music of its day. Today, the traditional musical is, like opera, more of a niche pursuit. It needs
to reinvent itself if it is to have a vibrant, popular future. You might even argue that plundering the back catalogues of pop groups such as Abba and the Spice Girls are one way forward (TV casting is another), and the best of these have no problems attracting large audiences.”

Firstly, traditional musicals are not a “niche” like opera. Revivals are playing in commercial theatres all across the land. Opera is almost entirely non-commercial. Secondly, jukebox musicals and TV casting are terrific but can’t offer a way forward. By definition these are old shows. Stiles and Drewe songs may sound as if they could have been written at any point over the last half-century but the songs from Jersey Boys actually were written half a century ago. Abba, Queen, even the Spice Girls; this is the popular music of yesterday, not today.

“But if new musicals are to find the large, popular audience required for a sustained West End run, they need to engage with popular forms of music, not
sounds and forms that hark back to a long-distant golden era”

Now I’m not in total disagreement with the analysis. I’m just not convinced that modern pop is the cure.

The problem is in our ears. Just for fun, let’s invent a theory and call it the Problem of the Audience and Stylistic Associative Preconditioning (PASAP). Stiles And Drewe sound old-fashioned. Why do they sound old-fashioned? Because their songs sound a bit like the kind of songs we associate with a certain period from the past. The clever lyrics, the exact and intricate rhymes, the lack of electric guitars and a heavy backbeat; there’s a gentility to their songs that speaks of a different time. By associative preconditioning the style points the listener to the pre-rock era.

Does this matter? Yes and no. On the Yes side:

1. Old-fashioned songs make it difficult to tell modern stories. It limits the potential.

2. Even old-fashioned songs in a period setting can be distracting. An old-fashioned song may be appropriate to the style of the show’s setting but that doesn’t necessarily make it an integrated musical. Oklahoma sounds folksy but it ain’t folk music. Period music is no substitute for drama.
(Incidentally the PASAP theory may explain why Stiles and Drewe have fared better with children’s musicals. Children are less preconditioned and therefore less likely to perceive a song as being “old-fashioned”)

On the No side:

1. Being old-fashioned doesn’t preclude success. The soundtrack to the Sound of Music beat the Beatles to become the biggest-selling album of the 1960s.

2. Modern pop music, despite the self-appointed title, isn’t that popular. At least not as popular as it once was. (In fact, it’s probably better to call it chart music in order to avoid confusion). “Memory” has never in the charts but it’s a far more popular song than most that have been.

3. Chart music faces the PASAP theory in just the same way as old-fashioned music. When you hear chart music, you think top ten, Radio 1, hippity hop, Beyonce, whatever. The point is that you don't necessarily think character, situation, drama. So how useful is it for musical theatre?

Alistair Smith points to the Divine Comedy, Lily Allen and Tim Minchin as songwriters bringing modern pop into musical theatre. It'll be interesting to see the results.

And if it doesn’t work, we can always blame the bankers.

Hogwarts for Girls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting the Content into the Concept

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

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

Plenty to chew over.

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

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

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

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

Hair (concept = hippies)

To which I’d add:

Cats (concept = er, cats)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that’s sorted that. Clear as.

Musical Eurythmics

Not the latest exercise DVD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW: The Book of Mormon - God's Favourite Musical

Another show from over the pond:

Sometimes it’s all about the punctuation. In musicals there’s a modern sub-genre which can best be described as the Unlikely Idea For A Musical! The Musical musical. The really significant bit is the exclamation mark. Now these new exclamation marks are not like the old exclamation marks of, say, an Oklahoma! or an Oliver!. Then they signalled joy and exuberance. Today’s punctuation is more of an ironic wink to the audience: “We know this is silly; you know that we know this is silly. Let’s all be silly and ironic together”. The problem with this approach is that it demeans the form as much as it does the subject matter; musicals as mindless superficiality. But all that ironic silliness is a just cop-out and no substitute for the far harder task of dealing in honest character and genuine feeling. More than funding cuts, jukebox jollies or Heathcliff on Ice, it’s the exclamation mark that truly threatens the future of musical theatre.

As a pretty unlikely idea for a musical The Book of Mormon could easily have gone down this route and turned itself into a piece of self-satisfied religion bashing. Thank Heavenly Father, it didn’t. Instead of being silly in an ironic way, it’s silly in a laugh-out-loud funny way. And amongst all the potty-mouthed so-wrong-it’s-right political incorrectness, it’s sincere and sentimental.

The show is written by South Park creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, along with Robert Lopez. Lopez was the co-author of the puppets-for-grown-ups musical Avenue Q and the same theme of wide-eyed innocents being thrown into the big wild world provides the basic impetus here. Two young Mormon missionaries, Kevin and Arnold, are sent to Uganda to convert the local folks. But the pair’s naive doctrines prove inadequate when dealing with the ills of Africa: poverty, AIDs, warlords and scrotal infestations (don’t ask). Kevin becomes disillusioned whilst Arnold makes up his own version of the Mormon story to try and win over the Ugandans, including a young girl Nabalungi.

One of the problems facing the authors must have been the need for exposition. The Book of Mormon can’t necessarily assume a lot of audience knowledge about the subject. The authors need to get some important facts across. So the centrepiece of the story is Kevin and Arnold’s mission and the big number in Act One, “The All-American Prophet”, sees them leading the locals through the Mormon basics. But it’s also educating us, the audience. Perhaps not in a strictly Mormonistic way (“You mean the bible is actually a trilogy and the Book of Mormon is Return of the Jedi? I’m interested”). But enough so that we get the Joseph Smith highlights:

“He didn’t come from the Middle East like those other Holy Men
No, God’s favourite prophet was All-American”

This set piece is then mirrored in Act II when the now-converted Ugandans act out their understanding of the story for the visiting Mormon bigwig. The problem is that their understanding is based on Arnold’s made-up version which involves the angel Moroni descending from the Starship Enterprise, ewoks dancing merrily in Salt Lake City and significant amounts of ranine fornication (seriously, don’t ask). The point is that all this exposition, which is normally just the boring bits necessary to explain the plot, has become the plot. That’s wonderful book writing and what makes the show work.

What makes the show funny is the cheery advice on how to cope with stultifying feelings of guilt, fear and shame:

“Turn it off like a light switch
Just go click
It’s a nifty
little Mormon trick”

Or perhaps it’s the fey bunch of shirt-and-tied white boys getting in touch with the dark continent:

“We are Africa
Just like Bono, we are Africa”

Let’s be clear: Cole Porter, these songs ain’t. There are no sophisticated rhymes, unexpected melodic structures or crunchy ‘n’ complex harmonies. But then Cole never wrote songs about a Mormon facing down a warlord by grabbing his hand for a white gospel singalong. Funny songs need funny ideas and this is one of the funniest. There are no rhymes. They aren’t even any jokes as such, just statements of faith set to an earnest gospel track:

“I believe
That ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America
I am a Mormon and a Mormon just believes”

Of course we’re being invited to laugh at some of the wackier Mormon beliefs but never at the Mormon characters; we’re still rooting for Kevin. It may not be Porter but, on its own terms, it’s just as good.

There’s obvious confidence in the material. The cast are kept busy by some wonderful vocal arrangements and a few of those tricky Jesus to Darth Vader quick-changes. The two leads, Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad, are spot on. They’re like two opposite types kids you meet at school: one’s the perfectly vain head boy, the other’s the weirdo at the back of the class. Yet you never doubt that their friendship is genuine. The staging adds to the whole with subtle touches of suitable inappropriateness. Such as? Well, things like the Ugandan’s ritualistically symbolic depiction of dysentery with red and brown tasselled sticks (you did ask).

The jokes may be dirty but it’s heart is pure. The Book of Mormon - no exclamation mark - is a spiritual whoopee cushion of a show.

Putting the Con into the Concept

So recently I made my first trip to the Isle of Manhatten. Naturally I managed to squeeze in a couple of shows. One of them said on the bill Catch Me If You Can. So I did.

And this made me think about concept musicals. Now I’m never sure exactly what makes a musical a “concept” musical; it’s a vague term and probably not a little self-important. Yet I have the funny feeling that Catch Me If You Can is an example of one.

So what makes a concept musical? I think there are two aspects to this: THE SONGS and THE FORM.

THE SONGS (ooh, sub-headings).

The songs express a concept rather than a character or situation. A good example of this is “If They Could See Her Through My Eyes” from Cabaret. Ostensibly it’s just a comedy number performed in the Kit Kat club. The joke is that the MC sings this sweet song of love-blind devotion to someone dressed as a gorilla in a tutu. The kicker is the last line:

“I grant you the problem’s not small
But if you could see her through my eyes
[pause] She wouldn’t look Jewish at all”

Suddenly it’s not just an innocent comedy song but a comment on the unfolding drama of the story; the sinister, but alluring, rise of anti-Semitism. The song isn’t expressing a particular character or dramatic situation so much as an idea, a concept.

The other thing I’d say is that concept songs tend to be highly stylised. That is, the style of the song, often a very self-conscious pastiche or parody, is in some way being used to express the drama. Take “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” from Company which is written as a 1940s close-harmony trio, right down to the patter lyrics (“Bobby booby bobi”) and the vocal glissandi (“Knock, knock, is anybody the-e-ere?”). Now there’s no reason why the three women singing (Bobby’s girlfriends) should sound like the Andrews Sisters. Even the showy rhymes (coercin’ a bull/personable) are characteristic of the style of song rather than the characters. So what is Sondheim up to? He’s not just written a cheery, upbeat song; he’s written of cheery, upbeat song in a very recognisable song style. When we, the audience, hear it we’ll recognise the style and bring all our pre-conceptions to it. In the case of the Andrews Sisters, we think of light and innocent and frothy (“Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”). Having planted this pre-conception, Sondheim can then do the opposite with the lyrics which are biting and acidic:

“You could understand a person
If he actually were dead
Doo doo do do!”

In other words the familiar and understood style of the song is being used to tell the story. Not so much a concept song, perhaps, but a pre-concept song.

So what about the form?

THE FORM

Concept musicals require some disassociation from the story. This can be a disassociation of place (like the Kit Kat club in Cabaret) or of time (like rock songs in an 1891 setting as in Spring Awakening) or of something more abstract. This disassociation allows for an artificial break in the story as the musical moves between dialogue and song. This is why concept musicals often mirror the form of a revue show (Chicago) where the formal scene-song, scene-song structure reflects the clear distinction between the talky bits and the sing-y bits.

This problem of moving from dialogue to song is, I think, at the heart of the way that musicals have developed. Broadly speaking the early musicals of the 20s and 30s ignored the problem; silly plots were punctuated by great songs via the most tenuous of dramatic links. Later the book musical tried to smooth the transition by making the songs an expression of situation and character. More recently the big West End shows overcame the problem by ditching most of the dialogue making everything one long sung-through poperetta.

The concept musical offers another solution. By creating this disassociation or artificial break between the story and song, there’s no need for a smooth transition from dialogue to singing. The songs are still “integrated” in the sense that they are still related to the drama. But there’s none of that fiddly lead-in/underscoring/intro used in book musicals to try and cue a song “naturally”.

Ay, but there’s a rub. Two rubs, in fact (ooh, numbered rubs).

1. The first is that most concept musicals aren’t fully so; most have a mixture of book and concept numbers. Cabaret, again, is a good example with some songs taking place within the Kit Kat club and others in the “real life” of the story. Even Company and Chicago have book numbers (“Barcelona” and “Class” respectively). This suggests that there are some practical limits to the form when it comes to telling a story. Some moments just call for a song to arise naturally from the moment in the narrative, not to be disassociated in an artificial way.

2. The second point is, I think, the bigger problem with concept musicals namely that the concept is always the same. Whether it’s a German nightclub, a Broadway revue or a Chicagoan burlesque, everything is viewed through the prism of entertainment. As Billy Flynn says, “it’s all showbiz, kid!”. This isn’t just a case of “shows about shows”; it’s shows about how everything can only be understood as a show. Sometime this works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Which brings me (finally, I know) to Catch Me If You Can.

**SPOILER ALERT** (ooh, spoiler alerts)

This is a musical based on the film which itself is based on the true life story of Frank Abagnale Jnr, a man who managed to defraud millions of dollars whilst still a teenager. The FBI, in the form of dogged investigator Carl Hanratty, finally caught up with him. Whereupon he was jailed, only to be released early and given a job helping the FBI helping catch other fraudsters. And presumably writing his memoirs.

(Nice little YouTube clips here which give a good feel for the show).

So what makes this a concept musical? Well for one thing some of the numbers are highly stylised which creates that funny old dissociative feeling. Frank and his Pop turn “Make Butter Out of Cream” into a Frank and Deano Vegas act; later Pop is drunkenly propping up the bar with Hanratty swopping boo-hoo stories in a classic saloon-style song “Little Boy, Be a Man”. But these stylisations are really part of a much bigger one.

The show begins at the end with Frank’s arrest. As Hanratty attempts to slip on the ‘cuffs, Frank starts spinning a line, trying to con his way out of trouble one last time. Hanratty’s having none of it. So Frank turns to the audience and makes his appeal directly. Just give me a chance to tell you my story, he says and...ding! We’re into the first number, “Live in Living Color” (or “Colour” – our language, I say we choose the spelling). The whole thing becomes Frank’s “show” in the form of a 1960s TV special. That’s the big concept.

Once again a story is being triple filtered through entertainment for a smoothly plotted outcome.
But I think Catch Me If You Can runs up against the limit of the form. In many ways this was a terrific musical: smart, tuneful, slickly staged and wonderfully performed. And yet , and yet. Somehow the big concept diminishes the drama. This is essentially a How? story. How’d this teenage kid get away with it? We need to hear more about the details of the con: the forged papers, the fake IDs, right down to the specialist inks. Not to the mention how he played the banking system, the payroll processes and the rest. But there’s not enough room for this in a concept musical. Instead the only answer to “How’d he do it?” is a spot of razzle-dazzle: with a smile, a song and a dance. The result feels like the kind of show the creators wanted to write rather than the kind the story required.

The show’s lyricist Scott Wittman said that he was inspired by a picture of Frank Abignale Jnr dressed in a pilot’s uniform (one of his many cons) and surrounded by a gaggle of air hostesses. He took one look at those leggy flight attendants and saw in them the potential for a great high-kick chorus line.

Life as showbiz. But sometimes the con needs a better concept.

Hello to Any MusicalTalk Listeners

And thanks for the link, Thos.

In his latest MusicalTalk episode he interviews Paul Emelion Daly and the curious issue of singing accents comes up for discussion. Readers may be interested in this post on a similar topic Better Get Rid Of Your Accent? (with added Thos commentary).

Poke a Bear and See if He Sings

Blogger Andrew Brinded has been busy unscrambling a very silly post by the Guardian’s Stuart Heritage. The thrust of Mr. Heritage’s argument is that characters in film musicals should just say how they feel rather than sing. He does, however, admit to liking “The Bare Necessities”, to which Andrew parries:

“I would suspect that as Baloo is a talking bear, it’s okay for him to sing”

There is much wisdom in this. Let’s poke this bear some more.

There is a notion in some quarters that cinema audiences no longer accept characters bursting into song MGM-style. What is credible on stage apparently becomes ridiculous on film. I disagree. I just think that most of today’s film musicals either skirt around the problem or aren’t quite good enough to overcome it. Let’s go back a bit.

Cabaret marked the turning point. In the stage show there are “book” numbers performed by the characters in the story and “concept” numbers performed in the Kit Kat club. For the film version they dropped the book numbers so that the only songs performed were the ones performed in the more “realistic” setting of the cabaret itself.

Post-Cabaret there followed a relatively fallow period. Then Disney brought Broadway back to the screen. Suddenly movies were singing once more. There were singing mermaids (Little Mermaid), singing prince-beasts (Beauty and the Beast) and singing lions (Lion King). Even the warthog got its own number. And clearly audiences weren’t put off by it.

Ah, but this was animation and a difference this makes. Musicals need to exist in a world of “heightened reality”. This doesn’t necessarily mean a fantastical world but there has to be some sense of “bigness”, a reason to sing rather than merely to speak. Animation, by its very nature, already exists in this world. This is where Andrew’s comment gets to the nub. For an audience member, the imaginative leap required to move from talking bear to singing bear is less than it is to move from talking human character to singing human character. But it’s essentially the same imaginative leap, the same basic need for the willing suspension of disbelief. Animation just makes the leap a little easier.

So Disney offered a way back for the film musical. But the real test came with the live-action stuff and that’s been more of a mixed bag. Two exceptions have been Oscar-laden Chicago and the box office hit Enchanted. But neither film really challenges the idea that audiences won’t accept real people bursting into song. Chicago works on a similar basis as Cabaret with the songs being presented as artificial “concept” numbers. Enchanted, although for the most part a live-action film, leaves the singing to characters transported from an animated world.

So the notion that cinema audiences won’t accept people bursting into song persists to this day. Of course it’s bunk. Audiences will accept plenty of things on film – “flying cars, wizards, dragons” as Andrew points out – so there’s no reason to think that they’d be put off by characters singing. They weren’t in MGM’s day, they wouldn’t be now. The problem is that no recent screen musical has done it successfully enough to prove the point.

In the meantime, we'll always have Baloo.

Unrepeatable, Is That What You Are?

(This is a bit of an old article but still worth a comment or two)

More from the Guardian Theatre Blogs on musical theatre. This time it's Dan Rebellato venturing the opinion.

Money is, again, the starting point. (There does seem to be a train of thought that is highly suspicious of anything in the theatre that makes a profit). So recent boffo box office from the likes of Wicked and The Lion King are "likely to be a cause for grumbling as much as celebration". Well, you can't please everyone:

"Musicals generate polarised responses for two reasons."

I'm assuming he's taking about people who work in the theatre rather than audiences. Judging by the box office, at least, the response of the paying public generally seems favourably unilateral.

"First, musicals are pleasure machines: vast theatrical mechanisms to generate rapture, exhilaration and joy. If you go see a musical with a sceptical attitude, these efforts are bound to seem teeth-clenchingly awful."

This is true. But it's not the exhilaration and joy that make it awful; it's the creekiness of the drama. The same thing happens with bad political theatre where the message is hammered home at the expense of the drama. It all becomes too obvious and embarassing to watch.

"Second, the scorn for musicals on one side tends to inspire equally passionate defences on the other, and vice versa, so that musical audiences wind up getting mocked as much as musicals themselves."

And, presumably, the scorners get mocked for being joyless ponces.

“Those of us who work in theatre tend to think what is distinctive about the form is its unrepeatability, its liveness...Some musicals raise that to a high level. Seeing enormously skilful dancers and singers performing complicated dance steps and hitting high Cs is an exhilarating live experience. But other musicals have taken the opposite route. These are the shows in which liveness takes second place to smooth reproducibility"

Two points. The first is that his subsequent examples – Cats, Phantom and The Lion King - are not judiciously chosen. Cats is essentially a dance musical requiring plenty from the performers including high Cs. Phantom goes two tones higher to a piercing high E. As for The Lion King, I admit I've never seen it. But I hear the giraffes are t’riffic.

The second broader point is that I don’t think the theatre’s “liveness” is best equated with its “unrepeatability”. Yes, every theatrical performance is technically a one-off but, in reality, most performances and most aspects of a performance do get repeated to one degree or another. And knowing that a performance will be repeated doesn’t diminish my experience as an audience member. My experience is still unique. So I don’t see that replicating a West End show in Toronto or Sydney or Reykjavik really demonstrates that “liveness takes second place to smooth reproducibility”.

I suspect what Mr. Rebellato means is that some potential aspects of a live performance such as spontaneity and improvisation can be lost in a large-scale musical production. This is true but inevitably so; indeed the larger the production, the less spontaneity is possible. But rather than dimishing the “liveness” this kind of production can bring out another aspect of it. When a well-drilled group of people work together to turn a song and dance routine into a smooth effortless joy the results can be exhilarating; a kind of exhilaration only possible with a large-scale musical. Co-ordinated disipline is as much to be admired as spontaneity; repeatability can be a virtue. It’s the difference between a marching band and a jazz quartet.

For me the “liveness” of theatre is more to do with its immediacy and riskiness than its “unrepeatability”. This is a significant point when the article brings up the important issue of microphones. Miking can take away from the immediacy of the singing voice and the kind of audio trickery that “cleans up” a singer’s voice in real time also takes away the risk. There’s a genuinely useful discussion to be had here.

But unfortunately it doesn't happen.

Instead the article continues with some cryptic talk about miking being “symbolic displacement” in theatre’s “connectedness to time and place” which suggests the need for “a vision of value that can't be reduced to market exchange?”.

Told you: it all comes back to the money.

Learning About Lerner

Finally finished Fi-n-ish-ing-the-Hat by Big Steve.

The best bits are the concise and sharp criticisms of some of the Great Broadway Lyricists. These, I suppose, are the “heresies” trailed in the title. Well, maybe you have to be a Broadway insider but they don’t seem that heretical to me: Gershwin over-rhymed; Hart was lazily inconsistent; Berlin, well-crafted but banal. Nothing too surprising there, I would have thought.
Except for Alan Jay Lerner.

Here Sondheim is unusually cryptic. He describes My Fair Lady as “one of his most entertaining nights in the theatre”. And yet is not particularly enamoured by the lyrics.

Yet Lerner has always struck me as the most polished of the Broadway writers. His lyrics, always singable and often elegant, sound as if they’ve been buffed to a high shine. In thinking this I admit that I’m probably as influenced by anecdotes as by the lyrics themselves. My favourite story is how he once locked himself in a hotel room for two weeks trying to come up with an alternative to one couplet from Gigi:

“Those little eyes so helpless and appealing
Some day will flash and send you crashing through the ceiling”

What’s wrong with the couplet? Well, should the mood take you, you would “crash” through a floor but more likely “fall” through a ceiling. But then, as well as gaining a few broken limbs, you’d also lose the internal rhyme (flash/crash). So Lerner spent two weeks holed up in a hotel room expending his nervous energy (he wore gloves whilst writing to stop him biting his fingernails) trying desperately to come up with something better. In the end he gave up and kept the lines as they were.

But that’s why I like Lerner; his lyrics (like Sondheim’s) are highly crafted.

So it’s surprising when Sondheim points out this bit of clumsiness in “I will Never Let a Woman in My Life”:

“I’d be equally as willing
For a dentist to be drilling
Than to ever let a woman in my life”

I never even noticed it before. Clearly I need to pay more attention. It’s a real grammatical pile-up, a convoluted way of saying “I’d rather go to the dentist than...”. (In addition I suspect that “drilling” really requires an object otherwise the implication is that you’re getting drilled by the dentist; very different indeed). This may seem nitpicky but remember who’s singing it. It wouldn’t matter if the character were a simple, uneducated “flahwer” girl who washed her face ‘n’ ‘ands before she come, she did. But it’s supposed to be a professor of English, one of the foremost linguistic experts in the world. The inelegant phrasing is uncharacteristic. Of Lerner too, for that matter.

Another one picked up by Sondheim is from “On the Street Where You Live”. The false rhyme:

“People stop and stare, they don’t bother me
For there’s nowhere else on earth that I would rather be”

Now I concede the dentist drilling but here I rush to Lerner’s defence. I’ve always thought that this was deliberate. Posh young Freddy has fallen head over heels for Eliza. But it’s not a grounded romance; it’s youthful and head-over-heels-y (“And oh, the towering feeling...the overpowering feeling”). I think Lerner’s indicating this by using that false rhyme. It’s letting the audience know in a very subtle and unobtrusive way that Eliza and Freddy aren’t quite the real deal; that the relationship we really should be paying attention to is Eliza and grumpy Higgins.

Or it could be that Alan Jay Lerner just ran out of fingernails.

Nothing To Do With Musicals But...

I managed to catch the t'rrific Aussie singer Kate Miller-Heidke last night. It reminded me of one of my favourite couplets which appears in her song "I Got the Way":

"You sound distant on the phone
Distant in distance and in tone"

Marvellous.

Makes me smile every time.