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.

Taking the Risk It

Dennis Kelly, book writer of Matilda, has been making the case for arts funding under the title of "Matilda, the musical? A risk only subsidised theatre would take":

"In 2006, Jeanie O' Hare at the RSC approached me about adapting Roald Dahl's Matilda into a musical. This was strange for two reasons: the first was that musicals generally start with the director or composer, not the person who's going to write the script"

Although technically it started with Jeanie O'Hare, the "commissioning dramaturg" (I'll bet you don't get them in the commercial theatre). But it's true: the book writer is not usually the primary consideration. Until the show flops and then they're first in the firing line.

"The second reason was that I had absolutely no knowledge of musicals whatsoever. Far from believing this was a problem, I think it was actually what she was after."

Well, ignorance is bliss, as they say. But is this a risk that the commercial theatre would never take? Let's take a look at some of the book writers with commercial musicals currently or soon to be playing the West End:

David Greig (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
Catherine Johnson (Mamma Mia)
Lee Hall (Billy Elliot)
Bill Oakes (From Here to Eternity)
Harry Hill (I Can't Sing)

All of whom, as far as I can tell, are first-time musical writers. And for good measure let's chuck in a couple of old hands:

Christopher Hampton (Stephen Ward) - a playwright whose first musical was the commercially successful Sunset Boulevard.
Ben Elton (We Will Rock You) - a screenwriter/novelist/playwright whose first musical was the commercially less successful Beautiful Game.

The point is that the commercial theatre seems quite happy to take a punt on first-timer musical book writers. That's probably because most people aren't primarily musical book writers. They are lyricists or playwrights or award-winning 70s Hollywood soundtrack supervisors who, for whatever reason, have found themselves with the unenviable task of writing the book for a musical.

"Then to make things even riskier, instead of getting a tried and tested composer to write the songs, the RSC went for a comedian, Tim Minchin"

Nope, the commercial theatre would never get a mere comedian to write the songs for a musical. Oops.

Whilst not an obvious choice, Tim Minchin was not completely left-field. For starters, he is/was not merely a comedian but is/was a songwriting comedian. For mains, he is/was a Roald Dahl fan and had even tried writing a musical of Matilda ten years earlier. For desserts, his dark and slightly twisted sense of humour is/was a perfect match for Roald Dahl (something that perhaps didn't quite work with Charlie and the Choclolate Factory with the more campy optimism of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman).

"Could all of that have happened outside of a subsidised organisation? The answer is simple: no."

Actually the slightly more nuanced answer seems to be: possibly. I'm not saying that Matilda was risk-free. Far from it. It must have taken some far-sighted imaginings to bring that creative team together and nobody could have known the outcome. The point is that exactly the same risks are being taken in the commercial theatre. As Viva Forever proved, even the sure-firest kind of crowd-pleasing jukebox fare can go belly up.

Ah, but it's a different kind of risk.

"It's just that there is a different ethos when a theatre is largely funded with public money, a different sense of what it is you're responsible to and it allows for a different kind of risk, a risk that can lead to unexpected and peculiar things."

Well, this is an edited version of a longer speech, so I'll have to give Mr. Kelly the benefit of the doubt and assume the details have been lost. But if all you've got to show for the riskiness of subsidised theatre is "unexpected and peculiar things", then this is no case for more funding. Is Matilda any more "unexpected and peculiar" than Cats? Or We Will Rock You? Or Billy Eliott? In fact, "unexpected and peculiar" would make the perfect subtitle for my monumental yet-to-be-written masterpiece on the history of musical theatre.

I'm sure there are differences between the subsidised and commercial worlds but I'm not convinced it's to do with risk. I suspect it's more to do with process. Subsidised theatre offers longer development periods and ensemble casts which, I imagine, means more workshops and improvisation. The commercial world favours shorter rehearsal periods which, I imagine, means getting the script finalised before you start hiring the actors.

Really, I'm just guessing. The point is that, whatever the process, the final product is indistinguishable. Personally I would struggle to discern the subsidised qualities of Les Miz and Matilda from the commercial ones of Phantom of the Opera and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They are all risky in their own ways.

Then again, so is all musical theatre.

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:

Dahl M for Mathilda

I was pretty interested when I first heard of a musical version of Roald Dahl's Mathilda, especially when Tim Minchin was named as the songwriter. It seemed like a terrific match of author and subject. It still does.

But this report from the Telegraph's Serena Allott is a bit of a worry. Here's the show's book writer Dennis Kelly:

"'I'd never written a musical,' Kelly says. 'I don't particularly like
musicals.'"

You hear a lot of this from new musical writers and I never really understand it. No first-time playwright advertises their play by telling reporters that "well, to be honest, theatre's not really my bag, I'm afraid". If you don't like musicals, don't write 'em.

"Kelly admits that he initially assumed that the collaboration would entail him writing the play and plonking Minchin’s songs into it where he saw fit. 'Slowly I began to understand that the songs had to tell the story as much as the dialogue.'"

It doesn't exactly fill you with confidence. You're opening a new musical with a book writer who doesn't like musicals and who only recently realized that songs are an important part of the storytelling. Hmm.

British writers often give this impression of underestimating musicals, apparently unaware of the thatrical tradition from Show Boat to Phantom and thinking that all you really need's some flash sets and some catchy tunes, then sit back and enjoy your percentage. The idea that musicals are actually written, as opposed to merely produced, seems like a novelty.

Perhaps this is being unfair but that's often my impression. I suspect it's because, even now, when the West End is choca with musicals, there's still not what you could call a tradition of musicals in British theatre. For the most part British theatre is the spoken word; musicals are, at best, a bit of fun. They're just not in the blood in quite the way that they are on Broadway.

Now sometimes tradition can be overbearing and ignorance a virtue and I honestly hope that Mathilda is just such a case. And that Dennis Kelly has changed his mind.

Who'd Want To Be A Librettist?

Charles "two minds" Spencer gets confused at Into the Woods:

"With characteristic ingenuity, Sondheim weaves together several fairy stories..."

But (there's always a but):

"But in the second half the musical falls apart. James Lapine’s book becomes an increasingly confused mess of plottage..."

So let me understand this. It's the songwriter, Stephen Sondheim, who weaves all the stories together so ingenuously. But it's the book writer, James Lapine, who messes up the plotting in Act II.

Ah, book writers: none of the praise, all of the blame.