Sams' Theory of The Second Act Dream Ballet

Last week The Sound of Music Tour reached Southampton.

Some time ago I actually heard the director, Jeremy Sams, discussing this show and the structure of musicals. His Big Idea was that, structurally speaking, all two-act musicals have a problem. The problem can be stated thus:

1. Act I is longer than Act II. Act I is normally around 1 hour 15 minutes and Act II around 30-40 minutes.

2. During Act I we get introduced to all the main characters, shown the main relationships and conflicts and reach a partial resolution for a suitably climactic finale. All well and good. But, says Sams, this means that...

3. Act II has 30-4o minutes to fill and not much story left to tell.

His solution is The Second Act Dream Ballet. This is the idea that every Act II requires a Dream Ballet. Not a literal Dream Ballet (although it could be) but some kind of biq sequence that doesn't further the plot much but does serve to run down the clock; a time-filling bit of theatrical padding. In his production of The Sound of Music, the Second Act Dream Ballet is the wedding sequence. In terms of plot, this sequence is telling us nothing more than that Maria and Captain von Trapp get married. But fill it up with singing nuns, processional children, vows, rings and a big white dress and, bingo, you've got ten minutes' worth of stage time.

Other examples might be (and these are my own random thoughts, not Sams'):

Carousel - a literal Dream Ballet sequence
The King and I - the Uncle Tom's Cabin sequence
Guys and Dolls - the Luck Be a Lady number
My Fair Lady - the Embassy Ball sequence
Hello Dolly - the Hello Dolly number
The Producers - the Springtime for Hitler sequence

I'm not sure it works for every show (I can't see where it fits in Oklahoma or Cabaret) and in some ways it sounds similar to the traditional "11 '0' clock number" (as in Hello Dolly) but there does seem to be a basic truth to it. Of course, all this theatrical padding still needs to be integrated. It should still be consistent with character, themes, comedy, emotion and so on. But (and this is the important bit) it should do little or nothing to further the plot in any way, shape or form.

So, in summation:

Sams' Theory of The Second Act Dream Ballet = more nuns.

Quote for the Day

David Mamet in the NY Times (via Mr Stage Right at Big Hollywood):

"I have never spent much time thinking about the themes of my plays, as, I have noticed, when an audience begins to talk about the play’s theme, it means the plot was no good."

The Jukebox Keeps Playing

Broadwayworld tells us that the Spice Girls' back catalogue is being lined up as the next big jukebox musical. Many will groan. But many more will go and see it.

It begs the question, how many more pop catalogues are there left that can be turned into commercially viable musicals? There has to be limiting factors. For starters there has to be a solid fan base, willing and able to make a trip to the theatre (so not too rock 'n' roll). Secondly, there needs to be enough material to make up an evening's entertainment. That means at least a dozen hit songs. By my reckoning that there are only a small number of potential jukebox musicals left:

Forever the Young One - the Cliff Richard musical
Hello, Yellow Brick Road - the Elton John musical
Desperately Seeking Something - the Madonna musical
When Irish Guys are Smiling - the Westlife musical
Retirement Plan - the Girls Aloud musical

I'd give 'em 5 more years. Tops.

Conceptions

Recently caught a show performed by the Guildford School of Acting. The show was Baby with a book by Sybille Pearson and songs by David Shire and Richard Maltby Jnr. It was first performed on Broadway in the 1980s. As the strory of three couples and their reactions to pregnancy, it was a small-scale, intimate show in an era of megamusicals. Lovely performances, sweet songs.

But one the most notable aspects of the show was coming out at the interval and not knowing what the ending would be. This doesn't happen often in musical theatre. Most succesful musicals are based on something else - a book, a play, a film, Argnetinian dictators' wives. There are exceptions (The Music Man, Company, A Chorus Line) but they are in the minority. Even the great Rodgers and Hammerstein only managed two musicals based on original ideas and they were two of their least succesful (Allegro and Me and Juliet).

Why should this be the case? Well, in commercial terms, having an already-established element may help with the advance sales. It's easier to sell Mathilda, the new Roald Dahl musical, than an entirely original musical. In practical terms, I'm sure it helps to have a focal point. Musicals are such a curious mix of competing elements and personalities, having an unchanging source material might help give a certain coherence.

But perhaps there's more to it. Perhaps there is something inherently difficult in conceiving ideas for musicals. Ideas often start small - a character sketch, a scene outline - and then get fleshed out. But musical ideas tend to require a certain size, of character, of emotion. In short, there needs to be a reason to sing. Maybe there is a discontinuity between the "smallness" of how ideas begin and the "bigness" required.

I admit this is all very vague. But along with the obvious commercial and practical considerations, it may explain why original idea musicals tend to come from smaller-scale shows. Shows like Baby are simply easier to conceive.

Phantom Rides Again

There's a new trailer for Love Never Dies, the Phantom of the Opera sequel. Sounds as if the story is largely the same as the one produced by Frederick Forsyth who, I think, was Lord Andy's book writer when a sequel was first mooted many years ago. Although I haven't yet seen Forsyth's name attached to any of the publicity for the new show, he did produce a novella called The Phantom of Manhatten. Spooky.

Anyway, good excuse to post a review of the film version of the original Phantom.

All musicals are, in the end, collaborative efforts and the more you look at Lloyd Webber shows, the more you appreciate his collaborators. Tim Rice initiated Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. Don Black had his finest lyric-writing hour with Tell Me on a Sunday. Cats owes a lot to its choreographer, Gillian Lynne. Perhaps the exception is Phantom of the Opera. That’s not to say that the rest of the Phantom team were unimportant. Maria Bjornson’s designs were spectacular, Hal Prince’s direction was fluid and Lloyd Webber has never been as successful without Cameron Mackintosh as his producer. Only to say that, more than any of his other shows, Lloyd Webber’s contribution was the driving force behind Phantom.

For starters, it was his idea. He read the book and saw the potential. It’s hard to imagine now but Phantom wasn’t always obvious material for a musical. The original Gaston Leroux novel is a patchy pot-boiler. The silent film versions play up the gothic horror. The Hammer Horror versions focus on, well, mainly the blood and the heaving bosoms. What Lloyd Webber provided was the romance. For him, the story of a beautiful young singer and her ghostly, disfigured tutor was, in fact, a high romance; the pitiful love of the unlovable.

According to some it is also the most commercially successful entertainment in the history of the world, ever. I remember reading that fact somewhere and thinking that (a) there’s no way anyone could possibly prove such a thing and (b) it’s probably true. On a commercial level Phantom can easily compete with biggest blockbusters that Hollywood can offer. Which brings us neatly to the film version and the simple question, what went wrong? How do you take the most successful stage show ever and turn it into a dud film? Here are a few thoughts, roughly in order of importance:

1. The show is “through-sung” which basically means that they cut most of the talking bits. This was Lloyd Webber’s biggest break from traditional musicals. The difficulty in traditional musicals is to get the characters to move easily from dialogue to song. With a “through-sung” musical, the opposite problem occurs: nobody stops singing and you end up with banal conversations being sung for no good reason. The stage show gets away with it because the whole thing crashes along on a big wave of emotion and the audience is swept along by the live performance. On film, there’s more distance and the endless singing starts to feel awkward and unnatural.

2. The film tried to out-size the stage show. Can’t be done. Grand and spectacular designs are always going to look better in three dimensions than two. The most memorable images from the film are the small things - the rose in the snow, the toy monkey music box. They should have found a few more of these.

3. The film tries to provide a bit of back story. We’re shown the Phantom as a child being ridiculed in a freak show. There’s no need. It skews the story away from the romantic and towards the psychological. The Phantom should be driven purely by desire, not the psychological need to work out any lingering abandonment issues.

4. The Phantom’s disfigurement isn’t nearly disfigured enough. In the stage version, half of his skull is caved in leaving a moon-like crater where is head should be. When the mask is whipped off in the Big Reveal, it is genuinely shocking. In the film, he has some severe burn marks and a touch of hair loss. It’s really not that bad; at least, not bad enough to spend your life in a sewer.

5. During the big climax in the Phantom’s underground lair, Raul finds himself singing with a noose around his neck. Inevitably this raises a snigger. There is an unspoken rule in musicals that singing should not be attempted in certain situations. (I seem to remember a song from Sweeney Todd, during which, the actor self-flagellates). It’s silly.

When it came out the film announced itself with no major stars and as the most expensive independent British film ever made. That, too, was typical of Lloyd Webber: big risk, big money. You can understand why he wanted to maintain control. There is something about the story that resonates with the composer. His curious mix of opera and rock, melody and bombast, sincerity and grandiose melodrama, all found their home in Phantom. There have been echoes in his subsequent musicals: the monstrous Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard; the dangerous relationship between the young girl and the convict in Whistle Down the Wind; and now, finally, he’s written a Phantom sequel, Love Never Dies. I think it’s probably worth the effort; this is a very unique relationship between author and story. Let’s just hope that the film version works out a bit better.

Dancing on the Edge

Lovely piece in The Guardian by Sanjoy Roy - a dance critic, he - taking time out from the high-falutin' stuff to cast an eye on dance in the some of the current West End shows. His conclusions:

"In the end, I realised that you can't judge dance in musicals by the same standards as you would use for ballet or contemporary dance. Far more than in those forms, it is designed to be looked through rather than looked at. Its focus is often elsewhere – a story, a person, a feeling, a song – and to achieve that, it sometimes matters less if a dancer can do a split leap than if she can wiggle a finger well."

This seems to me an eminently sensible conclusion, especially the distinction between "looking through" and "looking at"; dance as a tool for storytelling as opposed to dance for its own sake.

But it does raise an issue regarding performance in musicals. The problem is that doing a split leap is far more impressive than wiggling a finger. With a ballet or contemporary dance piece, even if you don't get what's going on, the sheer athleticism and physical achievement can still be impressive for an audience. It's clear that the abilities of the dancers go way beyond those of the average audience member and so the average audience member is suitably "wowed". So how can that same "wow" factor be achieved in a musical if the dance is less physically demanding (less "wowey", if you will)?

Some thoughts:

One is to have specialist dancers as Sanjoy Roy notes is the case in Dirty Dancing. The dancers don't have to sing; the singers don't have to dance. Each can specialize.

Two is to impress by versatility. Have the performers doing lots of things - acting, singing, dancing, juggling poodles - and doing them well. The World Champion heptathlete, Jessica Ennis, may not be the fastest runner in the world but the fastest runner can't also hurdle, high jump and throw stuff. Musical performers can be impressive all-rounders.

Three is...well, to be honest, I'm not really sure if any of this really matters. Let me digress.

A few years ago I had the good fortune of seeing Tony Bennett performing with a jazz quartet. As wonderful as Mr. Bennett was, the performer I most remember from that concert was the pianist. During one particular song the piano part started off simply enough but gradually became more and more complicated. The improvisations got more and more involved, the synchopation more and more off the beat. I became aware that this top-class pianist was actually struggling with the music. By the end his eyes were focused like a madman and he was concentrating like his life depended on it. He was on the edge of his ability and it was thrilling.

A few years later and I'm listening to a children's Christmas concert. A little girl, maybe only 5 or 6 years old, comes on with a guitar about the same size as her. She's only been learning a few weeks but is desperate to perform "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen". So she plucks out the first line of the melody. It's going well until, ooh, she hits a duff note. The audience shift politely in their seats but the little girl doesn't seem to notice. Her focus is on her fingers and that note. She tries again but can't quite get it right. She bites her tongue and has another go and finally, finally gets the note out. The performance continues in the same vein, only by this time the audience is hooked. Rather than feeling embarassed for her (she isn't embarassed herself), they are actually willing her on, beyond every wrong note and on to the end of the piece. Will she make it? The tension was almost unbearable. She was on the edge of her ability and it was thrilling.

Digress over.

This is a roundabout way of saying that perhaps it is not the level of performance that matters so much as the risk that the performer takes. A performer in a musical may not display the same physical prowess as a specialist dancer (or the vocal gymnastics of an opera singer, for that matter) but they can still be thrilling if we know that they're pushing to the edge of their ability. Like those high-wire acts who, now and then, pretend that they're about to fall off, even when they're not. It's reminding the audience that what they're doing is difficult. And musicals should always be difficult.

PC Peddlers

Following up from the post below on Oklahoma!, here's an interview with Michael Matus who plays the Persian peddler, Ali Hakim, in the Chichester production. Rather than playing the character as an actual Persian, Michael Matus plays him as a conman with a phoney accent and a painted moustache (at one point this is made clear when he briefly drops the accent and wipes off the 'tash). The Chichester Observer article explains:

As for Oklahoma!, Michael is playing a part described as a Persian peddler, a part he admits may well have raised a laugh in its day but could potentially come across as very un-PC today.

"Now it could just appear tasteless."

And so the current company have a different take on the role. Ali Hakim, they have decided, is probably from Chicago, quite a sinister character, a conman, not from Persia at all.

"I wouldn't want to end up with a fatwa on my head!"

I'd disagree with the "tasteless" accusation. It certainly didn't seem to harm the National Theatre's 1998 production. I suspect that the over-sensitivity was more to do with a white-skinned actor having to "brown up" in order to play a Persian. As such the decision is more understandable and, despite being a significant character change, actually makes surprisingly little difference to the storytelling. The most important thing about Ali Hakim is that he is a comically dodgy salesman of comically dubious wares; his ethnic origin is really by the by.

In related news Stage Right comments on another instance of change in the name of PC. In this case it's the original Shriner scene from Bye Bye Birdie which, according to the actress scheduled to play Rose in the forthcoming Broadway revival, is a bit too "gang-rape-y". Whoever knew?

Watch the clip and make up your own mind.