A Professor Professes

Apologies for the hiatus.

Funnily enough the world has continued to spin in my absence and MusicalTalk has continued its fine work with an interview with Professor Robert Gordon. And he has a theory or two.

Musical comedy: we started it

Basically the Americans often claim musical comedy as their own. They invented it, they perfected it. Well, it ain't necessarily so, says the Good Prof. In fact the musical comedy is a British thing, starting with Gilbert and Sullivan and continuing via the Princess theatre musicals of Guy Bolton and PG Wodehouse.

So not only did we give them classical liberalism and the philosophical underpinning of the Founding Fathers, we're also claiming Pal Joey. All of which explains why the Yanks are a bit miffed and why Broadway critics can get a bit snarky when it comes to British musicals.

Well I've looked at the G&S influence before. Now I'm not denying that it's there, only that it's not really what's important. The Good Prof cites the patter songs in the Gershwins' Of Thee I Sing. But the patter songs aren't really what we think of when we think of Gershwin. A Gershwin song is highbrow slang, blue notes and energizing syncopation, all of which are fairly non-Gilbertian and non-Sullivanian.

The Princess musicals may make a better case. I can't say I know much about 'em. But it's odd that, if they are such significant shows, that they are so little-known. Then again, significance is not always the same thing as enduring appeal.

Advancing it Backwards

No, not the plot of Merrily We Roll Along.

Instead the discussion turned to whether the newer Broadway shows - The Producers, Avenue Q, Hairspray, The Book of Mormon - represent a new kind of musical comedy. Not really, says the Good Prof. Critics have over-emphasized their innovations but, in truth, these are old-fashioned shows.

Couldn't agree more. Structurally they follow most of the conventions (two acts, a romantic plot) and musically they tend to hark back to old song styles. Nothing wrong with that.

Where they do innovate is in the choice of subject matter. Part of the joke of these shows is the clash between subject and form: high-kicking Nazis and cheery songs about racism. These shows play on the conventions of musical comedy and, in doing so, need to maintain some of the conventions themselves. You could say that they are advancing the form backwards.

Is Billy Elliot the Greatest British Musical Ever?

Not a bad choice.

But I wouldn't agree with the Good Prof's reasons which are:

(1) that the events of the Miners' Strike still resonate in people's memories
(2) because it's about a boy wanting to dance, this justifies the story being told as a musical

I'd say that (1) won't be true for everyone. It's not the vividness of audience members' memories that makes the show work but the convincing way in which the authors have portrayed the tension and atmosphere of the miners' community. On (2) I'd agree that every musical needs a justification for being a musical. But if musicals can only be justified if they are about dancing (or, presumably, singing) then we're seriously limiting their scope.

So what is the greatest British musical ever? Oliver! is the obvious choice but personally I'd plump for Jesus Christ Superstar. In fact it may well be the greatest musical ever.

Don't tell the Americans.

Felines, Nothing More Than Felines

A wee comment left at Chris Caggiano's blog. In a post about overrated musicals he asks his students to burrow down and figure out what's "wrong" with some well-known shows. It seems that Cats proves to be one of the trickier assignments:

"I've only ever had one student who came close to capturing what is really wrong with Cats. She focused on the fact that Andrew Lloyd Webber stuck too close to the original T.S. Eliot poems, which are mostly written in the third person. As a result, we rarely hear any of the cats singing about themselves, rather we hear about them from a third party. So, we never develop a bond with anyone on-stage, with the exception of Grizabella, who sings one of the few songs in the show that wasn't based directly on one of Eliot's poems. Pretty savvy, huh?"

This is not im-paws-able. But allow me to throw my penny into the kitty.

I'm not sure that this third person thing is the problem. Cats is a series of character portraits, not characters. As such we're not being asked to develop a bond with the characters so much as delight in the imagination that's portraying them. We're not bonding with the kitties; we're bonding with the whimsical mind of TS Eliot.

If Cats has a problem then it's more to do with the straight-jacketing effect of the light verse which sometimes forces the music into a predictable tum-ti-tum-ti-tum pattern. Sometimes Lord Andy can overcome this problem with inventive little bits of rhythm (as in the phrase: "The Rum Tum Tugger is a curious cat"). But the verse still doesn't quite offer the flexibility of an original lyric.

Even so, it's still a very entertaining miaow-sical.

Desert Island Discs in the South Pacific

Old interview with Lord Andy from Radio 4's archive of Desert Island Discs.

The Lord's (at that time merely Sir's) music selections are typically diverse - from rock 'n' roller Shostakovich to Bollywood composer AR Rahman - as well as typically populist - Elvis Presley and The Beatles. Only one pick was a musical theatre number but it was a goody: Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Some Enchanted Evening".

Hard to argue with that. But what makes the melody so enchanting? For me, the secret of the song is in one little semi-tone. Let's take the first six notes:

"Some En-chan-ted Eve-ning"

The second of those notes is an F sharp. If you are of a certain musical disposition and knowing that we are in the key of C, you may give a small shudder. F sharp, you see, is foreign to the key of C. It should be an F natural. Play a C chord and stick an F sharp on top of it and it sounds dissonant, wonky, wrong.

So how come this wrongness sounds so right? Well, firstly the F sharp falls on an off-beat - the "en" of "enchanted" - so there isn't a direct clash with the chord underneath. Place that F sharp on an on-beat like the "eve" of "eve-ning" and the whole thing sounds wonky again.

Secondly, try substituting the foreign-sounding F sharp for a "proper" F natural. Go on, I dare you. With just that tiny change the melody feels so different; it's lighter and brighter but, at the same time, a whole lot less enchanting.

The song is from South Pacific. The character singing is Emile de Becque, a romantic (he's French) and exotic (he has half-Polynesian kids) plantation owner with a dark past (he killed a man). In short, he is a man who would definitely sing an F sharp.

Sometimes a semi-tone makes all the difference.

Prom Talk: Four Questions Every Lyricist Should Ask

Interesting pre-Prom discussion on lyrics with Don Black and Barb Jungr, during which the host Matthew Sweet raised some pertinent lyrical questions. Thusly:

Is there something inherently funny about rhyming? 

At this point Don Black had his please/chimpanzees rhyme quoted at him from his title song from Tell Me on a Sunday which was a little unfair, being the only really cringe-making rhyme in that whole show.

But the proper answer to the question is, I think, not quite. Rhymes aren’t inherently funny. Rhymes make us smile but the funniness of a lyric usually comes from the idea. This, for example, from A Little Night Music's "You Must Meet My Wife" by Big Steve:

FREDRIK:
She loves my voice, my walk, my moustache,
The cigar, in fact, that I'm smoking.
She'll watch me puff until it's just ash,
Then she'll save the cigar butt.
DESIREE
Bizarre, but you're joking.

"Moustache/Just ash" is about as fun a rhyme as you can think of. But it's not funny. The funniness is from the idea of Fredrik extolling the virtues of his wife to old flame, Desiree, who's simultaneously trying to seduce him. Rhymes can be elegant and witty and an aural delight. But I don't think they're inherently funny.

“Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum.”. Is this cheating?

Certainly not. The lyric is, of course, by Sheldon Harnick and comes from Fiddler on the Roof’s “If I Were a Rich Man” and far from cheating is, in fact, quite brilliant. Why? Well, it's such a natural characterisation. Tevye is daydreaming about being a rich:

If I were a rich man
Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum

He even loses the lyrical train of thought mid-sentence the way people singing to themselves do:

All day long I'd biddy biddy bum
If I were a wealthy man.

In this case the nonsense of the lyric tells us something essential about Tevye. One, that he is poor. Two, that he will never be rich. This is not an ambitious ten-point plan of how to succeed in Anatevka without really trying. All that dibby dum-ing is telling us that this is an unfocussed flight of fancy, a plea to God that will forever remain unanswered. We know it and Tevye knows it. The song (and the show) is not about Tevye getting what he wants but whether he can keep his faith (and "Tradition") when he mostly gets what he doesn't want.

Is lyrics grammatical?

Hey, that was my question. Don Black pointed to his own example in a line from "Take That Look Off Your Face":

"I bet you didn't sleep good last night"

Now this may not pass grammatical muster but "sleep well" wouldn't sing half as good due to the adjacent "L" syllables - "well last" is not easy to get your singing tongue around. And in using "good" the meaning is still plain so nothing is really lost.

Lyrics are not prose or poetry. You don't need a literary degree or a Shakespearean-sized vocabulary to be a successful lyricist or even English as your first language (the lyrics of ABBA were discussed). It always stuns me to think how such well-known phrases such as "I'm dreaming of a White Christmas" could have been put into the American culture by an immigrant of limited education like Irving Berlin. Successful lyric writing is, to an exceptional degree, open to all-comers.

Is Dolly Parton the greatest lyricist in the world?

OK, they didn’t ask this question exactly. But they did end by quoting one of her lyrics which demonstrates all the strengths of the form. The song is about a simple poor girl who falls pregnant by a man who then leaves her. As time passes and against all the evidence, she clings to the naive belief that the child’s father will return “Down from Dover”. The last lines are heart-breaking ("it's too still") in a way that only a lyric can be:

"My body aches the time is here it's lonely in this place where I'm lying
Our baby has been born, but something's wrong, it's too still, I hear no crying
I guess in some strange way she knew she'd never have a father's arms to hold her
So dying was her way of tellin' me he wasn't coming down from Dover"

Music Television - Prom 59: The Broadway Sound

And no Sondheim. Gosh.

This was John Wilson and his orchestra who has found an enthusiastic audience by reviving old Hollywood and Broadway scores and giving them the full orchestral CPR. The result is to hear the music as if for the first time. Loosed from their prison of wheezy old mono recordings, these scores once again sound energetic and alive. He's proving to be a regular hit at the Proms and returned this year with Prom 59: The Broadway Sound.

The important thing about John Wilson is that he's from Gateshead and has a sensible haircut. Most conductors don't. I think that this, as well as the popularity of Broadway tunes, accounts for the fact this particular Prom was not only televised but also bumped up to BBC2 rather than being squirrelled away on BBC4.

In general classical musicians don't look good on television. String players tend to loll and jerk in their chairs like drunken puppets; percussionists look like they'd rather not be there; the brass are all puffed-out cheeks and sweaty faces; and the wind look as if that's what they've got.

This is not simply to be rude about classical musicians. These are exquisitely trained and talented professionals. The problem is that the physical effort it takes to play so exquisitely and talented-ly can often lead to some odd-looking contortions. Generally speaking classical musicians are better heard than seen.

The same is true for singers. The kind of stamina, diaphragm and facial muscle it takes to sing like Domingo is Olympian. In contrast it's easier to look good whilst singing a showtune. Musical theatre performers tend to be better at some basics of a visual performance: how to gesture with your arms, how to smile when you sing, how to act with your eyes. And they tend to have better haircuts.

So the Broadway Prom made for decent television as well as a lovely concert with Sierra Boggess (ever-glorious) and Seth MacFarlane (a fine crooner - new name to me but, apparently, famous as a cartoon dog) putting in t'rrific turns. Elizabeth Llewellyn also did a stunning version of "Come Home" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's lesser-known Allegro. In fact much of the evening was not the usual playlist, with even the Frank Loesser songs being lesser-known ("Sue Me", "Joey, Joey, Joey"). Perhaps that was to highlight the work of the great Broadway arrangers - Robert Russell Bennett, Don Walker, Irwin Kostal, Hershy Kay, Hans Spialek - rather than just the composers.

There were some less successful elements. Personally I'm never convinced that using bits of scripted dialogue to lead into a song works in a concert setting. It always feels stilted. And the Albert Hall is just too grand for pure musical comedy ("Seven and a Half Cents", Another Openin', Another Show", "Don't Rain on My Parade"). Comedy is hard work and, funnily enough, the rehearsal footage with the orchestra decked in their working clothes felt a more appropriate look for these numbers.

But all was forgiven as they ended with a whizz-bang and the whizziest and bangiest of all Broadway composers. Yes, Jerry Herman finally took his place in the Proms pantheon:

"You coax the blues right out of the horn, Mame
You charm the husk right off of the corn, Mame" 

Roll over, Beethoven.

Interesting programme notes here.

Odds and Ends of a Beautiful Lyricist

And so farewell to one of the greats. Mister Steyn has been posting his appreciations here and here. Nothing to disagree with there.

For me, Hal David was as good a lyricist as any. With his writing partner, Burt Bacharach, they were the inheritors of the Great American Songbook tradition: smart, funny, carefully crafted songs.

“What do you get when you kiss a guy?
You get enough germs to catch pneumonia
After you do, he’ll never phone ya
I’ll Never Fall in Love Again" 

That’s from their one and only Broadway show, Promises Promises, and, for Broadway’s sake, it’s a shame they didn’t stick with musical theatre. Their songs seem closer in spirit to the Tin Pan Alley tradition than, say, rock ‘n’ roll. You’d never find that “pneumonia/phone ya” rhyme in a rock song.

 If Hal David was a lyricist from the old school then it wasn’t really from the sophisticated Cole Porter academy. In interviews he spoke about his love of the Irving Berlin waltzes: “Always”, “What’ll I do?”. The same simplicity and directness can be found in his own 3\4 number:

“What the world needs now
 Is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing
 That there’s just too little of” 

Aside from the Berlin influence, what else makes a Hal David lyric a Hal David lyric? Well, there’s the domesticity. Bacharach’s music is, in songwriting terms, ambitious and precise with unusual shifts in harmony and unexpected time signatures. Arty and poetic lyrics would draw too much attention to the arty nature of the music (as is the case with his Elvis Costello collaboration “Painted from Memory”. But with a Hal David lyric, the music is grounded in the everyday:

“The moment I wake up
Before I put on my make up
I Say a Little Prayer for You" 

That’s pretty typical. And those typical staccato, off-beat phrases require the easiest kind of lyric to be effective.

The final ingredient is the song titles. A title is vital, as Ira Gershwin said, and Hal David had some of the best: “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, “Always Something There to Remind Me”, “Don’t Make Me Over” and my personal favourite, “Odds and Ends of a Beautiful Love Affair”. These are the kind of titles that most lyricists would kill for. They encapsulate their songs in language that’s immediate and precise. They don’t look like much on the page but when they’re sung they come alive.

In twenty years time most of the 1960s chart music will sound as oddly old-fashioned as Victorian music hall does today. But somebody somewhere will still be discovering afresh the easy beauty of a Bacharach-David song.

Magic Moments indeed.

Killer Idea for a Musical?

Is Assassins a good idea for a musical?

In a review over at One in a Long Line of Good Girls, Helena Williams quite rightly points out one of the key features of this musical:

“It was always going to be a bit weird...”

I remember going to see a production of Assassins and bumping into an acquaintance on the way to the theatre. The conversation went something like this:

HE: Hey, where’re you headed?

ME: Actually I’m just off to the theatre

HE: Oh, really? What are going to see?

ME: It’s called “Assassins”

HE: “Assassins”? Sounds interesting. What’s it about?

ME: Actually it’s a musical about all the people who have tried to kill American presidents.

HE: Oh-kaaaaaaay [backing away slowly].

For normal people, Assassins is weird.

To be honest all musicals are weird; we just forget with the most popular ones. But Assassins has a real struggle to overcome its weirdness. The problem is neither the music nor the lyrics. It’s not even the book. The problem is the idea.

Let’s begin at the beguine and consider a simple fact: most people do not try to kill presidents. So those that do are inevitably somewhat beyond the pale of most people’s sympathies. To put it bluntly, the central characters in Assassins are nutjobs. So what do you do if you happen to be writing a musical about them?

1)  EITHER try to humanise these characters by presenting them sympathetically (“underneath they’re just like us”)

2) OR darkly mock the characters for their nuttiness (“isn’t it funny how dangerous these nutjobs can be?”)

The problem with (1) is that it’s patently untrue. The problem with (2) is that it’s patently nasty. For me Assassins tries to do a bit of both and splits the indifference.

So we have John Hinkley Jnr, the man who lodged a bullet in Ronald Reagan’s chest. Why’d he do it? Well he’s just another pitiful guy impossibly in love with a gal:

“I am unworthy of your love

Jodie, Jodie"

Our sympathies go with him. Until we realize that the object of his his achy-breaky heart is the actress Jodie Foster and he is, in fact, America’s most dangerous celebrity obsessive. The song is genuine but we know he’s nuts. So do we cry with him or do we laugh at him? I can’t help feeling that most people would do neither. The weirdness is too distancing for anyone to engage.

Successful musicals can be made out of the weirdest ideas, from singing cowboys to dancing cats. But there are limits. All-singing-and-all-dancing–and-all-assassinating nutjobs? That idea would kill any show.