The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (25 page)

That small-town life, as the act begins to wind up, consists of preparations for a clambake on a nearby island, a clambake Billy has so far refused to attend. It’s an annual ritual of the village, and Billy finds it both threatening and beneath him. He’d rather find a good saloon on the mainland.

Jigger, meanwhile, has concocted a plot for him and Billy to rob the mill owner, Mr. Bascombe, who will be bringing a few thousand dollars to a ship (that he also happens to own) that night. The plan is to take the money from Mr. Bascombe as he delivers it to the ship’s vault.

Bascombe plays a significant part in the bench scene, offering Julie another chance at the mill if she’ll just leave Billy behind (she declines). It’s a prime example of the kind of architecture that keeps musicals shapely and all of a piece. Logically speaking, it’s not especially likely that the owner of the mill would also be the owner of the ship that Jigger has sailed in on, but it’s possible. It’s even less likely that he would be out at midnight carrying a satchel of money. This coincidence is covered in a single line that slips by the audience almost unnoticed, however. Why bother to make Bascombe the intended victim in this robbery instead of some new character? It’s important that the man who is going to be at risk is someone we know and already have feelings about—preferably negative ones. It gives us a rooting interest and makes us feel how the community is all interconnected. Bascombe is the town’s richest man, an oppressor of local labor, a small-minded, tightfisted entrepreneur whose placid, churchgoing exterior hides a tyrant’s soul. He’s the man Mr. Snow is on his way to becoming. Surely Rodgers and Hammerstein could have created an additional character to carry the money—a chief accountant or bookkeeper or even a messenger—but this is better. This creates dramatic symmetry and pulls the story together.

Characters such as Bascombe are like the iron tie rods that run through the ridge beams of the shotgun houses in New Orleans. The houses were relatively cheaply constructed and given to settling and slippage over the years, so builders introduced an iron rod that ran crosswise, bolted at each side. Every few years, or when necessary, a homeowner can pull his own home together by tightening the bolts—pulling the house in on itself, turning the screws, so to speak. Thus the house stays waterproof, insulated, and strong enough to stand. The rods are rarely noticed but always functioning, creating tensile strength in the building. Bascombe is like a human tie rod, keeping
Carousel
shipshape.

This is one of the reasons that picaresque stories are hard to do as musicals. In shows like
Candide
and
Big River
, we keep leaving the secondary characters behind, never to be seen again. This, like the passive hero, tends to limit a musical’s prospects. Audiences seem much more comfortable and nourished in a community that stays in the same place and where the people can be relied upon to take an ongoing part in the story. From
The Music Man
to
Fiddler
to
Sweeney Todd
, musicals thrive by taking audiences to a time and place and making them feel that—for a couple of hours, at least—they live there, too.
Carousel
gives us a community intact, disrupted by Billy, the force from outside whose very presence seems to ensure that there will be drama—just like Harold Hill or Sweeney or any other outsider entering a closed world.

Carousel
needs tie rods not because it’s a picaresque but because, like
Gypsy
, it covers a lot of chronological ground. In
Gypsy
the tie rods take two forms: the evolving but basically unchanging vaudeville act that we see being perpetually freshened up by Madame Rose but always reliably trading on corn and patriotism, and the musical leitmotifs that keep returning: “Let Me Entertain You” and the phrase “I had a dream!” No matter how often the show travels, it always carries the same baggage, literally and emotionally. The tie rods not only keep the show in shape, they keep the audience on the journey.

In any case, in
Carousel
, Jigger Craigin approaches Billy with his scheme, and Billy demurs. He hasn’t sunk so low that he needs to pull a knife on someone. He sends Jigger packing—for the moment. Then Julie approaches and delivers a piece of news he wasn’t expecting: she’s pregnant. The ground shifts.

Billy is about to take on a level of responsibility willy-nilly that he has never thought about before. The eternally rebellious boy is going to be asked to be a man and behave like one. Implicit in this is the idea that raising a child is best done in one stable place—never Billy’s milieu. Now what?

Rodgers and Hammerstein created from this circumstance one of the great showpieces of music theater, the “Soliloquy,” an almost eight-minute rumination on impending fatherhood. It is perhaps the greatest example of Hammerstein’s dictum that a song should be a miniature play, with its own movement, conflict, and resolution. Once Billy understands what’s happened, it takes him four minutes of imagining the great things he and his unborn son may do together and separately—four minutes of fatherly braggadocio—before it occurs to him that he may not have a son at all. He may have a daughter.

He’s awestruck by responsibility, an emotion with which he’s largely unfamiliar. “What would I do with her?” he wonders. “What could I do
for
her? A bum—with no money.”

Now the music shifts, and so does the nature of his thought process. By today’s standards, Billy’s musings on his “little girl, pink and white,” may seem politically unacceptable, but for an untutored carousel barker of the late nineteenth century, they’re apt enough. And then, after he’s painted the rosiest possible picture of her, darker thoughts begin to intrude. Finally, after seven minutes, he confronts responsibility. It’s not about the child at all—it’s about the man.

As Rodgers’s music stirs up a sense of resolve, Billy sings:

I got to get ready before she comes!

I gotta be certain that she

Won’t be dragged up in slums

With a lot o’ bums—

Like me!

She’s gotta be sheltered and fed, and dressed

In the best that money can buy!

I never knew how to get money,

But I’ll try—

By God! I’ll try!

I’ll go out and make it

Or steal it or take it

Or die!

The lyric is prophetic, but we’re hardly sure of what will happen, and on this moment, and after giving us his best high G, Raitt directed that the curtain should fall.

In the original show, however, that’s not the end of the act. In a quick scene, Billy agrees to serve as Jigger’s accomplice, and Jigger convinces him that their best plan would be for the two of them to go on the clambake with the villagers and then quietly “disappear” in time to go commit the robbery, returning immediately afterward. It will give them cover and an alibi. Billy runs into the kitchen for the knife they’ll use to threaten Mr. Bascombe, and then the two of them rush to blend in with the other villagers as they head to the boats that will take them out for their annual revel. The curtain falls on a gentle reprise as this placid small-town population heads out for a well-earned evening of food and drink, and maybe some innocent necking and stargazing.

The audience, of course, knows what no one in the town, including Julie, does—that before the night is out something terrible and irreversible is bound to happen. And in that suspension, we are made to wait. If we care about the people in the story, the wait is heartbreaking, no matter how much we may need refreshment or a bathroom or, in the days of the original production, a smoke. It’s unbearable because what can be more painful than bearing witness to innocence that is about to be destroyed by grim experience? It’s like watching footage of President Kennedy’s open limo turning into Dealey Plaza moments before the shots ring out. Although
Carousel
makes no claim to being witness to history, the emotional pull of watching the moments before a disaster—personal or global—is always the same. And, remarkable as it seems, it’s actually more powerful than the “Soliloquy,” and it’s the proper ending for the act.

*   *   *

For many shows, the question of where to drop the curtain must have been difficult to answer. Is the anticipation harder to bear than the act itself? Is “What will happen?” better than “Look what just happened!”?

West Side Story
used a variation of a classical technique to answer the question, the
finaletto
.
Finaletto
is a fancy opera term that refers to a piece of music that ends a scene. Often, it suggests a small cluster of reprises or intertwining songs. It doesn’t end the whole show (that’s the
finale ultimo
). A proper
finaletto
may take many forms, but it often manages to convey a group of differing points of view from different characters, letting us know that there are clearly defined conflicts and differences of opinion at this point in the story. But it also, by reprising familiar melodic strains in a small bouquet, reminds us of how these people feel and what they’ve been through emotionally.
Finaletti
were de rigueur in the operettas and musicals of the ’20s and ’30s but were still often in use in the ’60s, though you find them less often today. And the shows that used them don’t have to be high-minded just because the word is Italian; the first act of
How to Succeed
concludes with a
finaletto
—it’s even labeled that way in the playbill. But the “Tonight Quintet” from
West Side Story
is probably the finest of them—except it doesn’t end the act, and it’s only partly a reprise.

Tony, as you may remember, has agreed to try to stop the planned rumble between the two rival street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks. He’s also fallen in love with Maria, who has begged him to try to make peace between the gangs. Meanwhile, Anita, in love with the leader of the Sharks, is looking forward to a night of post-rumble sex with her presumably victorious lover, assuming the rumble actually takes place. A lot depends upon the rumble—if Tony can’t stop it from happening. And the enormity of his task is made manifest by the energy of the two gangs as they sing the “Tonight Quintet,” using a word (“tonight”) that has so far been used only in the first version of the song, where it is plaintive and filled with ardor. Now, suddenly, it is combative and dangerous. And set to music that we’ve not heard before. It is interrupted by Maria and Tony, singing the original “Tonight” melody and words, restoring the sense of romantic passion that drives the love part of this love/hate equation. And then we hear from Anita, who is singing about sex, using the angular, edgy music of the Jets and Sharks, with lyrics that are far more carnal and less celestial than those Maria and Tony are singing. If Maria’s love for Tony is celestial, Anita’s passion for Bernardo is definitely of the earth. These five points of view combine in five voices that lay out the territory of what might happen—the sexual and romantic passions are just as potent as the hatred of the two gangs for each other. Passion raises the stakes for hatred, and vice versa. The cost of not stopping the rumble goes up exponentially as the “Quintet” builds to its climax. And because it feels like a classic
finaletto
, it’s reasonable to expect that the curtain will fall on its final, percussive note, as we anticipate what this dangerous night will bring. But it doesn’t.

Instead, all this propulsive energy is transferred to the site of the rumble itself, and dance takes over. In a short book scene, Tony actually brokers a compromise—a fair fight between the leaders of the two gangs—but it quickly deteriorates and, in one of Robbins’s most famous theater ballets, all hell breaks loose. It ends when Bernardo, Anita’s lover, stabs Riff, the leader of the Jets, and then, in what can only be described as a meta-gap, Tony kills Bernardo. Tony, who has vowed to find his way out of the world of gangs, blood sport, and racial animus, finds himself a murderer with a knife in his hand.

The geometry of this outcome is set up by the “Tonight Quintet,” and now we know the outcome, at least for the moment. Anita will not have her night with Bernardo but will instead have her hatred of Tony and the Jets restoked. The gangs will remain at war. And Tony and Maria’s love will be more sorely tested than either could imagine—because Bernardo is Maria’s brother. The curtain falls not on anticipation but on all-but-certain tragedy.

*   *   *

West Side Story
was Stephen Sondheim’s first Broadway show as a lyricist; the opposite approach—using some of the same ideas—served him in one of his capstone achievements as a composer-lyricist fifteen years later.
West Side Story
was a gritty tragedy, while
A Little Night Music
was a frothy comic operetta, admittedly with some dark shadows lurking, as they tend to in Sondheim’s work. Nonetheless, the show is an intricately constructed, sophisticated, largely comic work, created after the landmark achievement (but financial disappointment) of
Follies
.

“I didn’t enjoy doing
Night Music
,” the director-producer Hal Prince wrote years later. “It was mostly about having a hit.”

In hindsight,
Night Music
is significantly more than just a hit, and one of its sweetest pleasures—especially if you admire puzzles and structural dazzle—is the number that brings down the first-act curtain, “A Weekend in the Country.”

This time it’s all about anticipation. An Act 2 lyric has the ensemble singing,
“Perpetual anticipation is good for the soul but it’s bad for the heart.”
While I can’t say with any certainty what that means, the anticipation referred to is certainly sexual; the anticipation in “A Weekend in the Country” is sexual
and
theatrical. Like the “Tonight Quintet,” it’s about the unforeseeable outcome of diverse characters on a collision course. And, as with the “Quintet,” there are five points of view. But the number itself couldn’t be more different. No hint of a reprise-driven
finaletto
here—it’s a whole new number with a whole new tempo. Where the “Tonight Quintet” treats rage, ardor, and danger, “A Weekend in the Country” is a frolic musically, and lyrically breathless. The danger it describes is of the heart, and there’s some panic in it, but no one is likely to get killed. Remember, it’s a comedy.