The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built Read Online Free PDF Page A

convinced), but it was quickly clear that these musicals had changed the form and content rules forever. Prince and Sondheim flew high above the rest of Broadway during this period, covering everything from Manhattan marriage to American imperialism in Japan to English cannibalism on Fleet Street, but they did it with the kind of daring that’s earned by years of deep experience in the more traditional forms. Both had long histories of working with experienced show makers: Prince had spent decades working on, and then producing, George Abbott musicals. He had worked as a producer extensively with both Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse. Sondheim had grown up with Oscar Hammerstein II as a mentor and had his first hits with Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Jule Styne. Both men knew how to grab an audience and hold it, when to introduce a subplot, how to create a showstopper for a star. They were musical theater virtuosi before they leapt into the unknown. No matter how wild and unbridled their shows became, they were operating from a deep understanding of where the form had been and how it had succeeded. Their success set a standard, but it also hurled out a gauntlet: Could other, less grounded writers and directors take these kinds of leaps and land on their feet?
    Well, not regularly. And by the mid-’80s, the American Broadway musical had lost its grip, even as some individual shows continued to succeed and break ground. To be fair, it was largely a decade of musical hits from England produced by Cameron Mackintosh, several composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Spectacle and big rococo melodies, once the hallmark of the early operettas of Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml, returned (with the addition of some rock influences) as a principal attraction of shows like Cats , Les Misérables , and, of course, Phantom of the Opera . But in America, the techniques, the mechanics of show making, of musical storytelling, ceased to be passed on and built upon constructively according to tradition. The Rodgers and Hammerstein model seemed worse than dated—it seemed like a lie. Writers began trying to reinvent the wheel because they hadn’t been raised in the traditions that would inspire the next steps, or because they simply felt duty-bound to reject a past they didn’t believe in. Perhaps, by embracing rock, they embraced the not unreasonable half-truth that a backbeat and a narrative story are natural enemies. But in the process of revolutionizing the Broadway show, as much was lost as securely found. A few shows, notably the 1981 Dreamgirls , married a rock-style score to narrative strength—a memorable protagonist, the inevitable challenges of a changing era, the satisfactions of a fully told story with a moving conclusion. But for every sure-handed experiment that worked— Sunday in the Park with George , Tommy Tune’s spectacularly imaginative production of Nine —there were a fistful of experiments that seemed lost in the dark— Starmites , Into the Light , and the legendary Carrie among them. And even a show like Sunday played as the experiment it was, not as a bona fide hit satisfying a general audience. That audience was still buying tickets for the deeply traditionally structured La Cage aux Folles , which had married a daring (for the time) story of gay romance to a formula plot that dated back to before Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It with You 2 and a score that could have been written more than a decade earlier.
    But in the ’90s, as the British Invasion wound down, a kind of redemption began to be seen in American musicals—fresh ideas and craftsmanship. Urinetown , a genuine satire about a ruined world where people have to pay to pee, featured a book that actually had shape, and a smart score that took its cue from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera and updated it with a modern kick. The turn of the century brought both The Producers and the underappreciated The Full Monty —beautifully shaped