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

comic yarns with appealing scores, which took advantage of all of the traditional structural lessons of the Golden Age. Hairspray followed, and The Book of Mormon , which consciously aped and poked fun at the Golden Age classics while telling a rude yet sentimental tale in defense of faith no matter how unlikely or illogical its tenets may be. Mormon demonstrated that, even as America becomes more jaded, there’s something inherent in an effective structure with a traditional song plot that taps into a fundamental human journey. Like The Producers before it, Mormon is a buddy story as much as a romance—a form borrowed from the movies and pretty much absent from Golden Age shows. But these shows figured out how to marry the bromance to the traditional musical theater template, and both are better for it. Wicked , which is a girl-girl buddy story, had a little more difficulty meeting the same challenge (though obviously, it more than succeeded in the end), but let’s leave that story for another day.
    The show that broke the mold again, in early 2015, was Hamilton , which opened off Broadway at the Public Theater, site of the birth of A Chorus Line forty years earlier. Written by Lin-Manuel Miranda as a hip-hop-influenced retelling of the life of Alexander Hamilton, the show demanded an immediate Broadway transfer, as had A Chorus Line . As unusual (possibly insane) as both the subject and the style seemed for a Broadway musical, Hamilton discovered an almost shocking synergy between then and now. Its Revolutionary War heroes seemed completely contemporary, reimagined as smart, angry, unpredictably high-spirited rappers, and, indeed, within moments, it was almost impossible not to begin imagining the members of Public Enemy, or Jay-Z, Nas, and Ice Cube, as the natural offspring of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, internecine feuds and all. Revolution is revolution, whenever—and messy, too.
    This ricochet effect created a palpable excitement in the theater, because it implicitly raised questions about how race, immigration (Hamilton was born on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean), political cowardice, and class have been burning American issues since before the beginning of the nation and have never gone away. It also provided a fascinating discovery that should have been obvious: rap is a great way to tell a theatrical story. Unlike in classic pop-rock, where the lyrics tend to be abstractly poetic, ruminative, repetitive, or simpleminded pleas for love and/or sex, the best of rap wants urgently to communicate something bigger—a personal and political creed and a contextualized view of the world as it really is. As a key component of the hip-hop life, it is always on the attack, trying to change things and call things by their right name. In a rich and varied score full of jazz and rock influences, Hamilton uses rap sparingly, but when it does, the urgency is palpable.
    Unlike rock, rap is a narrative form by nature, and Hamilton has a huge story to tell with it, as the very first iteration of the American landscape is built right before our eyes. Clearly more influenced by Les Misérables than by Rodgers and Hammerstein, it nonetheless follows the American rules in a number of fascinating ways, and always to its advantage.
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    Miranda wrote all of Hamilton —book, music, and lyrics—by himself, but many of the greatest classic musicals were the result of famously fractious collaborations. One might look at the master collaborators—from Kern and Berlin to Rodgers and Hart and Loesser and Jule Styne and Jerome Robbins—and come to the conclusion that the history of the Broadway musical is the history of short Jewish men yelling at each other. But to understand how these shows really came to be, it’s important to know what they were yelling about: the form and function and how the pieces fit together. These are the things that Broadway writers and directors used to carry