Why the Broadway Musical Refuses to Die
The Broadway musical astonishes us by its continued existence. Thrown off balance first by the talkies, then by television—not to mention the pop-music revolution of the sixties, which quickly made its narrative style (set, scene, song, repeat) seem dated—it should surely have died a quiet death many years ago. Some outdated genres really do die: those paintings of bank C.E.O.s or college presidents lining executive conference rooms seemed formidable until the postwar era, when they began to look wan and embarrassing and make you wish for a photograph.
Yet the Broadway musical persists, in its wholly impossible format, imposing eight big singing shows a week on its stars, which is, as any veteran will tell you, one of the most brutal workloads possible for a performer—and, when it occurs in long-running shows, mostly invisible as a personal triumph. The Phantom in the thirtieth year of “The Phantom of the Opera” might just as well be a phantom. For all that, theatre after theatre fills, leaving new shows searching for a landing spot. Much of this is the simple economics of New York tourism, but some significant part of the persistence stems from the genuine devotion to an otherwise dated craft by an ardent niche audience—akin to the wine world, another diversion that ought to have been fully mechanized long ago but never quite has been. A subgroup of obsessives keeps the quality alive through sheer passion.
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What perpetual-motion engine does the musical run on? In search of a partial answer, the conductor John Mauceri and the Columbia linguist John H. McWhorter have now collaborated on a new and amiably revisionist history, “Broadway in Black and White: The Untold Story of the American Musical” (Norton). Focussed on an interchange that may seem, from a conventional point of view, auxiliary but is in fact foundational, their book’s “untold story” is that of the Black Broadway musical and of how its reception, sometimes hot and sometimes cold, shaped more familiar stories and shows. The book moves from the still minstrelsy-adjacent productions of the twenties—“Shuffle Along,” “Blackbirds”—through various appropriations of the style by such landmark musicals as “Show Boat” and “Porgy and Bess,” to much later shows like “The Wiz,” the Black adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz,” which was a huge hit in its day. All of this leads inevitably to “Hamilton,” that most improbable apotheosis in the history of entertainment, in which a show essentially about quarrels over the federal government’s debt-assumption policy in the late eighteenth century became, for a while, a felt vehicle for American racial redemption. What emerges is that part of the musical’s staying power rises from its capacity to meld musical traditions, and make that marriage embody the political preoccupations of changing times.
Our two authors collaborate, unusually, by addressing the reader in alternation, with Mauceri’s musical knowledge balancing McWhorter’s broader social nous, sometimes with a lovely idiosyncrasy: Mauceri points out that a man named McWhorter criticized “South Pacific” for its preachiness, and McWhorter adds that the critic may have been related to the family who once owned his ancestors. Together, they make a persuasive case that the signature style of the Broadway musical was the genius of Black agony passed through the prism of Jewish melancholy. It probably isn’t insignificant that the creators of such classics as “West Side Story” and “Hello, Dolly!” were all gay Jewish men. Broadway’s affinity for certain kinds of outsiders helps explain something about its style: its makers struggled to slip “subversive” material into their shows while struggling just as hard never to seem subversive. Their art drew energy from the tension between those impulses. (Mauceri and McWhorter belong to the small fringe group of heterosexual non-Jews who live a furtive, shadowy existence within the Broadway world, knowing their own kind at a glance yet never fully accepted by the mainstream.)
Though the specifically Black shows were marginalized, the effect of their music—amplified, of course, through the larger megaphone of jazz recordings—was seminal. One has only to compare Jerome Kern’s beautiful but still Viennese-inflected scores for the “Princess” musicals he wrote with P. G. Wodehouse in the nineteen-tens to any Gershwin score of the twenties to sense how large a change this was, as Black sounds entered the theatre and never left.
Yet one language can have many dialects within it. What is striking about the “crossover” music that Mauceri and McWhorter examine is that, in Black blues-based Broadway songs, the minor thirds and bent notes tend to carry the more sombre meaning of the words, whereas in their Great White Way versions they are more purely romantic, registering an emotional high, not a low. In Fats Waller’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?”—written for the 1929 Broadway musical “Hot Chocolates”—the blue notes and expressive wail land tellingly on the words “black and blue” in the lyric. In a great blues-derived ballad like the Gershwins’ “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” written for the original “Funny Face” just a couple of years earlier, the blue note lands on the “going on?” query of the title. (The singer is comparing kisses sold at a charity fair to the real thing.) The same musical inflection that voices humiliation in Waller’s song becomes an expression of delighted discovery in the Gershwins’. The white composers took a demotic, street-made style and turned it into one that was declamatory and stage-bound.
The music of the Broadway musical has several lives, or layers. Blues and ragtime supplied a largely Black musical language that helped American composers break free of European operetta, even as jazz performers then gave them a life beyond the theatre. Cole Porter’s songs of the thirties, for instance, are better known through Frank Sinatra’s recordings of the fifties than through earlier theatrical recordings, while Ella Fitzgerald’s songbook series offers an encyclopedic survey of the Broadway repertory, particularly the songs of Gershwin, Berlin, and Rodgers. Just as we are told to love the sinner and hate the sin, it has been possible in the past to love the songs and hate the singers, or at least the scenes and scenery in which the songs were originally set. Wilfrid Sheed’s fine volume on the American songbook, “The House That George Built,” treats the shows themselves with indifference and sometimes embarrassment. A caustic critic of Sheed’s generation could recoil from the sentimentality of “Oklahoma!” or even “Carousel” while loving Fitzgerald’s or Sinatra’s versions of the songs they contain. Broadway had adapted Black musical forms to the demands of theatrical storytelling; jazz performers took the resulting songs back out of their theatrical settings and made them their own.
The most arresting chapters in Mauceri and McWhorter’s book are devoted to “Porgy and Bess,” the Gershwins’ 1935 “folk opera.” The authors aren’t much interested in condemning it, the way some do, as opportunistic cultural appropriation, with Broadway composers appointing themselves spokespeople for the Black residents of Catfish Row (which it is), or saluting it as an enduring American classic (which it also is). From the outset, they point out, “Porgy” gave Black performers a rare opportunity to play major, fully human roles in New York’s commercial theatre, without a hint of Tomming. Eighty years before “Hamilton,” the Gershwins contractually reserved the Black roles for Black performers, a condition that persists today.
Mauceri and McWhorter also trace the appreciation of the show, and the novel it was based on, among Harlem Renaissance figures, who saw empathy in what others saw as condescension. Even Maya Angelou recalled that her first encounter with the piece left her “totally consumed,” even “stunned,” because it “had shown me the greatest array of Negro talent I had ever seen.” She went on to win a dancing role in the touring company. McWhorter writes that his mother was “typical of her Black generation” in adoring “Porgy and Bess”: “What mattered was that Black characters were singing some of the most beautiful music ever written.” DuBose Heyward’s novel is, in fact, anything but condescending to its characters, and it is frank about their mistrust of even well-meaning whites like its author. Mauceri and McWhorter show how “Porgy and Bess” gives its Black characters an unusual sense of roundness: Bess’s “romance” with Crown is a grownup erotic addiction that the decent, disabled Porgy cannot rival, one that’s fuelled by a parallel addiction to cocaine. (It’s easy to forget that the lovable Sportin’ Life is a drug dealer.)
George Gershwin conceived the work as an opera, drawing on a stage adaptation by Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, but it arrived in New York on Broadway, playing eight times a week at what is now the Neil Simon Theatre. However ambitious, it was crafted as a musical. The more self-consciously operatic versions aren’t necessarily closer to the composer’s intentions. Often overlooked, too, is the blending of DuBose Heyward’s solemn lyrics with Ira Gershwin’s Upper West Side wit: Ira wrote “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” DuBose wrote “Summertime,” and they collaborated on “Bess You Is My Woman Now.” Lyrics are notoriously hard to collaborate on; here, mutual respect met a division of labor, one wry, one wise.
One comes away from the book thinking of “Porgy and Bess” as perhaps the greatest triumph of Broadway sensibility: Black musical traditions reimagined through the Gershwins’ show-business genius and the Heywards’ storytelling, then deepened by Black jazz performers. McWhorter observes that in “Bess You Is My Woman Now” the blue note falls on the first syllable of “woman,” where it “seemed to suggest sexual attraction.” And, yes, the best versions of the songs may be those that spring free of the opera, including Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s deeply personal account and a later one by Ray Charles and Cleo Laine. American music’s endless spiralling outward is nowhere clearer than in the afterlives of “I Loves You, Porgy.” Black style passes through Gershwin and out into Nina Simone’s famous take and Bill Evans’s imperishable version, where the blues is filtered through Erik Satie’s minimalism to become a haunted, achingly beautiful elegy. Of such social spirals great music is made.
“Broadway in Black and White” feels generally revivifying in its insistence on taking the musical seriously. Yet the obsessive reader may come away feeling a little discouraged, because the world it describes had an organic dynamism that seems hard to retrieve. Of course, every form feels in crisis or exhausted to its admirers at any moment—if the musical is in trouble, it should look over its shoulder at its cousin, the straight problem play, which is surely in even worse shape. Still, it sometimes seems as if three kinds of weeds—the jukebox show, the campy meta-parody show, and the I.P. show—have been outcompeting the native flowers on Forty-second Street.
The jukebox shows (“MJ,” “Jersey Boys,” “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical”) are fun if you already like the music, mostly dispiriting if you want to hear something new. The meta-musicals have their delights but can be no less demoralizing. “The Book of Mormon” and “Spamalot” are the best loved and most efficiently funny examples; the recently revived “Gutenberg! The Musical!” is the most mechanical. But Mel Brooks’s lovable “The Producers” also qualifies as one, with a make-believe score, scavenged from other people’s clichés, that relentlessly and affectionately sends up the musical’s hard-won conventions. The scores and scenes of these productions offer the safety of all meta-art: Are we kidding or not? Who cares! The musical’s storytelling tropes have become so familiar that parody can deliver the very pleasures it mocks, even as the labor of love that established its conventions gets lost in the joke. The I.P. shows, based on some recognizable “property”—“The Outsiders” or “Water for Elephants” or “Death Becomes Her”—usually end up feeling less realized than executed. (“The Outsiders” won the Tony for Best Musical, and certainly worked onstage, but I have never met anyone who can summon up a single song from the show.)
A familiar movie can acquire a richer musical life, as “Big Fish” and “The Band’s Visit” demonstrate. These shows, along with other notable musicals of this century, such as “The Light in the Piazza,” are among those inspired by Stephen Sondheim’s imposing example. Sondheim’s influence in his world—only the influence of Balanchine in American ballet is comparable—is such that, already the subject of a few biographies, he is now the subject of yet another, Daniel Okrent’s “Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy,” part of Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series. And a good one it is. We are reminded that Sondheim was not merely a dramatist but a self-dramatizer: he often referred to a letter that his mother wrote him saying that she wished he’d never been born, but the letter may have been fabricated or misrepresented by the son, to organize his own feelings of abandonment while assigning blame to Mom.
A great example, of course, can be a roadblock as much as a path forward. Sondheim’s implicit possibilities were broad; his explicit rules were narrow, emphasizing scene and storytelling at the expense of the delight in wit and melody that had long distinguished American songs from those of European operetta. (Like every artist, Sondheim made his best work at right angles to his professed beliefs: so many of his best songs are either exercises in linguistic play for its own sake, like “Uptown, Downtown,” or stand-alone soliloquies rising from the artist’s isolated heart.) But Sondheim is a jealous God, or at least his acolytes are even more easily enraged than acolytes usually are. As a Sondheim schismatic myself, worshipping and wondering at the same time, I have found what generations of heretics have found: you can protest the purity of your faith as loudly as you like while they drag you to the scaffold.
The Sondheim scruples, Okrent shows, begin with what he overlearned from Oscar Hammerstein, his beloved mentor: the priority of storytelling over the sensual delight of wordplay—a decent rule for beginners, but not one that Shakespeare ever followed—and the greeting-card habit of moralized instruction. Sondheim’s worst songs are dragged down by uplift, whose insincerity shines right through. The man who wrote “Finishing the Hat,” about the artist’s essential and incurable solitude, did not for a moment believe that “No One Is Alone,” as the hastily written eleven-o’clock number of “Into the Woods” would have it. He thought that we are all alone pretty much all the time, amid small, intense, providential pacts of togetherness. “Sunday” is about the accidental urban coexistence that cities provide and artists perceive, rather than “community” or common experience. For all his insistence on making the song match the scene, to the straitjacketing detriment of some of his students, he, like all real artists, wrote one song over and over: the tale of a lonely artist desperately seeking to connect.
For decades, a hope has persisted: that the popular music of the rock era and beyond, the “second American songbook,” would invigorate the Broadway tradition. There have been high-profile breakthroughs, like “Hair” and “Tommy” and “Jesus Christ Superstar,” but they remain isolated monuments rather than the foundation of a form. Even ventures involving songwriters of genius, including Paul Simon’s “The Capeman” and the Bob Dylan-inspired “Girl from the North Country,” have often felt oddly flightless. The attraction is obvious; the difficulty lies in what the songs are built for. A theatrical song gives a character something to do: persuade someone, resist someone, make a decision. The great modern American ballad, from Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Simon, often takes the form of a private self-inspection, a singer reflecting on experience. Even when songs like “Bridge Over Troubled Water” or “A Case of You” address another person, their emotional drama unfolds within the singer’s own soul. Such songs can illuminate a character’s feelings while leaving the scene where it was. Poetically alight, they are theatrically inert. (Billy Joel is a partial exception: he can write dramatic songs, as the Broadway success of “Movin’ Out” showed, and that overt theatricality is one reason that he so often seems cringe or corny to the illuminati.)
Lin-Manuel Miranda grew from a richer mulch: Sondheim worship mixed with a desire to modernize the musical and an ear open to everything. In “Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist” (Simon & Schuster), Daniel Pollack-Pelzner traces the formation of someone who was, like many artists, a liminal figure. The son of a Puerto Rican political strategist, Miranda grew up in northern Manhattan but also played as a child at Gracie Mansion. He was indeed the man who would make hip-hop part of the Rodgers tradition, but he did it first at Wesleyan. The beautiful encirclements of American music encircled him, too: Sondheim became his mentor, after Miranda was hired to translate some of the lyrics of “West Side Story” into Spanish for the 2009 revival, giving its Puerto Rican characters more of their own language. Yet his admiration left room for playful off-rhymes. (“I’m afraid it’s unlawful, sir. . . . She’s married to a British officer.”) Like Irving Berlin, Miranda is an instinctive musician whose mistakes can be worth more than other people’s rules. He finds harmonic surprises partly because he doesn’t know he shouldn’t. One realizes, by the biography’s end, that Miranda is doing with hip-hop what his predecessors did with jazz and the blues, and that, as a Puerto Rican, he occupies a place between white and Black, as did his Jewish predecessors on Broadway. His template for “In the Heights” was a favorite show of his, “Fiddler on the Roof.”
That breadth of influence helps explain why “Hamilton” is no more a hip-hop musical than “Porgy and Bess” is a blues musical. Its palette is broad, moving from comic to straight rap, from Cab Calloway swing to Beyoncé-style ballads, each idiom chosen for its dramatic purpose. “Hamilton” fulfills the musical’s original cultural function with extraordinary amplitude: turning the music of streets and dance floors into storytelling, and making American music whole.
One thing becomes clear in all these books: Broadway’s dominant disposition has long been liberal in a capacious sense, hospitable to difference and drawn to the possibilities of a shared American life. It goes without saying that first-class music and art can cut in every ideological direction, and American folk and country music are often deeply conservative—reacting to social alteration with alarm, as working-class Americans often do. Merle Haggard and even Bob Dylan find their essential subject in modernity’s threat to a coherent American mythology. But every long-remembered Broadway musical has had a liberal politics and a liberal breadth beneath it. And truly liberal rather than leftist: pluralistic, optimistic, committed to the ideal of integration that Broadway’s music exemplifies more fully than almost any other American art form, as different traditions find ways to live together within a shared musical language.
We don’t think of “My Fair Lady” as political in the way “West Side Story” is, but its cosmopolitan, outward-looking sensibility belongs squarely to Adlai Stevenson liberalism. “Guys and Dolls,” seemingly apolitical, becomes, in the hands of its book writer Abe Burrows, a hymn to the coexistence of New York’s Irish, Italian, and Jewish worlds, with room even for the Salvation Army. The delight of Nicely-Nicely Johnson’s revival-meeting song lies in how readily a Jewish gambler takes up the language of evangelical Christianity. “The Music Man,” far from being nostalgic Americana, is anti-Iowa: the con man Harold Hill is a gift to the straitened, parched culture of River City, Iowa, and its librarians. And “West Side Story” ends with Jets and Sharks solemnly, if improbably, united in carrying Tony’s body away.
Perhaps the crisis of the musical reflects the crisis of liberal America. A theatre that imagines a shared life needs an audience drawn from many kinds of lives. Its economics increasingly work against that ambition. When a manageable investment can bring a decent return, producers can risk something unfamiliar, and audiences can afford to try it. As the stakes rise on both sides of the footlights, familiarity becomes insurance.
The great eras of popular dramatic art have generally depended on broad access. Shakespeare’s Globe charged a penny for standing room and sixpence for its best seats: tiered prices brought different classes into the same house. Broadway once worked more recognizably on that principle. When “A Chorus Line” opened there, in 1975, its top ticket cost fifteen dollars, or around ninety today. A persuasive case can be made that the economics of the Broadway musical in 1960 resembled those of Shakespeare’s Globe more closely than those of Broadway today, with its extremes of expense. Affordability helped make theatre a habit, and the habit sustained the risks that made theatre an art.
That regular audience is theatre’s condition of existence. Great art can emerge from a garden cottage in Massachusetts or a madhouse in the South of France and find its audience generations later. Theatre needs its audience tonight. Even the highest tragedies, from “King Lear” to “Death of a Salesman,” must first of all offer their customers the prospect of a nice night out. Even as common rituals dwindle, the shared passion persists: people still want that night out. The show must go on because someone wants to see it. Eleven o’clock now happens at nine-thirty. Still, it happens. ♦