Wow – Alexander Graham Bell (Don Ameche) and the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) – movie stars singing and dancing, telling jokes in Goldilocks, a new musical trying out in Boston. But who the heck was Elaine Stritch – never heard of her at the time (1958 - I was 17). The musical director was later to become my mentor in the craft of writing musicals, Lehman Engel.
One evening in 1972, I was having dinner with Lehman at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and was able to ask Lehman a question that had plagued me for years. I had loved the show Goldilocks, practically wore out the recording of the score, and wondered why it wasn’t a bigger hit (it ran only 161 performances on Broadway in 1958 and 59). Lehman got a very puzzled look on his face, perched his glasses on the very tip of his soft nose, and said in his most Hitchcockian tones, “Why wasn’t Goldilocks a bigger success? (dramatic pause.) Because it was a piece of shit!”
Many of us have seen shows we liked that didn’t make it commercially. We have also seen shows we didn’t particularly care for that ran for years. My angle on this conundrum (to borrow a lovely word from Byron Schaffer, a later mentor of mine) is: That’s why they make different colored jelly beans. Lehman felt differently, though. He believed that every show is aimed at a particular audience, and any given individual may not be in that show’s sights. In other words, it’s OK if you don’t like the show – it wasn’t meant for you, it was meant for other people.
None of this, though, explains why I loved Goldilocks and Broadway snubbed it. It was my first – and we all know the first time is the best time. It dazzled me because I was a teenager and had never seen anything like it. Just like teenagers who go to see a new show (Spring Awakening or American Idiot, for instance) and come away gushing. More important than whether the show I loved was a hit or not, is that it turned me on. I went home that day and started picking out tunes on the piano. Really. I had no musical background whatever, but I knew what I wanted to do. That was 63 years ago, and I’m still doing it (although I have morphed from a songwriter to a bookwriter). I’m still doing it because I was turned on as a teenager by a charming but forgettable little show that a Broadway maven thought was unmentionably bad. The next time you see a musical that you think is definitely a piece of excrement, remember it might be creating a career pathway for some younger, less jaded, starry-eyed kid.
And - If someone tries to tell you he can teach you how to write a musical, consider homicide because suicide is messy, but one of you has to die. Here is the truth: Nobody knows how to write a musical. People write them. Sometimes they succeed; sometimes they fail (at the box office). But popularity at the box office doesn’t always indicate artistic value. Audiences are fickle. They like what they like, not what some critic or aficionado tells them they ought to like. Still, some shows manage to pass the test of time and are revived again and again with box office success.
I don’t think anybody can tell you or me how to write a musical. But we can study how other people have written musicals. We can look for those titles that brought repeated box office success years and even decades later to see if they have things in common. It feels to me as if the form is changing, tending to heavier topics, often skeptical stories about the disappointments and betrayals of contemporary life, rather than the previously inimitable American optimism.
So before my dotage creeps in, I have decided to commit some of these musings to this blog, in an attempt to make sense of where musicals seem to be headed. I hope readers will join the conversation and leave their comments so the discussion will not be one-sided. Meanwhile, I'd like to hear from you about your First Time in the musical theater - what was the show, how did it strike you, what part did it play in your decision to work in this form? Please let me know.
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