Mainly on Directing by Arthur Laurents (read more books .TXT) 📕

a cave explorer is trapped and unable to move in a Kentucky cave. That doesn't immediately bring visions of rehearsal pianos and leg warmers, but it became Floyd Collins. Begin with a somewhat legendary but unsuccessful nineteenth-century play about pubescent sexual angst in a stifling, repressive society. That doesn't even hum and jig, let alone sing and dance, not even with the pubescent agonizers aged up to late adolescents. Nevertheless, Spring Awakening became better known and successful as a musical-theatre piece. What made these unlikely subjects musicals? Their creators' response to the source material. They heard song and saw musical movement where it seemingly wasn't. In both shows, the musical response had to triumph over flawed books, but triumph it did.

With Floyd Collins, the suspense inherent in the central situation was vitiated by the equally inherent lack of physical action; the stasis inherent in the story was countered by what tended to be more padding than invention. What made the piece a triumph of musical theatre was Adam Guettel's dazzling score, especially an innovative, mesmerizing vocal line. With Spring Awakening, again the heartbeat was the musical element. I'm hardly drawn to rock, but Duncan Sheik's throbbing yet lyrical score was a knockout, lifted sky high by Bill T. Jones's totally original, charged musical staging. Together with dynamic lighting and well-directed performances by the young leads, they overcame shallow lyrics and repetitious scenes in a story that is old hat today.

All credit to the creators, however: any subject matter can conceivably make not just a successful musical but exhilarating musical theatre.

A digression, but not entirely irrelevant. The standard ingredients for supposedly surefire musical theatre are larger-than-life characters, a story brimming with opportunities for theatricality, some humor, and an answer to the first question a director must ask about any theatre piece: what is it about? A paradigm source: The Skin of Our Teeth. Every requisite on the list and ten more. No wonder it's been made into a musical only God (and the Thornton Wilder estate) knows how many times. Nevertheless, it has never worked as a musical. Why not? Because it already is a musical; it just doesn't have music.

A proviso to the assertion that any subject matter can make a musical: no one asks why the characters are singing. But if no one does, why don't they? Nine times out of ten, not because of the characters, but because of the style in which their words and music are written and the setting for the story.

Choose an unlikely subject to sing about: the weather. No storms: too dramatic. A humid summer night, then; outdoors in a crowded city. The song? “Too Darn Hot,” from Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate. Sung by whom where? A couple of tap dancers in the alley outside a stage door where sculpted bodies loll on fire escapes and hatch covers, fanning sexy faces and gymnasiumed torsos, and mopping unlined brows before their owners join the tapsters and begin dancing feverishly in the humidity. The choreography gets increasingly energetic and acrobatic to chorus after chorus after chorus until the chorus is pouring sweat. Why the endless dancing if it really is too darn hot? Because the number appears natural in the greasepaint style of this revival, and the exhausted audience gives it a big hand.

Years earlier, another song on the same unlikely subject was sung by very different characters in a very different style of words and music in a very different setting: a New York City tenement. The source was Street Scene, the naturalistic Pulitzer Prize play by Elmer Rice. Chunks of the original dialogue were kept by Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes, who found its musical equivalent in their first song: “Ain't It Awful, the Heat?,” sung by blue collars hanging out the tenement windows and slumping on the stoop in front. The people, the music, the idiomatic words, all perspired. Singing seemed completely natural.

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The one time out of ten when the characters themselves are the reason singing seems natural, it's because of what they are as characters. Much larger than life outside, but it's what's inside that produces the music. Sweeney Todd is frighteningly still outside, Rose is cheerfully threatening outside; inside, both are frustrated fury. His emerges icily, then builds angrily until it erupts into an almost operatic volcano of hatred and vengeful determination; hers starts with a brassy, jokey drive, then builds angrily until it shatters in a jazzed-up rage of hatred and wrenching determination.

The characters themselves can also be why they don't sing— or shouldn't sing. Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady has several what are called songs, but he doesn't sing them; he talks them rhythmically—not because Rex Harrison, who created the role, couldn't sing, but because Henry Higgins was too buttoned up, too much the pedant, too emotionally repressed to sing. Then he falls in love. Then and only then, for the first time in his hitherto dried leaf of a life, Henry Higgins sings, Rex Harrison sings, a haunting love song: “I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” (Also sung by Marlene Dietrich in her cabaret act, without a change of pronoun and with equal effect. Love levels.)

Sometimes a character sings before he should. This was the case in Do I Hear A Waltz? by Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim and me. The character was not a he but a she—the heroine, Leona Samish. Leona had come to Venice to find love but was too wary, too suspicious, too emotionally throttled. She herself says that when she falls in love, she'll hear a waltz—i.e., music. That, then, is when she should have sung, but she was trilling away long before that. I should have known it was a mistake: the musical was adapted from my play The Time of the Cuckoo (later disguised as a movie travelogue called Summertime), and no one knew Leona better than I. But I was too eager to get the show on and checked my musical brains. Singing too early