Pop Goes the Musical

Musical theatre finally turns on the tunes everybody in the world has been listening to for years.

By John Istel

Who would have though thought that, as we steam into the 21st century, we’d have Abba to thank for rejuvenating the American musical theatre? 

Whatever you think—or adore or despise—about Mamma Mia!, give this Broadway phenomenon credit. It has given musical-theatre artists and producers a creative roadmap into rarified territory: mainstream American culture. Thirty years from now, don’t be surprised if Mamma Mia!, with its score fashioned from 1970s and early ’80s pop songs by the Swedish songwriting team of Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, receives its due for putting the “pop”—as in popular—back in theatre music.

As most theatregoers know, for much of the century just past, popular music was theatre music. For the parents and grandparents of baby boomers, music written for the American theatre and performed on stage and on screen served as their generations’ MTV. It was the soundtrack to their lives, crafted by such giants as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers. 

But these composers are now dead. Most of their original audiences are, too. And for more than three decades, since the mid-1960s, the place to hear a Top-40 tune has been on the radio, not on a cast album. After 1965, only the original cast recording of Hair topped the Billboard charts, hitting Number 1 in 1968. (Remember how Hair was supposed to change the musical theatre? In fact, aside from a few exceptions like Jesus Christ Superstar and Rent, it has spawned a string of unpalatable flops, like Via Galactica.) 

It’s not that Mamma Mia!, which opened in London in 1999 and in New York City in 2001, is the first show to take a composer or group’s songbook and fashion a score from it. Over the past 25 years revues such as Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Fats Waller), Sophisticated Ladies (Duke Ellington), Eubie (Eubie Blake) and Smokey Joe’s Café (Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller) have put classic popular songs on stage with some success. The Who’s Tommy started life as a “rock opera” confined to vinyl LP until it made the transition to the theatre in 1993 under Des McAnuff’s stewardship. 

Today, the work of several of pop music’s best songwriters from the post—Sound of Music era can be enjoyed in a musical-theatre format, too. The most visible example on these shores is Movin’ Out, featuring music and lyrics by Billy Joel, a member of the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame, who, by 1994, had as many multiplatinum albums as the Beatles. Movin’ Out was conceived for the Broadway stage as a full-length narrative ballet by modern dance choreographer and director Twyla Tharp. Similar projects have been populating resident theatre stages as well. In April, Maryland Ensemble Theatre will debut Planet Claire!, an interstellar fantasy in which the garage-rock party songs of The B-52’s are sung in outer space. In Seattle this past fall, the ACT Theatre produced The Education of Randy Newman, which originated at California’s South Coast Repertory in 2000. The show culls 40 songs by the composer, who is perhaps best known to the American public for his film soundtracks and 16 Academy Award-nominated movie songs (“You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from Toy Story, for example), or for his novelty song “Short People” that hit Number 2 on the pop charts in 1977. 

This March in San Francisco, American Conservatory Theater’s Young Conservatory debuts Forever Young: The Music of Bob Dylan, following on the heels of last year’s Dangling Conversations: The Music of Simon and Garfunkel. Created by director Craig Slaight and Krista Wigle, the Dylan show treats each of the composer’s songs as a separate mini-script. Also in the Bay Area, San Jose Stage Company originated Michael Norman Mann’s Grateful Dead musical Cumberland Blues, which earned national attention, moved to a commercial run in San Francisco in 1998 and has been optioned for London’s West End, with a tentative opening slated in 2004. Though rarely represented in the Top 40 (their biggest hit was “Touch of Grey,” which topped at Number 9 in 1987), the Grateful Dead was continually one of the highest-grossing live touring bands throughout most of the 1980s and the first half of the ’90s—until lead guitarist Jerry Garcia died in a rehab unit in 1995. 

If Cumberland Blues makes it on time to London’s West End, it could have a lot of company. In addition to Mamma Mia!, a visitor to Britain could catch We Will Rock You, with its score consisting of songs by the art-rock group Queen (whose single “Bohemian Rhapsody” is one of the most popular songs of all time in England). The 1980s English ska-punk band Madness provides the music to the Olivier Award-nominated musical Our House, the title of which comes from one of its best-known hits (highest U.S. Billboard chart position: Number 7 in 1983). Also nominated for an Olivier this year: Taboo, with music and lyrics by Boy George, the lead singer of Culture Club (“Karma Chameleon” was Billboard’s Number 1 hit for three weeks in 1983). Ben Elton, the British playwright (Popcorn) and comedian, is working on a Rod Stewart musical. There are rumors about Fleetwood Mac’s album Rumours getting legit treatment in London as well. Taboo is heading for Broadway in the fall, with playwright Charles Busch tweaking its book for an American audience. Why are the Brits leading this invasion? Perhaps it’s because they’re not hamstrung by a Golden-Age-of-Musicals legacy that tends to compel stateside theatre artists and audiences to treat the art form like it’s our Shakespeare—which it may very well be.

For better or worse, Mamma Mia! is the mother of this trend, because it does two things that are unprecedented both in the quality of its artistry and in the quantity of its success. First, Mamma Mia! makes “Money, Money, Money” (as one of its tackier tunes terms it). Its financial success can be seen as the golden carrot, lighting the way forward. Productions are running in Toronto, Tokyo, Germany and Las Vegas. Although it remains to be seen whether it eventually rivals Cats, the longest-running Broadway show in history, Mamma Mia! is consistently one of New York’s highest-grossing theatre attraction. 

More important, for those interested in the aesthetics of that peculiarly American art form, Mamma Mia! eschews the familiar “revue”-style of the past, where a composer’s songbook must survive any flimsy pretext of a libretto. Instead, producers Judy Craymer and Richard East commissioned playwright Catherine Johnson to write a book, and her ingenious ability to meld Abba’s songs into a heartwarming, if melodramatic, story is responsible for much of its success. Even those who claimed in the press that Johnson stole her plot from an obscure film screenplay have had to admit it works extremely well, creating an emotional narrative arc as it details a girl’s search for her real father prior to her wedding day—and injecting another sweet Abba song every time the story’s blood sugar dips dangerously low. You might call this clever concoction of pop music and crafty book a “Pop-Book Musical.”

Although one U.S. reporter wrote that Mamma Mia! is “dismissed by traditionalists as little more than an excuse to trot out old disco hits,” such a sentiment misses the point. I’ve never been a fan of disco in general or Abba in particular, but Mamma Mia! is one of the most entertaining musicals I’ve ever seen, in no small part because of the way it incorporates familiar tunes by using theatre to do what all great artists do—make the familiar seem brand-new. 

Here’s the heresy: Mamma Mia!’s libretto breakthrough is not unlike what Pablo Picasso did with collage. Picasso may not have been the first artist to glue newspaper and other found materials to a canvas, but his inventive and artful use of the technique made it a groundbreaking moment in modern art. He changed the rules. And Mamma Mia!’s melding of catchy pop and structurally sophisticated libretto make these latest Pop-Book Musicals a charming new addition to the lexicon of musical theatre, a genre that has always been a hybrid anyway.

At the least, Mamma Mia! raises the bar for directors, librettists and musical arrangers. Scott Ellis—associate artistic director of New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company, for whom he’s staging Look of Love, a musical based on the pop hits of Burt Bacharach and Hal David this spring—calls earlier songbook shows “stool revues.” He’s referring to smaller, intimate, almost cabaret-like works that are staged as an excuse to hear top-notch performers sing standards. There are many examples, from Cole Porter to Stephen Sondheim. But that’s not what he and his collaborators (co-conceiver David Thompson, music director David Loud and choreographer Ann Reinking) want for the swinging, infectious pop of Bacharach-David’s songbook. “We don’t want tuxedos,” Ellis says. “We don’t want a stagnant presentation. We want something hotter, sexier—something hipper.” 

The mantra in these new Pop-Book Musicals is narrative, narrative, narrative. “With revues, you always have to start over and create something new with each song,” says Jerry Patch, literary manager at South Coast Rep, who, along with orchestrator Michael Roth, contributed the book to The Education of Randy Newman. “We looked for the tug of a narrative to put together Randy’s work,” he says. And that impulse is creating some of the most imaginative librettos in years. “I came up with the idea of a pseudo-autobiographical piece,” Patch recalls, “based on the 1918 autobiography The Education of Henry Adams. Now, Randy’s contributed a song at the top of the show where he compares Adams’s family to the Newman family.”

For Cumberland Blues, playwright Michael Norman Mann took his favorite songs from early Dead records and from Garcia’s solo albums and fit the country- and bluegrass-inflected tunes into a Western tall tale about poker-playing gamblers and lovers, death and redemption. “I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do as a playwright and was exploring songbooks,” recalls Mann. “I caught a Grateful Dead concert, and I thought: I can make a musical out of this. I started doing research and found all this material.” Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter helped Mann by tinkering with the words to familiar songs to make them fit into the story. “I was worried about the Deadheads,” says Mann, “but within minutes they were dancing in the aisles.”

One of the most creative books was fashioned by Twyla Tharp for Movin’ Out, which had its Chicago tryout at the Shubert Theatre before transferring to Broadway. Listening to Joel’s songs over one weekend, Tharp was convinced she could cobble together a story about a group of friends from Hicksville, Long Island (Joel’s home-town), and their struggles as they age through the 1960s, the Vietnam War and into the 1980s. She then had to convince Joel to let her do it. “I told him, ‘Look, the lyrics in your songs are the story, and what I’ll be doing is putting them into action,’” she recalls. “It’s a play and it has a text, but it’s not a linguistic text. It’s action, and it has characters that make choices exactly like any player in any dramatic presentation.”

Joel saw an opportunity for his songs to be staged—renewed in a way that wouldn’t make him cringe. “You wouldn’t believe how many scripts I’ve been sent where they’ve cobbled a book together based on ‘The Piano Man,’” Joel says. “And I just didn’t want to see that.”

Tharp’s work on Movin’ Out shows how an artful collagist crafts an original musical by using a composer’s music as found object. Joel remembers: “I had some concerns about songs that became hits, because they might seem hackneyed. ‘Just the Way You Are’ is a song which is…I don’t know…overused—at weddings and what have you—so I was worried about it. Twyla was very clever: She took an excerpt from one of my piano pieces called ‘Reverie,’ which has a similar rhythmic theme or motif as ‘Just the Way You Are.’ And she has two lovers dance this beautiful ballet-like pas de deux. Then suddenly instead of continuing into a sort of impressionistic Debussy-like section, she goes right into ‘Just the Way You Are.’ I said to Twyla, ‘Hey, that’s the same motif.’ And Twyla looks at me as if I’m an idiot. She says, ‘Well, yeah.’”

The prevalence of Pop-Book Musicals raises the hope that all over the country, enterprising and creative theatre artists—like Tharp, or Ellis and Thompson, or Patch and Roth—will pore over the chart books, reexamine their CD and album collections and find a way to continue to bring great popular songwriting to the stage. It also opens up the theatre as an artistically viable venue for today’s pop composers, many of whom aspire to create musicals because they themselves grew up listening to legendary Broadway composers like Porter, Kern and Rodgers. (As a point of fact, Abba’s Bennie Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus wrote Chess, a short-lived Broadway musical in the 1980s. Bacharach and David actually wrote a hit Broadway show, with Neil Simon Promises! Promises! And did you know that Jerry Garcia was named after Jerome Kern? According to playwright Mann, Garcia met lyricist Robert Hunter at a local production of The Music Man.) 

Randy Newman is a prime example of a pop composer who tried his hand at writing a musical on his own. Faust, his first effort, was produced at both California’s La Jolla Playhouse and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 1995. But as he told an interviewer afterwards, his song “I Love to See You Smile” “made more money than anything else I’ve done. I sold it to toothpaste companies, mule-packing teams—anywhere I could. I worked eight or 10 months on Faust—but I never made a dime on it.”

Newman’s actually lucky that he only worked a matter of months on his Faust. Many composers may wait 8 to 10 years for an opportunity to see their shows given full productions. Indeed, one of the benefits of encouraging contemporary theatre artists and producers to scour their song archives in search of musical fodder is that the music already exists from the moment of conception—it’s the equivalent of a Caesarean birth. Pop songs may need adjustments when altered within a new narrative framework (changing the key for a character’s voice, perhaps), but it’s a lot quicker to tinker than compose whole scores from scratch. 

That’s how Elton John first got his fingers wet. His songs composed originally for the film of The Lion King were used in Taymor’s stage producton. With Aida, he was involved from the beginning. But getting someone of his stature to work as hard as is needed in the theatre to develop an original piece of musical theatre is extremely unusual—all the more so since composers, as Newman attested, can make a mint by contributing material to music videos, TV commercials and soundtracks. 

The way this song-first, libretto-later process can jumpstart productions is startling. “The first conversation between Billy [Joel] and myself about making a musical,” says Tharp, “will have taken place approximately two years before the New York opening. Two years!” She’s as amazed as anyone who is familiar with the tortuous path most musicals take. 

The natural fear, of course, is that such endeavors as Mamma Mia!, The Look of Love, The Education of Randy Newman and Movin’ Out might limit the opportunities for devout musical-theatre composers. When posed that question, Roth, a composer in his own right, replies that he isn’t worried. “If it’s a trend, like all things, it’s passing,” he says. “I don’t think there will be a lot of shows with mediocre pop music by the likes of Strawberry Alarm Clock.” That kind of prejudice against pop music, however, may be the theatre’s problem. Undoubtedly there is a lot of mediocre pop music—but there’s plenty of mediocre musical theatre as well.

Few songs express the Grand Canyon-sized gulf in 20th-century American songwriting—that between the theatre culture and the culture-at-large—better than “Where the Orchestra?”—the last song on Billy Joel’s 1982 album, Nylon Curtain. It’s a bittersweet lament with hints of Kurt Weill, written from the perspective of a regular guy, not unlike the figures Joel celebrates in songs like “Allentown” (factory workers) and “Goodnight Saigon” (Vietnam vets). 

Where’s the orchestra?
Wasn’t this supposed to be a musical?
Here I am in the balcony
How in hell could I have missed the overture?

The poor schmo in this song thought he was seeing a musical. Instead he finds himself at a tragedy. Although Joel wrote this song as a statement about life’s disappointments, it aptly describes the attitude theatre traditionalists must now feel when they encounter a show like Taboo or Cumberland Blues. The tables have been turned. 

Just as it’s a truism that the best musicals come from mediocre source books or films, perhaps the better the songbook, the more difficult the transplant operation. Patch and Roth reported that with Newman (whom Patch calls “our Schubert, writing pop lied within an American cultural context”) it was the most devoted connoisseurs who sometimes had the most difficulty hearing Newman’s songs in a dramatic context. Similarly, the high esteem and love audiences feel for the Beatles’s songbook may partly account for the disastrous reception received by the short-lived West End musical All You Need Is Love. 

Still the advantages that this new genre offers outweigh the misgivings. For one thing, it signals the long-awaited death knell of the “Broadway-orchestra sound.” Baby boomers can finally listen to music in the theatre that sounds like the music they’ve always listened to—loud, electronic, amplified. Fewer musicians are needed, of course, which is a boon to producers. Current negotiations between the musicians’ union and producers are devoted to eliminating the onerous minimums that mandate a certain number of musicians for each Broadway house.

The musical theatre, more significantly, may finally be able to draw audiences that never before would have been caught dead on Broadway—unless they were there to stand on the sidewalk and gawk at the MTV studio windows. Rock concert tickets to the Rolling Stones can cost the same as a front-row chair on Broadway, if not more. And since when do the Stones do matinees?

Top-40 songs, according to Joel himself, are for the young. “I listen to pop radio and there’s a lot of music that doesn’t get me,” he says. “It’s for much younger people. That’s as it should be. What’s always healthy about American pop music is that once a performer or songwriter is past a certain age, we eat them to death—we cannibalize them. The young eat the old.” Joel swore off writing pop songs in 1993. “If you’ve been on the playing field long enough, hey, get off the stage,” he adds. “Let somebody else come along. Even the Beatles, who have cast such a long shadow, were really only together for about 10 years. There’s the time to write certain kinds of music; there’s a time to write other kinds of music.” 

Most Pop-Book Musicals feature music born before MTV. The songs by these artists weren’t originally theatricalized on celluloid. Now, by the time many kids have heard the latest Avril Lavigne tune on the radio, they’ve seen it already. Most music is already visualized on video and given some modicum of narrative (often by a stunning array of talented film, commercial and television artists), and the results aren’t any more or less stylized, cloying and pretentious than many musical-theatre presentations. 

Without a doubt, different generations have different vocabularies when it comes to theatricalizing music. But the infusion of songs by today’s pop composers onto legit stages makes the future of musical theatre very bright. The possibilities for new projects are bountiful. Patch has his eye on another favorite rock songwriter’s work—but he doesn’t want to name him or her in case someone steals his idea. Mann already has written a sequel to Cumberland Blues, also based on Grateful Dead tunes, called Shakedown Street, which he describes as “a film noir musical, a mixture of The Maltese Falcon and Guys and Dolls.” Meanwhile, Laurence Boswell, who’s about to direct A Day in the Life of Joe Egg for the Roundabout, says he wishes he could get David Bowie to agree to let him stage Ziggy Stardust. What about Steely Dan? The Roches? They Might Be Giants? The Clash? 

The list could go on. There are tons of great, highly theatrical pop and rock songs—and who better than the innovators of the American musical theatre to put them to creative use? 

John Istel is a New York-based writer and editor.
 

Ghosts in the Song Machine
by Randy Gerner

Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Jackie Wilson and Nat King Cole have never let a small thing like death get in the way of career advancement. Their legacy thrives unabated in a head-spinning smorgasbord of musical-theatre fare that resuscitates their greatest hits, reworking them into musical biographies and celebratory revues.

And why not? If Natalie Cole creates duets by recording her voice with her father’s original recording (20 years after his death) and Liza Minnelli sings “The Trolley Song” with her mother while scenes from Meet Me in St. Louis are projected onstage, who’s to stop Jason Petty from eerily calling up the spirit of a country-music legend in Randal Myler’s Hank Williams: Lost Highway (which has been seen at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum, Cleveland Play House and Manhattan Ensemble Theatre)? If Janis Joplin still rouses audiences in Off-Broadway’s Love, Janis, why can’t Ol’ Blue Eyes croon in My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra, this season’s most-produced musical according to a recent TCG poll?

Typically, these musical tributes churn out songs within a “life and times”-story format. In King of Cool: Nat King Cole—The Life, the Man, running through March 9 at Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Repertory, Jimi Ray Malary captures the smooth-as-silk elan of the baritone icon who wooed us with “Unforgettable” and “Mona Lisa.” A rhyming narrative poem mirrors the events of Cole’s life, with his songs performed chronologically by a jazz trio. Extended through April at the Center Theater Company of Tampa, Fla., Satchmo: The Life and Times of Louis Armstrong samples from Armstrong’s autobiographical writings and stitches together his signature songs (“Georgia on My Mind” and “What a Wonderful World”), with impersonator Bill Smith in the lead and glimpses of Ella Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby.

Backed by a four-piece combo, Tony-winner Ann Duqesnay slings sass as blues singer Alberta Hunter in Cookin’ at the Cookery: The Music and Times of Alberta Hunter by Marion J. Caffey. After its New York City gig at Melting Pot Theatre Company in March, the hand-clappin’ show serves up 21 of Hunter’s songs (“My Castle’s Rockin’,” “The Love I Have for You”) at California’s San Diego Repertory in April.

Chester Gregory II channels the R&B pop/soul spirit of “Mr. Excitement” himself, Jackie Wilson, in Jackie Taylor’s The Jackie Wilson Story (My Heart is Crying, Crying) for Chicago’s Black Ensemble Theatre. Expect Gregory to do splits, spins, knee drops and plenty of shakes while singing “Baby Workout” and “Higher and Higher,” as the show shimmies to Memphis, Tenn., in March; and New York’s Apollo Theatre in April.

While Can’t Help Falling in Love, Joe Di Pietro’s upcoming musical comedy featuring the songs of Elvis Presley, remains in development, fans of the King may get all shook up with Smokey Joe’s Café, based on the works of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (“Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock”). It’s also one of the top 10 most-produced plays of this season—tied with the Fats Waller revue Ain’t Misbehavin’, which sets fingers snapping at Florida Repertory Theatre in April; Wisconsin’s Skylight Opera Theatre in May; and California’s Sierra Repertory Theatre in September. 

© - 2006 by Theatre Communications Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.