Those who read this blog want to know the real me. Well the real me loves musicals and this web page--BlueGobo--is like crack. It's an online musical theater video archive and some of these clips are like mannah from heaven--at least for someone who grew up listening to these soundtracks always wondering what the shows looked like onstage. My favorites, so far, are the clips from Guys & Dolls, the original Evita (Patti singing "Buenos Aires"), and--just for kitsch value--Merlin (the little boy in it is Christian Slater). Now I have to get back to my new drug of choice.
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June 2007
Pure Expression
Music week has been really good for me. Ten years ago I was writing music all the time--I was more confident as a musician, in many ways, than I was as a writer. I wanted to write musicals. In fact, in college I started to write one called "Joe: The Musical" which was a modern day version of the Biblical story of Job. The best song in it was a song called "Different Now"--my friend Meredith (Girl Robot!) sang it at her senior recital--and it featured the lyrics: "Joe would say I drink too often / oy: boray puree hagafen." (Those lyrics will only be funny to Jews. It's the Jewish prayer for wine.)
Then something very damaging happened in college. His name was Stephen Sondheim. My friend J.T., a very talented musician, came to listen to my score for "Joe: The Musical" and subtly told me that the chords were predictable, the harmonies simplistic, and the overall feel way too amateurish to be taken seriously. If I wanted to really do this, if I wanted to write musicals for a living, I needed to listen to the music of Stephen Sondheim. He was the master, the guru, the one all musical theater composers needed to bow down to before beginning their journey. It was time to drink the Kool-Aid.
And drink the Kool-Aid I did. I started with "Assassins," worked my way to "Company," "Into the Woods," "A Little Night Music." But it was "Sweeney Todd" that really won me over: it quickly became my favorite musical (especially after watching the Angela Lansbury version on DVD). That and "Merrily We Roll Along" are my two favorite Sondheim scores.
Yet, despite the alacrity with which I tackled Sondheim, it had a devastating effect on my ability to compose: it just made me feel inept, ill-equipped, out of my league. Unlike Sondheim, who studied music theory in college, I had no real music training. Like my dad, I play piano by ear. It's all instinct and impulse: I can hear a song and play it. I write songs by improvising on the keyboard. There's no logic to it, no rhyme or reason. And Sondheim is nothing if not rhyme and reason: his songs are the most worked-over of any musical theater composer I know. Which is why, quite frequently, they're so difficult to perform.
I just stopped. Here and there I'd write a song, but I no longer saw a future in it. I shifted my interests to just writing: there I was in complete control. I had a degree in Creative Writing, I could read all the books I'd need to read to be well read. I understood the parameters within which I was working; I knew the context in which I fit. And that's why, to this very day, I spend most of my time behind a computer keyboard, not a piano keyboard. With writing, I'm the Captain of the ship and I know how to steer it. I know what body of water I'm in. I know how to get from here to there.
But with Music Week, I'm starting to rethink this. It happened when I wrote "The Lasagna Song." I could've crafted an ultra-sophisticated, highly complex song about lasagna. Instead, I just started playing and singing that bouncy, joyous tune. It felt like a song a little kid might sing if he had to make up a song about lasagna. And that, to me, gets at the root of what I did well before and what I might be able to do well again: pure expression.
When I say "pure expression," I mean just that: the nexus between the idea that motivates the song and the song itself. The Beatles, for example, are masters of pure expression. You can imagine somebody walking down the street with the girl they like and spontaneously composing, "I wanna hold your hand." Conversely, you wouldn't expect someone at a barber shop to magically break out into "Pirelli's Miracle Elixer" from "Sweeney Todd." And that, to me, is the divide between two very different types of art: that which is crafty and that which is pure.
Great art is often a mixture of both. "The Catcher in the Rye" is a very raw book, but it's also very carefully composed. One doesn't doubt its authenticity, and yet there's still a measure of craft. Music is more forgiving. Many musicians aren't trained and, in many cases, their craft is simply a matter of tweaking forms that have existed for generations. Like the blues. To be a great blues artist, you don't have to innovate musically. You just have to have soul--there has to be pure expression.
What does that mean for me? It means that I feel more empowered now as a writer of songs. Will I give up my book writing career for musical theater? Nope: I'm definitely still more comfortable here at my computer than over there by the piano. But who knows, maybe one day inspiration will strike, and the music will come pouring out of my fingers. But for now, let's just sing about falafel.
The Producers
I just caught "The Producers" movie on TV. No, not the original "Producers" with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, but the new "Producers" with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick based on the Broadway musical. I saw (and loved) the musical the year it first opened--the year it won more Tonys than any show in history and that seemed to herald a new golden age for musicals--and yet this movie somehow depressed me. I think it depressed me because it was like a copy of a copy of a copy. The musical copied the original movie but magically improved upon it. This movie just copies the musical without new innovation and that's why it fails.
What Rob Marshall, the genius behind the "Chicago" movie, knows that Susan Stroman (the director of "The Producers" both on Broadway and on film) doesn't is how to make something theatrical cinematic. The reason "The Producers" was so wonderful on stage was that it was so theatrical: the big flashy numbers, the tap dancing old ladies, the giant mirror that descends so you can see the Nazis form a Rockette-like swastika. All of these things happen in the movie, and yet they lose their zip. A comedy must speed along or, in the dead air, you begin to think about logic and reason and the confection falls apart. "Chicago" is a comedy--a satire, really, of celebrity and America--and it's relentless with its speed, its sound, its images. And Rob Marshall (like Bob Fosse before him) knows how to edit. The cuts are rapid and smart--they're on beat with the dance. You'd think Susan Stroman, also a choreographer, would use editing to her advantage, but she doesn't. Many of the scenes in the "Producers" movie feel static. The whole movie, in fact, feels static, two-dimensional. Stroman's natural medium is the stage, and that's the tragedy here.
Still, as a preservation tool for the show itself (which has since closed) it's a useful artifact. If you didn't get to see The Producers on stage, this will at least allow you a glimpse of what it was like. And Nathan Lane is pretty wonderful--his comic timing and delivery matches that of all the great comics of the early 20th century: Laurel & Hardy, Bert Lahr. He's the best reason to see the movie. And of course "Springtime for Hitler" is a catchy tune...
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