Joel Philip Friedman--composer/currator/colaborator

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Chapter 4.

Musicals, Operas, Revues and "Revuesicals"

FJO: This gets us to the question of vocal music, theater, opera, music theater vs. opera. Is there a difference between opera and musical theater?. . . This is a question that has haunted me for my whole life, and I know it must haunt you; you flow in both of those worlds.

JF: Right. They both can be wonderful, if handled well. I guess in a nutshell, musical theater is word-driven and not music-driven, and that's its strength as well as its weakness. It's a strength because it creates clear narratives, semi-realistic pacing, strong characters who want something and who you care for, relate to, and understand. It's potentially a weakness because it can inhibit the music, make it "too rational," not let it soar. It's kind of like text setting for the Mass. Do you limit your setting to what is easily understandable, can function in a church - homophony, or do you enrich the music, let it rip, but possibly cloud the intelligibility of the words - polyphony? In theater, or a musical, you only have one chance to hear something, or set something up. The audience has to understand it in order to be with you and want to see/hear the second act. I'm not sure if opera has to work that way. You can still love that famous duet scene even if you don't know Italian, or you can't understand the words because the music, in general terms, tells you what is going on. Perhaps the action and characters are also simpler and "larger than life," I don't know. There is something very "melodramatic," in the true sense of the term, about opera. Opera has a wonderful magical way of suspending time that is totally unrealistic. And one of its great strengths - I'm again trying to find that middle path - is, yes, you can have a five-minute chorus on "we're going fishing. . . in the morning we're going fishing, Oh! We're going fishing", just because the music is beautiful. The people are just standing there doing nothing but singing, and you've learned nothing about them, they're a bunch of peasants, they're generic peasants, whatever that might be. . . But starting with the Rodgers and Hammerstein model of the modern musical, - basically from late 30s and 40s, starting with Oklahoma! and going well into the 70s, 80s and still propagated in its own ways by Sondheim - it's all driven by the book, text, and by the characters so that you don't tend to have those big, flashy numbers whose only purpose is to "bring out the girls!," for example, or the big rousing chorus number that tells you nothing, where the action grinds to a halt. Even Officer Krupke, a classic Shakespeare "Porter Scene" that relieves the intensity of West Side Story, and a total hoot, illuminates a huge amount about who these gang members are and what they face in society. Yeah, you can still have those show stoppers, but the idea is that the bar has been raised. "Let's dance!. . . for no reason!" is now considered sloppy or cheap, like rhyming "mind" and "time" in a theater song. The big production number now has to do something else: the plot has to be propelled through the music, by the music and the words, so that you learn something about the characters and the situation through the number and arrive at a different place at the end. It's really amazing to think that with the best musicals, for example Gypsy or West Side Story, nothing is wasted. They cover so much ground in a mere 90 minutes or so, with such concise books. They are so succinct compared to most operas. Imagine: Ring!, the Wagner musical would be two acts and take only 90 minutes! Find ring, give up on love, burn your house down, . . . The End.

FJO: And that succinctness clearly happens in the best of opera too. Nothing is wasted in the best operas, either. They work as music and as theater.

JF: Yeah, that's true. Imagine all the amazing music you would miss out on from the Ring Cycle if it were "just" a musical. Again, it's that operatic idea of letting the music soar and of suspending time. Opera can be so much more metaphorical and symbolic while musicals tend to have the trappings of realism. Their danger is being mundane. It also touches on the "high versus low" argument again. I guess I'm thinking more about older opera: opera libretti that just repeat the same text over and over in ensemble numbers and so forth. Da capo repeats. . . indulgences for the singers. It's not so much the case with 20th Century opera. There are probably more great operas that have okay-to-bad libretti and plots than there are musicals. . . you know. . . well that might not be entirely true. The older style shows. . . you know, Gershwin musicals, have incredible scores and some wonderful lyrics, but the plots can be stupid. I worked on the piano-vocal score for Pardon My English for the Library of Congress a few years ago. A gangster gets hit on the head and becomes a sweetheart. Gets hit again and reverts to gangster. . . and on it goes. Now there's a plot! Many of those shows aren't really integrated with the book. The songs are simply wonderful diversions from, or amplifications of, what has already happened.

FJO: You cannot revive them anymore without completely revising the story.

JF: Exactly, exactly. But maybe that proves my point: those shows are more like traditional operas, while the "modern" musical is different. You know I was mentioning the lineage of Rodgers and Hammerstein going into Sondheim, and maybe it's potentially a liability of Sondheim that things are too word driven, too integrated, he doesn't let the music soar enough. People talk about him being cold-blooded, which isn't true, and I don't think that has anything to do with plot or the brilliancy of his words, or even his music, 'cause it's all brilliant. If anything, it's emotionally too sharp, it cuts a little bit too deep, it doesn't just make you feel good, and that just may be the issue. Perhaps he's the "modernist of musicals" waiting to be understood in "the future!" But, contrary to what I've been saying about integration, there are times that the music needs to "irrationally" soar in a musical, where you want to have that big dance number. . . hopefully you still justify why and how they dance, that in the process of the dancing the plot and the audience is gaining something. But Sondheim maybe doesn't do that enough, while someone like Bernstein did.

FJO: Except you've got to die for beautiful melodies like "Johanna" in Sweeney Todd, or "Not a Day Goes By" from Merrily We Roll Along. . . they're just so beautiful.

JF: And you know what's interesting. . . I totally agree with you, and yet when I have taught Broadway classes, they do not go over, and don't know exactly why.

FJO: Those songs?

JF: Yeah. . .

FJO: And you've used those songs in. . .

JF: Ah-huh. Oh yeah.

FJO: Wow. . .

JF: Yeah, yeah. There's gorgeous music in Company, in Sweeney Todd, in Merrily, all those shows, and it's maybe because they're less familiar than Cats or Oklahoma! to many, maybe the styles are less familiar, maybe it demands too much emotionally as well as intellectually from the audiences. . . Sondheim himself talks about the joy of doing something like Gypsy where the audience laughs and taps their feet only to go home and not be able to sleep because they're so upset. What a great thing to do in theater, to get somebody like that. I don't think The Lion King does that to you. It demonstrates again this idea of combining two opposite poles, to somehow going down in the middle. Gypsy is a great example, the acid of Arthur Laurents' book and Sondheim's lyrics are coupled with the gorgeous, warm syrup of Jules Stein's score. . . what a great mix. And there's a lesson to be learned in that. . . Sometimes, you can make your point more effectively with a "spoonful of sugar" as opposed to writing the big, didactic Brechtian number, which might be musically wonderful, but pounds you into the ground. Theater teaches you about the possibility of not being so didactic all the time, to sometimes cut against the grain with the music, making the scene much more effective, even funny - while you're crying. There are usually so many ways of doing something, so many choices. Sometimes it's the difference between being "dramatic" and "theatrical." I think this is a difference between musical theater on one hand, and opera and concert music on the other. Many 20th Century works are highly charged and "dramatic" in a didactic and unfocused way: "this piece is about. . . Death and Horror!" In good theater it's about specific death and horror that befalls a person you know and care about. So, while it isn't as much of a universal statement, I think you feel more, or relate more to theater. I'm beginning to think this is one of the reasons I don't like some of the recent mega-musicals, "poperettas," they're too based on generalities and "universal themes." Theater also shows you, it doesn't tell you. Very important. You know, now that I think about it, maybe I overstated something: songs can function in other ways in a musical or an opera. They can comment on the action, think of Company, they can also act as inserted diversions, like in Singing in the Rain. Both of those pieces are amazing so I have to take back some of what I said. You can't say those pieces don't work!

FJO: So, to bring this to your own work, to a show like Personals. That's an unusual piece in terms of its collaboration 'cause you only wrote about half of the songs for it, that's odd.

JF: It's an odd piece in a lot of ways., It started off as a college show at Brandeis University where my brother, Seth, and a bunch of friends were theater majors. They weren't getting cast, and the obvious thing they said was "let's write a show for ourselves and cast ourselves". At the same time I had been wanting to work with my brother, we had played together in school and in jazz and rock bands.

FJO: So he is a musician as well?

JF: Yeah, a very fine instinctual musician. And so when we collaborated it was absolutely wonderful, not just because we're brothers and there was a certain "communication shorthand" there, but because we shared so much musical history together. I can make a musical reference, whether it's a verbal or a playing one, and he gets it. And vice versa. So that's really fabulous to have that kind of collaboration. And the trust, because a collaboration is like a marriage. I should add that I've also worked with my sister, Bela-Lisa and set some of her poetry. It's a family sort of thing. So, since Seth and I wanted to work together I joined their group. There were many, many versions of the show, in some ways the older versions were much more raw and experimental, and musically more interesting. The score was also much more jazz influenced than the final version which was very good and very successful but did become a little bit more mainstream pop because of economics, the directors, producers, etc. So Personals is a real hodgepodge of different things. As for some of the other composers, frankly, we were unknowns when we came to New York, and the producers said "well, you know, we need somebody to help sell the show". So we had a series of conversations with Steven Schwartz and Alan Menken, pre-Disney, and asked them if they would write a couple of songs for this piece with the realization that they had much bigger names than us.

FJO: So that's how that happened.

JF: Yeah.

FJO: Ha. So it's like the old days of Herbert Stothart coming in and doing some of the music for shows by Sigmund Romberg. . .

JF: It's true, and what's interesting also about it is you can get away with it because Personals was nominally a revue, it's common to have a number of different writers working on a single piece. But, what very few people picked up in the criticism of the show was that it lived in. . . well, somebody once called it a "revuesical". . . a place midway between a revue and a book musical. Book musicals have set characters and a through line. Revues are more free, loose, episodic. They're usually based on a theme, a topic, or a writer. In Personals the theme was relationships and personal ads but there also were characters with through lines that wove in and out so that an actor plays both "Man 2" and the "Typesetter." The difference is that "Man 2" isn't a returning, identifiable, fixed character like the "Typesetter," he's just the unknown guy in the bar, someone who sings in an ensemble number or does a skit. The Typesetter is someone you come to know, who has a story. It was really very fluid and an inventive form to work with, trying to get a little bit of both worlds. There was an attempt, at one point, and it was misguided. . . to make the show into a book musical. It became a soap opera. We were smart enough to say no to it.

FJO: To get it back to Sondheim and the influence of Sondheim, there's a song on your demo that I absolutely adored. . . the song about the woman who picks up this guy, and she hasn't slept with anybody for a while. . .

JF: "I Think You Should Know." Kim's a recent divorcee who has doubts about her decision.

FJO: It's just brilliant in that Sondheim way of the character totally driving it. I had this visceral picture in my mind of exactly what that scene was on stage. . . and it's just her, it's a monologue. . .

JF: Right, and it's been done a couple of ways. It's been done where it's just her, it's been done where there's basically a mime, the guy who is dancing with her, and when she sings "Oh, don't kiss my neck it makes me nauseous" he's kissing her, but you don't know who he is, he's just the guy she's bringing home. I guess he's "Man 2." Sondheim was really big for us, when I mentioned influences I didn't get into theater. . . I mean, I grew up with West Side Story and Funny Girl and all sorts of other musicals, but coming of age in the 70s how could you not know and love Sondheim: A Little Night Music, Sweeney, Pacific Overtures. . . it's incredibly influential stuff, somewhat in the attitude of urbane wittiness, a sharp, dark undertone, the emotional twists and turns, but also in the brilliance and literacy - both in lyrics and music. It occurs to me now that Personals was a "concept musical," not unlike Company in form (and originally in tone). A kind of early Hal Prince-Sondheim show. We probably knew all of that in school years ago. . .

FJO: We mentioned "Not a Day Goes By" a few minutes ago, and here's a prime example. Did you see Merrily We Roll Along?

JF: I saw the last performance. . . When they are up on the rooftop and "point" to Sputnik someone had placed a balloon on the ceiling so the spotlight went to that. That little prank brought the house down.

FJO: I had the weird luxury of getting to see that show three times. . . out of its two-week run. I saw the first night of previews, and then I saw another preview, and then I saw the opening night. . . and then it only ran for about a week and a half. And it was because I was a part of this music theater workshop. . . What was interesting is that "Not a Day Goes By" began as a duet between a man and a woman getting married, and it ended up being the husband singing to the woman he was marrying juxtaposed against another woman who was secretly in love with him and watching the wedding from a table in the corner, singing with him. . . It was an amazing theatrical moment. But that wasn't the original conception, that came about through collaboration, through somebody saying "well this isn't working as theater." I had a very similar reaction to your song, "I Think You Should Know." It's a solo that functions as a duet, it's only half of the conversation and the other half isn't necessary, but that's the theatrical aspect of it. . .

JF: Yeah, that's what happens when you work with people who know theater. . . When writing music for the theater you have to have a sense of character, who this person is and what they need to do, whether the words are already written, being written or not written, etc. As a composer you deal with people with whom you have conversations like "No, that person wouldn't do it" or "No, that doesn't work" etc. It all starts with the theatrical/character situation. When I mentioned the earlier versions of Personals, that some of the best music was cut. . . if it was the "best" music, how come it was cut? Well, because it ended up that the show took a turn in a very different direction, and the situation, the character, etc. that called for that type of music disappeared. Sometimes the music was portable, you could just keep recasting it as such, as in the case you were talking about, "Not a Day Goes By.,". Sometimes it can't work so they just end up being "trunk songs", the tone of the show alters in such a way that they no longer fit. But, I was thinking of another difference between opera and musical theater, going back to the idea of the chorus singing for 5 minutes about fishing., There's this classic Sondheim story where. . . or actually maybe it was Hammerstein who said it. . . "What is the person doing on stage during a specific musical moment?" "Well, this is a really cool modulation, I'm going from C minor to A major, isn't that great?" "What are they doing on stage?" "I don't know" "Cut it!" [FJO: Laughs.] And you lose some of your best "children" in that sense, because, musically it might make sense but if it doesn't make theatrical sense it goes, Yes, there are exceptions, including scene-change music or indulgences, again that sort of irrationality that sometimes just works. Even Sondheim talks about there being "real time" and "theater time," you can suspend this belief and just have people dance and it's a great moment. But, so many things are character-driven, and even circumscribed by this, that it is both a strength as well as a limitation. And what I would love to do is to find a way to incorporate both ideals. . . Basically to have a musical that is concise and book-character driven yet can draw upon the power of opera music, and potentially the sophistication of it, whether that means the musical language, the overall length, inclusion of instrumental music, the ensemble numbers, and so on. Obviously a lot of people have done that and done that successfully, whether it's Bernstein or Sondheim, or Gershwin. But it's a great place to try to live in because the language and the parameters are so broad. . . I think opera tends to allow more of those cool modulations.