For an art form that started as long ago as 1866 — The Black Crook
is generally thought of as the original — musicals are not doing at all
badly. Put that another way: for a genre that supposedly had its heyday in
the 1950s and 1960s with the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and
Loewe and the rest, and which routinely faces accusations that it is singing
on its deathbed, producers’ wallets are surprisingly fat. This month the
Society of London Theatre reported that the West End box office is up 8 per
cent year on year to more than £483 million, with musicals accounting for a
whopping 61 per cent of all tickets sold (and given that they tend to charge
more than plays, it is likely that their earnings percentage is considerably
higher). Over time, a hit musical’s grosses can be every bit as spectacular
as its outsize sets or falling chandeliers — Phantom of the Opera
has taken £1.7 billion worldwide. Whether you think that these figures
deserve brickbats or ovations will entirely depend on your reaction to
musical theatre. Because, as much as millions of people are addicted to
musicals, others cannot stand them. I’ve always been an addict, never
happier than when thrilling to a great show from the stalls or, failing
that, belting out a Valjean-Javert duet from Les Misérables
(yes, both roles) in my car. Yet, throughout a career of reviewing and
writing about musicals, I’m not sure that I’ve ever taken the time to
penetrate their mysteries, to identify that quality which compels so many
and seems to repel others. So, I decided to be in one.
Les Misérables is the propulsive staging of Victor Hugo’s epic
novel that first got me hooked (I’ll never forget the excitement when my
father surprised me, aged 11, with tickets for a return visit) and, now in
its 23rd year, is still pulling in full houses at the Queen’s Theatre in
Shaftesbury Avenue. I approached the producer, Cameron Mackintosh, who
agreed that my idea made sense, and a date was set, complete with an
audition to determine whether I’d be allowed to sing or, better yet, have a
solo. Here was I, having done no acting since university, having never sung
in front of an audience except at my wedding, presuming to step in at short
notice to one of the more complicated productions in the West End.
I sought advice from David Babani, one of the most enterprising young
producers of musicals (with two shows running in Theatreland, La Cage aux
Folles and A Little Night Music). He was not reassuring. “Musical
theatre is one of the most complex art forms to pull off. It is infinitely
more difficult to get right than straight theatre.” What really annoys
Babani, though, is that musicals don’t get the credit he feels they deserve.
“They are still generally seen as a lesser art form than plays.”
According to Stephen Schwartz, the composer-lyricist of shows such as Godspell
and Wicked, there is a historical reason for this. “The
intelligentsia, including reviewers, always viewed musicals as second-rate
entertainment. The audience has always been ahead of them. They’ve always
wanted musicals to be deeper and more meaningful than have the critics,
who’ve generally liked them to be flip and fun so they can look down their
noses. This is in reverse to straight plays, where critics have often
championed writers that audiences then had to catch up with. That said, it
has got better. The critics have evolved.”
Surely it’s not all the critics’ fault? Might as well admit it, the West End
is not the creative hothouse for new musicals that it once was. Amid some
distinguished revivals (Oliver!), and the long-runners, almost the
only new shows that are keeping the boxoffice tills ringing are rehashes of
famous movie titles, often with borrowed songs — Dirty Dancing, Priscilla
— or undisguised pop song catalogue shows such as Jersey Boys.
There are exceptions, among them Hairspray or Schwartz’s own Wicked,
but generally anything vaguely experimental or progressive — such as this
season’s New York import Spring Awakening — gets shut out. Yet,
apparently, this is a London thing. “The West End does favour fluffier
musicals,” says Schwartz. “Broadway is on a creative upswing, and shows by
new writers are attracting younger and more varied audiences — musicals like Next
to Normal, about a bipolar mother.”
Babani agrees: “America is far head of the UK in developing new writers and
without them there is a danger that the West End could become tired and
unimaginative.”
One of the more conspicuous young writers to benefit from the American system
is Jeff Marx, co-author of the oddly touching swearing and puppet-sex show Avenue
Q. For him the problem goes deeper. “The younger generation see musicals
as stilted and stodgy. So to do new work you have to find new ways of
reaching people.” It’s no accident that Avenue Q was
originally designed to be a South Park-style TV series. “TV is a
powerful way of making musicals fashionable,” says Marx.
Fine. But in this rush to capture the young with the new, isn’t there a danger
of the old being lost? Of forgetting what made musicals great in the first
place? One of the father figures of musical theatre, Jerry Herman, has
stopped writing. He is 79 and in fragile health, but there are reasons why
Herman, whose oeuvre includes Mack & Mabel, Hello, Dolly
and La Cage aux Folles, laid down his pen after La Cage in
1983. “The loss of melody saddens me,” he says. “When I saw my first
musical, Annie Get Your Gun, I went home and from memory played all
the songs. Now people are afraid that if they write a hummable melody they
will be branded as old-fashioned. But for me, musicals don’t as a form work
without that central requirement.”
Interestingly, the one musical that Herman does credit with a wealth of
hummable melodies is Avenue Q. Did Marx feel that it was only OK to
write, say, a traditional torch song such as It’s a Fine, Fine Line
because it had inverted commas around it? “You just have to find new ways of
presenting things,” he replies. “The traditional show tune isn’t dead, but
we deliver them in a way that seems less antique.”
None of which answers the question as to why some people hate musicals. “I
don’t understand those people,” says Herman. “Words and music in combination
can be incredibly potent. In Mack & Mabel, when Mack sings, ‘I
won’t send roses, or hold the door’ to Mabel, the music tells you something
else that’s going on in his head. That he’s really in love with her and that
he doesn’t want her to know it. That double-whammy is the secret of why
people get so addicted to musicals.”
Schwartz says that musicals tend to wear their hearts on their sleeves.
“Perhaps some people are uncomfortable with that open emotionalism,” he
says. This tallies with my experience, with people telling me they feel
“manipulated” by musicals. Perhaps what they mean is that they’re not
comfortable with exposing their emotions to the music in such a bold way.
Schwartz’s solution? “So why go to the theatre?”
Babani says that musicals provide “something for everyone. For every big,
emotional show there are other ‘grown-up musicals’ that challenge you in the
way that a play does. Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, for
instance, is incredibly cerebral. But for many people, it usually comes down
to some bad experience they had early on with a terrible production.”
As to what it takes to hurl a show across the footlights, only a performer can
really know. With my Les Mis debut nearing, I ask the sometime
Javert, Philip Quast (currently starring in La Cage) for a
masterclass. With immense cheek I have chosen Javert’s great credo, Stars,
as well as a scene where the nasty fop Bamatabois attacks the fallen but
saintly prostitute Fantine.
In Quast’s subterranean dressing room , I launch into the opening of Stars.
“There, out in the darkness,” I croon, in what I hope is a good approximation
of how a Javert should sound. I don’t get any farther. Quast thinks for a
moment, then says, “The trouble is that there are too many recordings. Les
Mis has been going for so long that generations have grown up on the
recordings and they become obsessed with making ‘a Les Mis
sound’. Your voice is fine. What the directors will want, what audiences
will need, is the original thought.”
He starts to pace and speaks one line, then abruptly changes direction.
Another line, another shift. “This is a great rehearsal exercise. Change
direction whenever the thought changes, and it’s impossible to be
monotonous. Do this at home.” An hour with Quast is revelatory. At home, I
pace the evenings away, with jolting direction changes. I have my costume
fittings. I am given four outfits, one of which, the student, is flattering
and three which are — characterful.
On performance day I get to the Queen’s Theatre early and am taken straight up
to meet the audition team, among them Adrian Sarple, the director, and Adam
Rowe, the music director. The pianist strikes up, Rowe cues me in and I
launch into the workers’ chorus, At the End of the Day. I use
my “original thought” for each line, carefully, moving from routine
collection of wages, to crushing sense of the debts that build up through to
fear of what happens when I can no longer “graft till I drop”. “Sing through
the ends of the lines, don’t drop the pitch,” instructs Rowe. “More attack
on the words, diction is key,” says Sarple. But they seem happy. I am
allowed to sing in the chorus.
I give them my solo audition, Bamatabois. It goes well and they try me out on
the soldier’s warning to the revolutionaries — “You at the barricades listen
to this!” It lies terrifyingly high with an exposed top note. “Relax,” says
Rowe. “It’s in your voice.” At least it is after four attempts. At which
point Sarple says: “If this was a normal audition and you had stage
experience, I’d put you in.” he says. But. “Wait until you get out there
with the audience. You might be fine, you might freeze. I’m not going to
risk the solo.”
He’s right. When I join the cast to rehearse it is all I can do to remember my
movement and my lines, never mind how the notes come out. In the inn scene,
where I am flirting atop a table, repelling a boisterous drunk, I manage to
forget my lines altogether. Back in my dressing room before the performance,
I give myself a stern talking-to. Waiting in the wings for my first
entrance, it’s exciting but there are no great revelations. Not until I step
out on stage. That’s when I sense it. The lights mean that you can’t see the
audience. What you see is an immense blackness. It’s as if the so-called
“fourth wall” has become a gateway to, well, something. To a different
dimension, almost. It bristles with its own energy.
The performance is going well, everything coming together and it’s in the inn
scene where I finally feel part of the story we’re telling. At that moment,
I feel that same energy surging through me, carried by the music, by the
words, through that wall, and I feel a connection. And there, I realise, is
the true power and beauty of musicals — the energy that music and words
combined can help to harness and project, in harmony with the audience. It
is, as Herman puts it, “the power of the music to waft across the stage,
through the audience, and leave them stunned”.
James Inverne is the author of The Faber Pocket Guide to Musicals,
published on September 3 by Faber at £8.99. To order it for £8.54 inc p&p
call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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