Broadway Babylon (15 page)

T
HE FIRST COLLABORATION
of Rodgers and Hammerstein boasted songs that furthered the plot and helped explain the characters. Although the popular impression is that
Oklahoma!
is a light, all-American tunefest centering on a 1906 picnic, the show is also about a virgin’s sexual fears and fantasies (at times the same thing) and about attempted rape and murder. Its primary theme is responsibility and the need to establish a community, e.g., cowboy Curly’s becoming a farmer and a husband to Laurey, and territory folk’s uniting to become a state (one of the last two to join the continental US).

Agnes de Mille’s choreography also broke new ground. The dances were integrated into the plot, and her influential Dream Ballet revealed as much about Laurey as Laurey’s words did.
Oklahoma!
forewent the tradition of using female anatomy, specifically legs, to lure heterosexual male customers. Its costumes weren’t glamorous, the conversation wasn’t cosmopolitan, and the curtain rose on elderly Aunt Eller churning butter. Yet the unorthodox musical became the longest-running show to date, with 2,212 performances, in an era when runs didn’t reach 1,000 performances—the next-longest-running show was the 1919 musical
Irene
, with 670 performances.

Oklahoma!
also offered insight into and sympathy for its villain. The songs “Pore Jud” and “Lonely Room” disclose that what Jud really wants is a woman who will love him and not be afraid of him. When Rodgers and Hammerstein agreed to team, Oscar Hammerstein II asked Richard Rodgers if he could pen the lyrics first (Larry Hart had fit his words to Rodgers’ music). Because the pair was aiming for significantly expressive lyrics that were as important as the melodies, Rodgers willingly reversed the usual work process of composing music first.

T
HIS MUSICAL, BASED ON STORIES
by Christopher Isherwood, didn’t just have a dark character—a Joey or Jud—but was itself dark, set in an early-’30s Berlin irrevocably turning Nazi. (
Cabaret
followed
Flora, the Red Menace
, the Broadway debut of John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Liza Minnelli; that 1965 flop featured communists in Depression-era U.S.A.) Two non-German lead characters served as audience surrogates in the grim worlds of the Kit Kat Klub and the boarding house where Sally Bowles works and lives, respectively. An Englishwoman dreaming of fame, she falls in love with visiting American writer Cliff. (In the movie, Sally is American—Liza Minnelli—and Brian is English; based on Isherwood himself, Chris was closetedly gay in the stories, hetero in 1966, and bisexual in the 1972 film.)

The main German character is the Kit Kat’s emcee—Joel Grey onstage in 1966, in the movie and in the 1987 Broadway revival. He presides over what could be called the musical within a musical, for
Cabaret
is both a musical play and a revue. Many of its songs are performed in the context of performances at the Klub. Like
Mame
the musicalization of a straight play,
Cabaret
was adapted from the 1951
I Am a Camera
. Unlike prior musicals,
Cabaret
emphasized darkness, using it to tell a story of a time and place. Darkness was embodied by the breakup of the affair of Sally and Cliff, and his departure from Berlin; the seediness of the Emcee (not bisexualized until the UK—derived 1998 Broadway revival); the desperate lives of its characters; burgeoning anti-Semitism; and the eschewing of happy endings that would have betrayed historical truth.

In the manner of Greek drama,
Cabaret
challenged audiences to rethink their initial assumptions. Critical reception at the time was downbeat, puzzled, or indignant. Yet the original production ran 1,165 performances. It bears noting that only
successful
innovative musicals attain the longevity and impact to become major influences.

M
ANY OR MOST MUSICALS BARELY
, if at all, reflect their times. But in the late 1960s,
Hair
integrated pop-rock music, the hippie counterculture, sexual liberation, drugs, and the Vietnam war in a nonlinear presentation that would
echo in shows like
Company, Follies
, and
A Chorus Line. Hair
had less of a story than a theme: peace, love, and equality. The strand of plot concerned whether Claude would be sent to fight in Vietnam.

With book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado and music by Galt MacDermot, the psychedelic, impressionist musical ignored almost every rule in the book. It offered non-rhyming lyrics, various songs that didn’t end but rather slowed down or segued into the next number, four-letter words, nudity, sexual content, an integrated and sometimes gender-bending cast, and a unit set. The title, of course, referred to the hirsute symbol of individualism that so threatened the Establishment; beards and hair below the collar were enough to keep males out of restaurants, clubs, schools, and elsewhere.

Although
Hair
featured no big names, it launched the careers of Diane Keaton, Tim Curry, Melba Moore, Donna Summer, Peter Gallagher, Nell Carter, Joe Mantegna, Meat Loaf, Ben Vereen, Cliff DeYoung, and others.

Even those who never saw the show heard the omnipresent hit songs that fueled the 1,750 performances that made
Hair
the fourth-longest-running musical of the ’60s. Most famous were “The Age of Aquarius” and “Let the Sun Shine In.” The latter, which concluded the “tribal-rock musical,” isn’t a cheerful Broadway ditty, but a call to action that urged audiences to give up dark resignation for the light of activism and change.

Less well-known but more-provocative songs included “Sodomy”—The
New York Times
marveled that
Hair
didn’t frown upon homosexuality—“Colored Spade,” about racism; and “Black Boys/White Boys,” in which women sing about preferring men of the opposite race—the
Times
commented that
Hair
approved “enthusiastically of miscegenation.”The latter song was innovative in that the singers objectified males the same way men had always done with “girls,” and daring in that several US states at the time had laws against interracial marriage.

Even if to a large extent
Hair
preached to the converted—the
Times
admitted that the show wouldn’t please “adherents of Governor Reagan”—its revolutionary format and crowd-pleasing topicality shattered the conventions of what a musical should be. Its success impressed upon producers that new musicals could and perhaps ought to present the voice of today rather than the day before yesterday.

J
ONATHAN
L
ARSON
, a fan and student of Broadway musicals past and present, used Puccini’s opera
La Bohéme
as inspiration for his portrait of survival and illness in New York’s East Village. Larson spotlighted homelessness, struggling artists, and AIDS—an unprecedented four main characters in
Rent
have AIDS. Although the title refers also to payment for lodging, Larson’s preferred meaning was
torn
, as in between conflicting feelings, as in split relationships, as in torn by pain.

Ironically, Larson’s own life was rent apart before his epochal show opened. After seven years of
Rent
workshops and rewrites, the 35-year-old felt unwell. One hospital diagnosed flu, another food poisoning. The night before the preview, after a final dress rehearsal, Larson returned home, began to make tea, collapsed, and died of an aortic aneurism. The artistic team headed by director Michael Greif had to decide which remaining changes Larson would have made.

Extravagantly endorsed by the media and audiences,
Rent
soared. The
La Bohéme
connection elicited much publicity; however,
Rent
wasn’t really an update, though it focused on artists and illness—AIDS instead of tuberculosis. Where Puccini romanticized death, Larson glorified survival.
La Bohème
was tragic,
Rent
joyous. A few critics complained that
Rent
was a-cynical and too direct, rejecting Sondheim’s by then widespread “frosty intellectualism.” Yet its spirit grabbed spectators even in the absence of any real set, of costumes, of superficial glamour or a chandelier or helicopter.
Rent
does include a substantial diversity of heteros, gays and lesbians, blacks, Hispanics, transvestites, and junkies, though its two lead characters are male, white, and heterosexual. More mysteriously, why do two unimpoverished roommates decide not to pay rent this year or next, as if it’s a noble act?

Almost entirely sung,
Rent
often gives the impression of nonactors on a stage revealing their own life stories. It connects with the times and viewers in a way few musicals ever have. Larson had written that in a troubled world, “We can all learn how to survive from those who stare death squarely in the face every day.” He sought to present and bond the human community on stage, using genuine rock music, albeit more ’70s than ’90s. Larson believed his musical style was Broadway’s future, and declared in 1992 that his masterwork “exalts Otherness, glorifying artists and counterculture as necessary to healthy civilization.” His exuberant and enormously successful legacy has expanded musical horizons and continues to inspire theatre artists seeking to reconcile individuality with community and difference with tolerance.