The following is an excerpt from the preface of the revised and expanded version of my book, A Million Miles from Broadway -- Musical Theatre Beyond New York and London. It is a work in progress, so I will encourage comments.
For many generations, the world has presumed that
the musical theatre is primarily an American art form: like jazz, it is America’s
gift to the world.
Balderdash. It’s one thing to say that the musical is an
integral part of American culture; it’s quite another to claim that America is an
inseparable part of the musical.
I grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, some
three thousand miles away from Broadway, yet it was a musically and theatrically
charged environment. The first professional musical I ever saw was Anne of Green Gables in 1967[i]. Even before that, whether through local
amateur productions, movies or the odd touring show, there were people
everywhere bursting into song.
During the next decade, there emerged a
remarkable group of people who were evidently drinking the same water I was
drinking. These included singer/songwriter Ann Mortifee, director and writer
Richard Ouzounian, composer Marek Norman, actor Brent Carver, actress Ruth
Nichol, dancer Jeff Hyslop, singer and actor Patrick Rose, producer David Y. H.
Lui, writer and director John MacLaughlin Gray and actor Eric Peterson. They all came out of the University of
British Columbia at around the same time, and all but the last two had been my
fellow members of the UBC Musical Theatre Society (Mussoc), an organisation
that began in 1916 and whose past members also included actress Margot
Kidder.
These were my early influences. After graduation, they continued to work
together, informally calling themselves the “Movers and Shakers” club. For a time, they gave Vancouver a unique
theatre scene, especially for musical theatre.
Several of them eventually rose to international prominence, and you may
see some of their names recurring elsewhere in this book. For others, their
fame remained local.
I watched from the sidelines, and got to know all
of them personally. They were my first
heroes, and, importantly for this book, they proved that local people could be my heroes.
While I have since then worked in Toronto, New York and London, the
influence of the “Movers and Shakers” is still with me.
Yet, like most of the “M and S’s”, I had to
leave, for I believe in learning from the masters. Sometimes it takes an entire lifetime to
learn that the first idea you had was the right one.
It wasn’t until the mid 1990s – some twenty years
after I wrote my first musical – that I actually saw my first show on Broadway.[ii] Like The
Drowsy Chaperone‘s “Man in
Chair” character, I was more familiar with the Broadway cast albums than I was
with the shows themselves. I saw them
from a remote distance, and so they were filtered through local
perceptions. New York may have been
literally about 3,000 miles away, but it might as well have been a million.
Some people believe that the modern musical
reached its zenith on Broadway in the 1940s and 50s, but “the history of the
musical theatre”, in the words of New Zealand-born historian Kurt Gänzl
(1946- ), “is no one-nation or one-center affair.”[iii] Alan Jay Lerner (1918-86), the librettist behind My Fair Lady said, “Broadway cannot live
without the musical theatre, but the musical theatre can live without
Broadway. After all, its first home was
Paris and then Vienna and then London and then New York. So changes of address are not uncommon.”[iv] American composer-lyricist Maury Yeston (1945- ) adds,
“Broadway is now a very long street running from the Kartnerstrasse in Vienna
through Hamburg and Amsterdam, across to the West End, New York, Chicago,
Minneapolis, L. A., to the Ginza and beyond.”[v] The musical wasn’t born in America, and I do
not believe that Broadway is its ultimate destination.
The American musical may have been the child of a
European parent, but that same parent had other offspring as well, and
therefore the American musical has siblings. These siblings have co-existed and in fact
borrowed from each other throughout history.
Why then did the late Peter Stone (1930-2003), a former president of the Dramatists Guild best
known as the Tony winning book writer of 1776
and Titanic, once claim that no
musical theatre existed outside of New York City?
Stone was not himself a native New Yorker. He was born in Los Angeles, the son of film
writers – (his father John produced Shirley Temple’s Baby Take a Bow in addition to several Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto
films) – and he even spent thirteen years living in Paris as an employee of an
American broadcaster.
However, in 1989 Stone said, “Why doesn’t a
musical theatre exist anywhere but in New York?
It doesn’t, you know.”[vi] That seems like a rather bold statement,
given that at the time, Broadway was dominated by Cats, Phantom
of the Opera and Les Misérables, with barely an American-written musical to be
seen (or heard).
He continues, “It is in New York that it is
passed along, the lore of it, the craft of it, the technique of it.” It
may be that Stone did not forsee the extent to which audiences – and thereby some
creators – would stop caring about the lore, the craft and the technique that
went into the classic musicals of the golden age. On the other hand, people (like me) who do care passionately and are really
dedicated will do whatever it takes to find a way to learn about it. And what I have discovered about the lore of
musical theatre would, I aver, surprise even Mr. Stone.
He goes
on: “Musical comedy writing is something that is passed down and around from
practitioner to practitioner, so it’s not something you can do in a room in
Cincinatti. New York is the place. You can see the shows that are working and
synthesize what’s to be gotten from them.”[vii]
It’s true that historically the craft of musical
theatre was handed down from one generation to another. Stone was himself mentored in this way by
Frank Loesser (1910-69), the composer-lyricist of Guys and Dolls. But what do you do if you’re not an American,
and living in New York is not an option?
How do you learn the technique? Take
a tip from Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin and Charles Strouse.
Before New York had taken its place at the head
of the queue, Jerome Kern studied in Germany.
Ira Gershwin worked in London with people who had known and worked with
his idols Gilbert and Sullivan, while his brother George returned from Paris
with suitcases filled with Debussy scores.
A generation later, Charles Strouse studied in Paris under Nadia
Boulanger. Consider also the many
Broadway writers, including Victor Herbert, Frederick Loewe and Kurt Weill, who
were born abroad and arrived in New York with their studies – and sometimes
even their reputations – completed.
Some people from New York have also turned their
attention to training foreigners. Lehman
Engel taught in Toronto. People from
Korea come to study at the Tisch School in New York (or Goldsmiths in London),
then they go back home to practice – and spread – what they have learned. Others
just study the works themselves – the hits and the flops – and read every
biography they can get their hands on. They
may also have a chance to see – and learn from – the more than eighty percent
of musicals that fail.
In this sense, New York has, in the past, enjoyed
an advantage, but does that mean it is really the only place where musicals can
happen? I deeply admire Peter Stone’s
work, and there is a great deal of merit in what he says, but on this one
point, I know for a fact that he was wrong.
Imagine hypothetically for a moment that, at some
point, somebody had declared that no musical theatre existed outside of
Vienna. (I have little doubt that at
some point in history, somebody actually has said or thought that.) How would Americans have summoned the courage (and
it does take courage) to prove this wrong?
At the time Stone was speaking of, many of the
greats – including George Abbott (1887-1995) – were still with us and plying
their trade. Now, thirty years later,
virtually all of those practitioners – including Mr. Stone himself – have left
us. It is no longer possible to be
directly mentored by them, so we learn from the greats by whatever means are
available to us. That’s what I did – and
hence this book.
Make no mistake – musical theatre certainly does
exist outside of New York. I’m not
talking about the many franchised versions of Les Misérables and Hamilton that have played everywhere from Tel-Aviv to Abu
Dabi. Like the “Movers and Shakers”, I’m
referring to indigenous musical theatre created in places other than New York
by people other than New Yorkers and drawing on traditions other than just those
of Broadway. We are now in the world of what Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan (1911-80)
called the “global village”.[viii]
[ii] I saw my
first London show, Fiddler on the Roof starring
Alfie Bass, in 1969.
[iii] Kurt
Gänzl, The Musical – A Concise History,
Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1997, p. xi.
[iv] Alan Jay
Lerner, The Musical Theatre: A Celebration, McGraw-Hill
Book Company, New York, 1986, p. 236.
[v] Scott
Brown, “How Can Musical Theater be Saved?”, Vulture.com, 24 May 2012, accessed
21 July 2012.
[vi] Peter
Stone, “The Musical Comedy Book” in Dramatists’
Guild Quarterly, Vol. 25 No. 4, Winter 1989, p.13.
[vii] Stone,
p. 23
[viii] Marshall
McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962, p.31
