As you no doubt know, I have begun a Kickstarter campain to raise £3000 toward the cost of producing a new revised and expanded version of my book A Million Miles from Broadway – Musical Theatre Beyond New York and London. I have now raised £936 of the minimum £3000 pounds I will need by 23 March. Please help me reach my goal so that I can finish this vitally important book by going to http://kck.st/2DN3yzx
These are some of the reviews that a previous
edition of my book has received:
"His research is monumental... This is an important book on a
previously undocumented area of musical theatre." -- Peter Pinne, Stage Whispers
"There’s never been a better book for the
armchair-traveler-theatergoer." -- Peter
Filichia, New York theatre critic
"An intriguing and informative work that will help you see the
musical in an entirely new light - and make you hopeful for the future."-- Viewsfromthegods.co.uk
Overture:
A Search for
Signs of Life
For many generations, the world has presumed that
the musical theatre is first and foremost an American art form and that all of
the great Broadway and Hollywood musicals were the result of uniquely American
ingenuity. Like jazz, the musical is deemed
to be America’s gift to the world, and requires American know-how to make it
work.
Balderdash.
Great
as the classic Broadway musicals may have been, 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 am not an American. Nor am I English. And yet, I write musicals. I grew up in
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, some three thousand miles away from Broadway;
nonetheless even the New York Times has
praised my “lovely music”[i]. It may therefore surprise you to learn that my
home town was an artistically charged environment.
It is, I believe, signifigant that the first
professional musical I ever saw – in
1967 – was a Canadian show, Anne of Green
Gables[ii]. There were lots of other shows too –
professional, amateur, movies; it seemed that people everywhere were bursting
into song.
During the next decade, there emerged from this
cocoon a remarkable group of people who were evidently drinking the same water
I was drinking. These included singer/songwriter Ann Mortifee, director and librettist
Richard Ouzounian, composer Marek Norman, actor Brent Carver, actress Ruth
Nichol, dancer Jeff Hyslop, singer, songwriter and actor Patrick Rose, producer
David Y. H. Lui and future Artistic Director of the Arts Club Theatre Bill
Millerd. They all emerged from the
University of British Columbia at around the same time, and had been members of
the UBC Musical Theatre Society (Mussoc), an organisation that began in 1916
and whose past members also included actress Margot Kidder. (They would eventually also include me.)
After graduation, they continued to work
together, informally calling themselves the “Movers and Shakers” club. For a time, they gave Vancouver a unique
musical theatre scene. Several of them eventually
rose to international prominence, and you may see some of their names sprinkled
elsewhere in this book. For others, their fame remained local.
I was too young to actually be a part of this
group. I just watched from the
sidelines, and got to know each of them personally. They were my first heroes, and, importantly
for this book, they proved that local
people could be my heroes.
Yet, like most of the “Movers”, I had to leave
Vancouver, for I wanted to study the masters and to combine the discipline I
would learn abroad with the uniqueness that I found at home. Sometimes it takes an entire lifetime to
learn that the first idea you had was the right one. While I have since then worked in Toronto,
New York and London, the influence of the “Movers and Shakers” is still with
me.
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.[iii] 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.
It may come as a shock for some to hear this, but
what we now call the musical wasn’t conceived in America. It was the child of a
European parent. Some called this parent
“operetta”, while to others it was “opéra-bouffe” or even “comédie-musicale”, a
term which pre-dates the American “musical comedy”. (These terms relate to the musical in the
same way as “Gramophone” relates to “record player”.) That same parent had other offspring as well,
and therefore the Broadway musical has siblings. These siblings have co-existed and borrowed
from each other throughout their history, and the musical theatre has benefited
from this. However, I have never believed that Broadway is the musical’s ultimate
destination.
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.”[iv] 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.”[v] 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.”[vi]
Alas, not everybody sees it that way.
Why else 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.”[vii] In case you don’t wuite believe what you’re
hearing, on another occasion, he also said “I always thought the reason [Waiting for] Godot was a hit everywhere except in New York was because we were
the only place in the world that had musicals.”[viii] These seem like rather
bold statements, 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 elaborates, “It is in New York that it is
passed along, the lore of it, the craft of it, the technique of it.”[ix] Now,
not everybody these days cares about the lore, the craft and the technique that
went into the classic musicals of the golden age, but I do. I care passionately, and people like me will
therefore do whatever it takes to imbibe it, regardless of where we live. And what I have discovered about the lore of
musical theatre would, I aver, surprise even Mr. Stone.
He continues:
“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.”[x]
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 living in New York is
not, for whatever reason, 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 for two years in Heidelberg, Germany, then
moved on to London, where he lived and worked for a further decade. Ira Gershwin also 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 – already a fait accompli.
Some people from New York have also turned their
attention to training foreigners. Lehman
Engel (1910-82) taught in Toronto. “Writers
and composers in other countries have made serious attempts to rival the
creative spirits of the American musical theatre”, he wrote in 1981. “There seems to be no reason why they should
not succeed.”[xi] 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 to learn from him, 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 even 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, no matter where you live, so we learn from the
greats by whatever means are available to us.
That’s what I did – and hence this book.
[i] Laurel
Graeber, “Family Fare”, New York Times,
7 November, 2003.
[iii] I had
already seen a number of London shows during visits, beginning in 1969 with Fiddler on the Roof starring Alfie Bass.
[iv] Kurt
Gänzl, The Musical – A Concise History,
Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1997, p. xi.
[v] Alan Jay
Lerner, The Musical Theatre: A Celebration,
McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1986, p. 236.
[vi] Scott
Brown, “How Can Musical Theater be Saved?”, Vulture.com, 24 May 2012, accessed
21 July 2012.
[vii] Peter
Stone, “The Musical Comedy Book” in Dramatists’
Guild Quarterly, Vol. 25 No. 4, Winter 1989, p.13.
[viii] Patsy Southgate, “Peter Stone: Musical Titan Writes the Book”, The East Hampton Star, 29 May 1997.
[x] Stone,
p. 23
