Archive for September, 2009
Driving the Plot Forward
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
In the world of musical theater, it’s often stated that songs have to move the plot forward - something has to happen in the song. That is, if you left out the song, the play should have big holes in it that confuse people. I’m not so sure this is right. Or, at least, it often misses the real problem.
I suspect that the main problem this trope is trying to solve is a feeling that we’ve all had: during a show, you find yourself pretty caught up in the story, but then the music starts, a character turns to the audience, and you groan and sink back in your chair, prepared to wait out the oncoming boredom so you can get back to the plot. I know I’ve felt it - among other times, at a local performance of Into the Woods. I didn’t like the feeling much, so I appreciate the efforts of musical theater folks to minimize it.
However, I don’t think that tying songs to the plot more strongly really gets at the problem. I mean, think about the evidence.
1) People - even young people inclined to vast quantities of boredom - will sit through hours of music at a concert without the slightest thread of story or dramatic tension.
2) Several successful musicals feature songs that don’t forward the plot at all. Sometimes these are the best songs (”All That Jazz” and “Nowadays” from Chicago, “Ladies Who Lunch” from Company, many of the numbers from Cabaret, “Chim Chimeree,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” “Step in Time,” and others from Mary Poppins, “Circle of Life” and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from Lion King, the entire score to Spring Awakening, etc etc etc)
3) Some musicals have “plots” but no one actually cares, as the songs and dances are enough to keep everyone entertained throughout - Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Cats.
4) Some songs from musicals technically “do something” plot-wise, but they don’t really have to. Consider “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof. The song does do some character development for Tevye, but the play is not really “about” Tevye’s quest to get rich. Our interest in the song is not really related to its role in the plot. Likewise, a number of the great Disney songs, like “Be Our Guest” and “Under the Sea,” do advance the story in an emotional way, but in a very simple way that could just as easily be conveyed with a sentence or two - “Welcome to the castle!” or “Look at how good you’ve got it!”
All these things suggest to me that the principal source of that “not another song” feeling isn’t the song’s relationship to the plot - it’s that the music itself is boring or not worth listening to. Good songs can happily insert themselves into a show without slowing things down, if done properly - the song “Little Bird” from Man of La Mancha is a pretty song that doesn’t need to fit into the plot until it’s almost over. It can just be a pretty song strummed by a guy with a guitar for the first verse or so. Of course, the best scenario is when music and story enhance each other in a beautiful synthesis - but if the story has to carry the music all the time, something’s wrong.
I think that this tendency to overemphasize plotline in musicals has led to problems with new shows. If you head over to nymf.org and listen to the samples for the new shows the festival is showcasing, you’ll often hear a lot of songs that sound the same - like someone took a wordy passage of dialog, rewrote it with some measure of rhyme and meter, added some uninteresting piano noodling underneath it, and called it a book song. Not that there aren’t some good songs to be heard, or that the songs on display are necessarily bad. But they don’t really work for me as music. I’m not even slightly tempted to download the mp3 to listen to on my iPod. I can’t imagine ever buying the cast album. Perhaps they’re clever or emotionally satisfying in the context of the show, but I’d like a little more out of my show music.
It seems like a lot of the people now producing new musicals aren’t really “music” people. What I mean by this is not that they’re not talented musicians - I’m sure I don’t hold a candle to most of them in terms of composition knowledge - it’s that their focus is more on theater than on music. At least, that’s how it comes across from their work. Theater-focused songs tend to be on the characters and on the dialog and on attempts to be clever or dramatic, often at the expense of satisfying song structure, strong melody, or powerful harmonies. The music is not really used to its emotionally fullest extent. It’s a light color wash added to witty or thoughtful (but often extraordinarily wordy and meandering) text.
To contrast, music-focused songs can sound like they were made for an album, perhaps even to the detriment of theatrical plausibility. They’re not afraid to employ melismas (multiple notes sung for one syllable, as in “I-ee-I-ee-I-ee-I will always lo-ove yoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo,” etc.), use scat singing or non-words like “ahh” and “ooh,” or even have extended portions of music without words at all. These things don’t necessarily mean that the music is good, but they do mean that the music had a focus in the writer’s mind, so the odds are better. Sometimes a show like this still crops up, but they’re fewer and farther between. Also, their plots are often tragically less compelling.
Nonetheless, most of the best musical theater songs of the last few decades have come out of the pop music world (or composers with pop music ambitions), rather than the theater music world (Sondheim and Kander/Ebb being some notable exceptions). Consider Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who, being all British and such, started out with pretensions to Beatle-dom. Joseph, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita are all three more albums than they are shows. Or consider Stephen Schwartz, who worked popular music into his shows and even now puts out albums of original music without a show context. And now, dominating Broadway, you have folks directly from the popular music world - Elton John, Duncan Sheik, Phil Collins, even Dolly Parton.
Not that all the stuff these folks produce is great and wonderful (I’m not so much an Elton John fan) - but it’s often better than what we get from folks out of the theater tradition, who seem to be both clinging to song styles that have long since lost their luster and reaching for some nebulous novelty that no one’s really grasped yet.
Somehow, the world of musical theater and popular music need to come together and draw on each other in a more productive fashion. Any ideas?