Elements of a Musical
The Score
R/MusicalScores: A place to share scores from Musical Theatre. PC's (Piano Conductor), Vocal Scores, (full) Orchestral Scores, Band Parts. Top Broadway Songs of all time in one musical playlist! CLICK SAVE and share the beautiful broadway songs from the 50s until today! Also check here the BEST.
by John Kenrick
(Copyright 2000, Revised 2020)
Fantasies
The glorious fantasies of MGM's golden age were so potent that they have become part of our culture's ongoing mythology. For example –
Scene: A group of teenagers wonders how to get their parents, town or school out of debt. Suddenly, Mickey Rooney looks up with wide eyes and says, 'Hey, why don't we put on a show!?!' Judy Garland gushes with pride and shouts, 'Oh, Mickey!,' and the other kids roar their approval. After a few weeks of writing, rehearsals, assorted misfires and romantic misunderstandings, the show -- staged in a barn, school gym, or local corral -- is a triumph. A big time producer is in the audience, and promptly moves the show to Broadway, making the kids overnight stars.
Would that it were that easy! Nowadays, every musical play or film – including the bad ones – comes into being through tremendous craft, ruthless determination, and years of unrelenting effort.
In the 1800s, producers could throw a show together in a matter of weeks, beef it up with songs by any number of different composers, and raise the few thousand bucks needed to stage it all. But musicals now cost millions to produce, and raising the funds can take several years. Composing the score can take months – even years – of painstaking effort and revision. To give a show a sense of audible cohesion, it is now standard procedure for the songs to be written by one songwriter or team, working in close collaboration with the book writer. All these people have a say in such issues as song structure, song type, and song placement. Each of these is explained below, as is the importance of rhyme.
Showtune Structure: AABA
Most showtunes have a verse and a chorus (or 'refrain'). The verse sets up the premise of a song and can be of most any length, while the chorus states the main point of the lyric. For example, consider the title song to Oklahoma!. The verse begins 'They couldn't pick a better time to start in life,' and says how happy the leads will be living in a 'brand new state.' The chorus starts with a joyous shout of 'Ooooo-klahoma,' and then sings the praises of that territory. While most composers concentrate their best efforts on the melody for the chorus, there are exceptions. For instance, Jerome Kern's opening verses to 'You Are Love' or 'All The Things You Are' are ravishing.
Since the early 1900s, the choruses of American popular songs have traditionally been thirty-two bars long, usually divided into four sections of eight bars apiece – the AABA form. This format forces composers and lyricists to make their points efficiently acting more as a discipline than a limitation.
A is the main melody line, repeated twice – in part, so that it can be easily remembered.
B is the release or bridge, and should be very different than A.
A is then repeated a third time, usually with a melodic twist to give the final bars more interest.
If you examine your favorite showtunes, you will find this format used time after time. From Cohan to Jonathan Larson, every modern Broadway composer has worked within this structure. In fact, AABA remained the standard for all popular music until hard rock threw conventions out the window in the 1960s. Those showtunes that do not use AABA tend to use a slight variation of the form. A song may double the number of bars (four sections of sixteen apiece), or shorten the form to something like ABA. Some numbers introduce a third melody line at the end (AABC) – but the AABA structure and proportion remain the norm.
Song Types
Some people think that it is enough for a showtune to be melodic and generally entertaining. That may have been true in the days of Ziegfeld revues and screwball musical comedies, when any song could be inserted into most any show regardless of its connection to the action. Ever since Oklahoma, expectations have changed. Now, each showtune must serve as a dramatic element in a play or film by helping to develop character and/or move the story forward.
As much as everyone loves a showstopper, it has to work as a cohesive part of the storytelling process – otherwise the only thing it really stops is audience interest. The most memorable show songs tend to gel around three kinds of character experiences –
Transition - a moment of change or conversion.
Realization - reaching an insight or new level of understanding.
Decision - after long wrangling, a character finally makes up his or her mind.
Traditional musicals carefully varied the placement of song types, while musicals of the late 20th Century showed an increasing reliance on placing ballad after ballad after ballad . . . yaaaawn! If you are writing a musical, give your audiences a break and vary their melodic diets. The types of songs commonly required in modern musicals can be illustrated with these examples from Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady –
Ballads - usually love songs ('On the Street Where You Live'), but they can also philosophize about any strong emotion ('Accustomed to Her Face').
Charm Songs - a character beguiles an audience ('Wouldn't It Be Loverly').
Comedy Numbers - aim for laughs ('A Little Bit of Luck').
Musical Scenes - seamlessly blend dialogue and song, usually with two or more characters ('You Did It').
Of course, there are other ways of defining song types. The great Bob Fosse said that from a director's point of view musicals have only three types of songs. To illustrate, let's take examples from Bernstein and Sondheim's West Side Story –
I Am songs – Any song that allows one or more characters to explain who they are or how they feel. Examples: 'The Jet Song' and 'I Feel Pretty.'
I Want songs – In these songs, characters tell us what they truly desire, what motivates them. Most love songs fit into this category. 'Something's Coming' and 'Tonight' are examples, with the ensemble reprise of 'Tonight' giving a dramatically powerful opportunity for every major character to simultaneously express what they want. In 'A Boy Like That,' we see two 'I Wants' clash, only to wind up in harmonious agreement on the undeniable power of love.
New songs – This includes any song that does not fit the other two categories, usually because they serve special dramatic needs. For example, 'Gee, Officer Krupke' let the Jets express their frustrations and gives audiences a breather from the tragic story line. 'The Rumble' ballet would also fit this category.
Since the 1890s, most traditional musicals have tried to include at least one or two songs that might find popular success outside the show. Many shows did better overall business thanks to a hit song -- 'People' was a big factor in the success of Funny Girl.
The rise of rock pushed showtunes out of pop contention by the mid-1960s. While this made showtunes less profitable, it also took a burden off composers and lyricists. Now they can concentrate on the dramatic needs of their shows, rather than trying to artificially squeeze hits into a score. (Of course, more than a few songwriters would still love the millions a few song hots would bring them – they just realize they are not going to get that kind of song hit out of a Broadway score today.)
Song Placement
Songs in a musical libretto must be strategically placed at emotional highpoints, those key moments where dialogue is no longer enough. In Hello Dolly, when Dolly Levi comes down the stairs of the Harmonia Gardens restaurant, it would be more realistic if the head waiter just looked at her and said 'It's good to have you back, Madam,' but what fun would that be? Instead, Dolly and the waiters express the overwhelming joy of their reunion by singing 'Hello, Dolly!' Where words are not sufficient, the music and dance take over, bringing the show and its audiences to greater.
Consider Kander and Ebb's 'Pineapple Song' in Cabaret. For most of us, there is nothing particularly exciting about receiving a pineapple as a gift. But when it is the first token of affection exchanged between two shy middle aged people in the midst of a severe economic depression, it becomes tremendously poignant. The courtly manners of the grocer and the landlady, set to a romantic tune, make for a moment of enchantment. The music says what their restrained words cannot, showing just how much each is attracted to the other.
Scores Musical Broadway Nyc
Because song placement is of vital importance in the writing of a musical, the composer and lyricist usually work closely with the librettist (the script or 'book' writer) to plan each number. Once a show goes into production, the director and producers also have a say in placement. Three song choices are of particular importance –
The Opening Number sets the tone for the rest of the show. This song is often rewritten or replaced as the rest of the show develops. The bawdy farce A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum originally opened by proclaiming that 'Love Is In the Air,' a genial song that left audiences expecting a sweet romantic comedy -- not the zany farce that followed. Jerome Robbins (called in to help doctor the show out of town) asked for a replacement, and songwriter Stephen Sondheim came up with the raucous 'Comedy Tonight.' From the moment the new opening was introduced, the entire show got a better reception. (Note – musicals that open with substantial dialogue still set the tone for the evening with their first song, such as My Fair Lady's 'Why Can't the English Teach Their Children How to Speak?')
The Main 'I Want' Song comes early in the first act, with one or more of the main characters singing about the key motivating desire that will propel everyone (including the audience) through the remainder of the show. In many cases, these songs literally include the words 'I want,' 'I wish' or 'I've got to.' Classic examples include My Fair Lady's 'Wouldn't It Be Loverly,' Carnival's 'Mira,' The Sound of Music's 'I Have Confidence' and 'King of Broadway' in The Producers.
The Eleven O'clock Number takes place about midway through Act Two. It can be a ballad ('This Nearly Was Mine' in South Pacific, 'Memory' in Cats), charm song ('Hello, Dolly!') or comedy showpiece ('Brush Up Your Shakespeare' in Kiss Me Kate, 'Betrayed' in The Producers). It must be a major audience pleaser, strong enough to energize the audience and propel the show towards its climax. (Note: since curtain times are earlier than in years past, this number now takes place around 10:00 PM.)
The Finale should carry a satisfying emotional wallop, leaving audiences with a powerful last impression. This is often done by reprising one of score's most emotion-packed numbers. Showboat closes with a family reunion as Joe sings another chorus of 'Old Man River,' and Les Miserables brings on ghosts of the past to sing an encore of 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' A less frequently used alternative approach is to introduce a rousing new song, like 'You Can't Stop the Beat' in Hairspray.
A reprise is when all or part of a song is repeated to make a dramatic point and (usually) to energize the end of a scene. In the stage version of Funny Girl, Nick Arnstein sings a reprise of Fanny's 'Don't Rain on My Parade' to signify his need for independence and end a crucial scene. Fanny later reprises the same song at the end of the show to declare that life will go on without Nick and to finish the final scene with an emotional flourish.
From the 1800s through the early 1940s, some musicals were so loosely constructed that you could easily insert additional numbers. Al Jolson's best remembered songs (including 'Swanee') were interpolated into existing scores, and no one cared that they had no connection to the story. All that mattered was coming up with a hit that could stop the show.
Today, every song must either develop the characters or push along the plot. Anything that confuses an audience can break the dramatic action of the play, so lyricists must make their points in a precise, fresh manner, while composers (and arrangers) must not drown out the words. In August 2002, The New York Times chided the producers of the long running Rent for allowing the high volume music to drown out Jonathan Larson's all-important lyrics.
It is a real mark of craftsmanship to write showstoppers that are fully integrated into the rest of a show. Even mediocre musicals are still expected to have a song that makes the audience roar with approval. While some musicals like The Lion King rely on clever staging to get people cheering, a powerhouse number remains the most desirable way to stop a show. As an old adage puts it, 'nobody ever walsk out humming the scenery.'
Lyrics: To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme?
Creative and entertaining use of rhyme has been a hallmark of musical theatre since William S. Gilbert's elevated lyric writing to an art form in the 1880s. Rhyme is one of a lyricist's most potent tools, giving a song additional comic or dramatic impact. It is easy enough to find words that rhyme – the trick is in how a lyricist gets from one of these rhyming words to another. Fresh use of language and surprising word arrangements are the hallmarks of great songwriting, and these revolve around the careful placement of rhymes within a song. For example, placing rhymes at the end of lines as well as within them ('internal rhyme') can add comic flair –
Sondheim's 'Chrysanthemum Tea' in Pacific Overtures describes 'an herb that's superb for disturbances at sea.'
Cole Porter's 'Brush Up Your Shakespeare' in Kiss Me Kate has such ingenious rhymes as heinous with Coriolanus and fussing with nussing ('nussing' is Porter's playful faux-Yiddish version of the word 'nothing.')
Creative rhyme can make a difference in any type of showtune, setting classics apart from pedestrian efforts. Porter's ballad 'I Get a Kick Out of You' has a famous five part rhyme ('fly-high-guy-sky-I') that has delighted audiences since Ethel Merman introduced it in Anything Goes (1934).
Obvious, tired rhymes, cliched phrases, or forced non-rhymes (like those found in many rap songs) are distractions that can ruin the effect of a show song. Theatergoers expect a smooth, professional effort. Of course, some drab, witless scores (Footloose,Saturday Night Fever) proved that there are audiences which will tolerate anything if the volume is deafening enough. If you want to write a musical, please take the approach that your audience deserves something better. Every lyric in a musical must help tell a story. The great lyricist Dorothy Fields, who's work spanned five decades and involved such composers as Jerome Kern, Jimmy McHugh and Cy Coleman explained it this way –
'Sounds and rhyming can be beguiling only when they state exactly what you should say. Don't fall in love with what you believe is a clever rhyme – it can throw you. Think about what you want to say and then look for the most amusing or graceful way you can say it.'
That covers the bare basics of what goes into a score. Many promising scores sank into oblivion due to badly written librettos. Most failures are blamed on 'the schnook who wrote the book.'
On to: The Book (Libretto)
by Laurence Maslon
For the first 50 years of its existence, the music of Broadway was the music of America, but beginning in 1954, a schism grew between Broadway and commercially popular music. That year, Bill Haley and the Comets released a single for Decca called “Rock Around the Clock,” with a heavy backbeat and an electric guitar solo. When it was used to represent disaffected youth in the soundtrack for THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, the song became the anthem for an era, selling two million copies by the end of 1955. Rock ‘n’ roll so dominated the times that, by 1957, every entry in BILLBOARD’s Top Ten was a rock song. Rock spoke to youth, it was about youth, and served as the seminal wedge in popular culture to create a divide between parents and children. After the Beatles landed in America in early 1964, the dominance of youth became complete — their singles soon occupied the top five places on the BILLBOARD charts. (They were temporarily unseated by Louis Armstrong’s rendition of “Hello, Dolly!,” which, in a brief paroxysm of revolt from the old folks, reclaimed the number-one spot.) What it came down to, by 1967, was that Broadway was “your parents’ music,” which gave young audiences yet another excuse for ignoring it. The show that brought rock music to Broadway was born downtown at the eastern fringes of Greenwich Village, at the Public Theatre, which was run by the brazen and mercurial Joseph Papp. A couple of unemployed actors, Gerome Ragni and James Rado, cobbled together a musical script about life among the flower children in New York’s East Village. They found a Canadian composer named Galt MacDermot, who had worked in Africa but had never seen a Broadway show. Papp was enthusiastic when MacDermot’s eclectic score of hard rock, Motown, hymns, Indian ragas, and ballads was presented to him. Papp had to pick something provocative with which to open his theater in October of 1967; “Hair” seemed a reasonably unreasonable choice.
Scores Musical Broadway New York
“Hair” didn’t have much of a plot; a young man named Claude, set loose among the “tribe” of young hippies in Washington Square, faces being drafted in the Vietnam War. What was far more compelling was the phantasmagoria that exploded around him. “Hair” was, in many ways, simply a revue, showing practically every aspect of the counterculture in a variety of musical styles, dance, and stage effects. In April 1968, “Hair” took the IRT to Broadway, ensconcing itself at the Biltmore Theater on West 47th Street. The show’s nudity was a first for a Broadway musical, as was its full rock score. Both intrigued potential customers, and “The American Tribal Love Rock Musical” — a subtitle coined as a gag — settled in for a run of 1,742 performances.
'Promises, Promises' poster.
The show’s rock score pleased critics of the Broadway sound, and soon some of its more accessible songs — “Aquarius,” “Hair,” and “Let the Sunshine In” — made it onto the pop charts (where they were most emphatically not covered by Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney). Eventually, a younger audience started coming to the show, intrigued by the music they found so compelling on the radio or the cast album. Would “Hair” be the musical savior of Broadway, dragging other scores kicking and screaming into the Age of Aquarius?
At the end of 1968, “Hair” found itself competing with a show that might have had an even more profound effect in renovating the sound of Broadway. When Burt Bacharach and Hal David were approached by David Merrick to score the musical version of Billy Wilder’s movie THE APARTMENT — “Promises, Promises” — they were, next to Lennon and McCartney, the most successful songwriters in pop music. With songs like “Walk on By,” “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” “The Look of Love,” and “This Guy’s in Love With You,” they had, in many ways, defined the American sound of romance in the 1960s; they were also excellent storytellers. Bacharach loved developing songs out of author Neil Simon’s narrative scheme, and he and David were challenged by writing for consistent characters and their emotions. The score itself was biting, tender, and impulsive, and practically shrieked with the sounds of contemporary Manhattan. Bacharach used a completely modern pop sound in the service of a narrative musical comedy.
Marvin Hamlisch with Michael Bennett during rehearsals for 'A Chorus Line.'
What he didn’t love was the lack of control that was part and parcel of the Broadway musical. “It used to drive me crazy,” he recalled. “There would be eight [substitute orchestra players], including the drummer. The impermanence of Broadway gets to you because everything shifts from night to night. If you’ve got a great take on a record, it’s there, it’s embedded forever.” The recording studios provided more comfort — artistically and financially — and Bacharach moved back to Palm Springs; to this date, he has not written another Broadway score. In his wake, the “contemporary” rock sound could be found instead in such shows as “Dude,” “Via Galactica,” “Sgt. Pepper,” and “Rockaby Hamlet” –all unsuccessful attempts in the early 1970s to put rock music at the service of a Broadway narrative.
More successful were the hybrid scores that used the backbeat of rock music or some of its electronic instrumentation to juice up a more conventional score. Marvin Hamlisch’s score for “A Chorus Line” (1975) used some of these effects, and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice provided rock-tinged music for their British transfers of “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1971) and “Evita” (1979). In the form of the massively successful “pop operas” of the 1980s (several written by Lloyd Webber), accessible pop/rock rhythms supplanted pure rock and, for a while, the more familiar electric guitar riffs appearing on Broadway entranced a younger generation of theatergoers. But when these megahit scores began tapering off in the 1990s, Broadway producers desperately sought out new ways of capturing the Generation X audience.
For the first time, several big-name pop composers contributed scores to Broadway. Elton John made his Broadway debut, working with lyricist Tim Rice on the transfer of his film score for the stage version of “The Lion King” in 1997. When Disney offered John and Rice a chance to write a new version of Verdi’s opera “Aida” for Broadway, John applied his ebullient eclecticism to a score that he wrote at the amazingly fast rate of about one song per day: “It’s truly a pop musical, with spoken dialogue. There are black songs, very urban-based, rhythm and blues, gospel-inspired songs, and kind of ‘Crocodile Rock’ songs, and ballads, of course.”
The same season that John made his debut with “The Lion King,” another major figure in the pop world, from the 1970s, brought his first score to Broadway: Paul Simon. Critics had always invoked Simon’s name as a natural for Broadway, for his sense of narrative was extraordinary and his songs had already provided strong emotional backgrounds for several films. Simon’s Broadway project could not have been less conventional; it was based on the true story of a 16-year-old Puerto Rican gang member, dubbed “The Capeman,” who had stabbed two white kids in 1959. Simon’s look at urban history was both uncompromising and sympathetic, and he provided a breathtakingly wide-ranging score of gospel, doo-wop, Afro-Cuban bop, and Latin salsa tunes. But “The Capeman” lasted only two months, costing $11 million, and when it folded, it took with it one of the most thrilling scores written for a Broadway show in the last 20 years.
Desmond Richardson and Nancy Lemenager from 'Movin' Out.'
In 2000, choreographer Twyla Tharp wanted to create a large-scale theater piece, and she knew that the swinging narrative songs of Billy Joel held the answer. “He was clearly the best choice because he’s such a good storyteller,” Ms. Tharp said. ”There is rage in his music and guts in his songs. I’ve always known that his music dances.” Tharp created “Movin’ Out,” which tells the story of three Long Island friends and the girls they leave behind during and after the Vietnam War. “Movin’ Out” is performed unconventionally — the show’s large corps of dancers move through the narrative to the live accompaniment of 30 Billy Joel songs performed by a single singer and a back-up band. Although the show hit some shoals on its way in from Chicago, it opened in New York in the fall of 2002 to ecstatic reviews.
But, as became immediately apparent to musicians like Bacharach, John, and Simon, a Broadway collaboration is a very different prospect from a date in the recording studio. Not only do rock and pop composers have to stretch their narrative range to cover songs that work together over the course of an evening, they have to surrender to the grueling politics and unpredictability that go into creating a Broadway show. Broadway babies are born, not made.
Jonathan Larson, however, was a Broadway baby. He grew up in suburban Westchester and was taken by his parents to see “Fiddler on the Roof” and “1776,” yet avidly followed the concerts and recordings of Billy Joel and Elton John. In the late 1980s, he began writing the book, music, and lyrics to a musical update of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” relocated to Alphabet City in the East Village, an area he knew well; it was, indeed, the cutting-edge epicenter of bohemianism. The ambitious score to “Rent,” as the project was now called, required Larson to orchestrate gospel numbers, hymns, tangos, patter songs, and character songs, all to a rock beat.
The late composer and lyricist of 'Rent,' Jonathan Larson.
All signs pointed to “Rent” as the logical successor to the ambitions of “Hair” in the days before it opened downtown at the New York Theatre Workshop Off Broadway. Larson died suddenly after the final dress rehearsal, at the age of 35, due to an untreated aortic aneurysm. His death created the biggest Off-Broadway sensation since “A Chorus Line” opened at the Public Theater more than 20 years earlier. But all the publicity would have meant nothing if audiences and critics hadn’t liked “Rent.” They loved it and, within months, the show transferred to Broadway and won the Tony for Best Musical and Best Score, and ultimately, the Pulitzer Prize.
Since its transfer in 1996, it has run more than 3,500 performances and, even better, attracted a new, younger audience to Broadway, just the way Larson wanted. It’s surprising, absent Larson’s consultation, that the Broadway producers of “Rent” decided to grab a youthful audience by promoting the show as something anarchic, hard-edged, and raw — the very antithesis of “Pippin” (one of Larson’s favorite shows). “Don’t you hate the word ‘Musical’?” read the ad campaign. Larson’s death only complicated the debate about rock scores on Broadway — someone else came along and brought the two together again. Composer Marvin Hamlisch puts the dilemma in the right context:
I have my own thoughts about Broadway and “the Broadway sound” — there’s been a lot of discussion about “Rent” and shows like that with the “rock sound.” … I think rock ‘n’ roll is wonderful and is here to stay, and we’ll have those kinds of shows, but they’re rock shows. Sometimes a good coat that’s been there a long time is better than the brand new one that you have to break in, so I don’t know how far Broadway can take it, how far we can move the envelope.
Photo credits: Photofest, the New York Public Library, Martha Swope, Triton Gallery (© Disney), Joan Marcus, and the Larson family