Throw the book at B’way
Two highly anticipated fall volumes take on musicals and O’Neill
IT won’t be long before it’s time to snuggle up with a good book on a cold day. Here are a couple that theater lovers will devour.
Modesty forbids me from mentioning that the paperback edition of my book —“Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway” — comes out in October (oops, I slipped), so let me put in a word for
Jack Viertel’s superb “The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built.” Everyone I know in theater has been reading it this summer.
Viertel is senior vice president at Jujamcyn Theaters, worked on “Into the Woods,” “City of Angels” and “Hairspray,” and is the artistic director of Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert. He knows exactly how musicals are conceived, and he lays out the blueprint in this elegantly written book.
Which is not to say that blueprints are foolproof: There has to be some kind of magic to create classics like “Gypsy,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”
But even before the magic kicks in, Viertel points out, the basic elements have to be there, or else you’re looking at “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”
Act 1 had better have the “I want” song, which lets you know who the main character is and what he or she wants. It doesn’t get much clearer than Eliza Doolittle’s “All I want is a room somewhere” from “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” in “My Fair Lady.” Or Leo Bloom quitting his accounting job because “I Wanna Be a Producer.”
Conditional-love songs come in handy. Viertel’s favorite is “If I Loved You” from “Carousel,” though the one that’s near and dear to my ears is “People Will Say We’re in Love” from “Oklahoma!”
Not everything has to move the plot, and Viertel has a fondness for second-act toppers that essentially serve to settle the audience down after intermission. “This Was a Real Nice Clambake” (“Carousel,” again) doesn’t tell you anything about Billy Bigelow, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun. So, too, is Act 2’s “Prologue: So Happy” from “Into the Woods.”
Viertel admits he battled the creative team of “Hairspray” to drop the big gospel number, “I Know Where I’ve Been,” because it didn’t move the plot. But the creators wanted one song that made a statement about racism, and they got it.
Arthur and Barbara Gelb cornered the market on Eugene O’Neill with their celebrated biographies “O’Neill” and “O’Neill: Life With Monte Cristo.”
You wouldn’t think there’d be much more to say, but several years ago they discovered unpublished diaries by O’Neill’s third wife, Carlotta Monterey. The result is the fascinating “By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O’Neill.” Out in November, it examines O’Neill’s relationships with his three wives and his mother, the basis for Mary Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
Sadly, Arthur Gelb, the legendary managing editor of the Times, died two years ago. But the couple’s reporting instincts are all over this more than 800page book.
With Carlotta’s diaries as their guide, the Gelbs provide an intimate and often painful look into O’Neill’s dark world.
I’d always heard that O’Neill gave up drinking at 40, before writing his masterpieces “Long Day’s Journey” and “The Iceman Cometh.” But apparently, when the pressure got to be too much, he hit the bottle.
And the fights he had with Carlotta are as harrowing as any the Tyrones have in “Long Day’s Journey.” At one point, O’Neill brandished his pistol at her. She grabbed a butcher knife.
“Then they dropped their weapons, and O’Neill began choking her,” the Gelbs write.
Not for the faint of heart is “By Women Possessed.” But neither, for the most part, are O’Neill’s plays.