Tunes or Story: What Makes A Hit Musical?

You might think great tunes make great musicals. Not according to some. David Spicer speaks to two men who believe great stories are the bedrock of the art form, Tony Award winning Director/Choreographer Jerry Mitchell for Legally Blonde The Musical and Oscar Hammerstein III, namesake grandson of one half of the great creative team Rodgers and Hammerstein..

When you are hot you’re hot. Jerry Mitchell was the original director and choreographer for Legally Blonde the Musical and kicked off the rehearsals for the Australian Premiere in Sydney before rushing back to Chicago to prepare for the World Premiere of a new musical called Kinky Boots. The Broadway-bound musical has an original score by Cindy Lauper and a book by Harvey Fierstein, based on the 2005 movie of the same name.

He loves the music (of course) by the pop diva but it is the story which he says will strike a chord.

“It’s about two guys who come together. It’s about fathers and sons and thinking you’re a failure in your father’s eyes, then becoming a success in your own terms. All set in a shoe factory going under, they make boots to save the factory,” he said with boyish enthusiasm.

“I have learned the strength of any musical relies on the story and the book of the musical. Whether the book ends being sung danced or spoken, it’s still a book. The story is what makes it great; characters that you care about. Root for.  Get emotionally involved in. That is what makes a great musical for me and a great score.”

Oscar Hammerstein III was aged four when his famous grandfather with the same name died. He was in Australia in August 2012 for the opening of South Pacific and to deliver a keynote address at the Rodgers and Hammerstein Symposium at the Victorian College of the Arts.

“Oscar was always interested in the plot and was slow at writing the songs. Musicals are not successful because of the tunes. There are a lot of good songs in bad shows you will never hear again. They are successful because of the story,” he said.

Jerry Mitchell applied these principles when, as the original director/choreographer for Legally Blonde the Musical, he helped craft the movie into a musical.

“Elle is the underdog from the second scene when she is dumped by her boyfriend, Warner Huntingdon III. The whole journey of this play is about her succeeding by being true to herself and asking you, the audience, to stop judging people by the way they look and judge them on their merit. That is a very powerful story for young people and old people.”

“I watched the movie then read the book, then put all of that away. We had a leading character whose emotions ran so hard it was easy to make her sing and dance. The question was where would she sing and dance? We had a series of friends in the opening scene of the movie but when she goes to Harvard they are gone and she only speaks to them on the phone. ”

“We created a Greek chorus, so when she is in crisis she summons them. They give her bad advice, mostly, but she bounces her ideas off them.”

But he says you can’t just insert songs into a movie script.

“No that would be death. Theatre works in a different way. Films go close up. That’s usually the emotional ballad in the musical. A director tells you something that only you can do in film. A song is the equivalent of the close up. ”

Oscar Hammerstein III believes that adapting movies into musicals has its limitations. He says it is like trying to breed a zebra with a horse.

“The sense of time that can be compressed in movies can’t be done on the stage. You can’t have a montage push time forward six months. Movies have fluidity and it is harder to believe people singing in a movie.”

Certainly they don’t always get the thumbs up from audiences and critics.

Jerry Mitchell was also the choreographer for Catch Me if You Can, the musical which lasted 170 performances on Broadway and is about to tour the United States.

“I thought the score was amazing, but it didn’t do well and got terrible reviews. The choreography was some of the most fun stuff I had ever done.”

“I think somewhere we lost the book in it. We lost the audience caring about the characters. You’ve got to hook the audiences into caring about the characters…they didn’t do it enough.”

Oscar Hammerstein III says his grandfather’s career really took off when he wrote musicals with Richard Rodgers that had epic stories.

During his lifetime he wrote 61 shows with a host of different composers. Some were hits, such as Showboat, but others were stinkers.

He points out that the big five - South Pacific, Oklahoma, The King and I, Carousel and The Sound of Music, written with Richard Rodgers, had themes of love and death which always resonate.

Now an adjunct professor at Columbia University, specialising in theatre, and author of the book The Hammersteins, he is naturally a keen ‘student’ of the art of writing lyrics. He believes that simplicity is an important part of a successful musical.

“Oscar did not write successfully for characters that were into a lot of self-analysis. When a person sang in his show it was like they were singing into a mirror. They were straight-forward characters speaking their minds. It wasn’t Sondheim-like. It wasn’t she’s pretty but what will she look like in 20 years. Or she is pretty but am I gay. There was I only wish I had the nerve to ask her to dance.”

He notes Richard Rodgers’ previous lyricist Lorenz Hart was the complete opposite.

“He did interior rhymes, played games, was urbane and his lyrics, while easy to take out of the show, did not advance the character nearly as much as Oscar’s.”

Songs also need to move the story forward; to speed up the show rather than slow it down.

“A good example is the soliloquy ‘My Boy Bill’ in Carousel that goes for 8 minutes. It saves the audience 25 minutes in exposition.  The man finds out he is going to have a child. He projects upon what it would be like to be father, listing all the things this child can do. It has nothing to do with the child but he is describing himself. It reveals character, grudges and also his hopes and dreams for this kid. Then he has a whiplash moment and realises it could be a girl. He adores his possible daughter but is afraid for her. We know he’s going to do something that is going to get him into trouble.”

I asked him to give me some examples from South Pacific. It occurred to me that some songs which do slow down the action are a little on the silly side. I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair came to mind.

“What’s silly about that? It’s really a statement of where she’s got to,” he said.

And what about the classically beautiful Some Enchanted Evening - is that not a slow moving ballad?

“Yes but it was written for a purpose in the story.”

As part of his visit to Australia, Hammerstein is visiting some of his local relatives. It’s little known that his grandfather’s second wife was from Tasmania. Dorothy Blanchard also had a mysterious New Zealand connection. She had a Maori middle name – Kia ora.

None of the extended family derives income from the copyright any more. Many of the musicals are of course still blockbusters, performed between 500 and 1500 times a year, in venues ranging from high schools to the Sydney Opera House. A Dutch pension fund purchased the entire catalogue of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals a few years back, before they enter the public domain seventy years after the death of both men.

“We sold out because we did not want to have the end of the ride. We’ve turned something that would disappear into something solid. It’s the same as any family business. Some are into Laundromats; we are into musicals.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that the ‘something solid’ was in the vicinity of $200 Million.

Not bad for musicals that were written in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

But a constant is that these productions have to first strike a chord with the audiences of their time. Critics don’t matter much. The Sound of Music at its world premiere was given the thumbs down as being too sweet. This was just what audiences of the time, and since, were happy to lap up.

The commercial success of Legally Blonde on Broadway and the West End has been attributed in part to striking a chord with some contemporary issues.

“We found there was this great phenomenon in the US - that at about 11 or 12 girls decide to either stay with the books, or give it up so they concentrate on their looks so they can land the footballer or the head of the track team,” said Jerry Mitchell.

The message from this musical, he says, is that boys can catch the ‘beautiful’ girl if they respect her.

Of course life isn’t always that simple.

Images (from top): Lisa McCune as Nellie Forbush with the boys of Opera Australia’s South Pacific (Photographer: Jeff Busby); Jerry Mitchell; Oscar Hammerstein III and David Harris as Emmett and Lucy Durack as Elle in LEGALLY BLONDE (Photographer: Jeff Busby).

Originally published in the September / October 2012 edition of Stage Whispers.

Legally Blonde plays at Sydney's Lyric Theatre until January 27, 2013, prior to opening in Brisbane at the Lyric Theatre, QPAC on March 14, 2013.

South Pacific plays a Brisbane season at the Lyric Theatre, QPAC, from December 27, 2012 to February 3, 2013, following successfiul seasons in Sydney and Melbourne. It plays a return Sydney season from September 2013.

Musicals in Australia 2012 and Beyond