Musical Theatre Song

A Comprehensive Course in Selection, Preparation, and Presentation for the Modern Performer

Stephen Purdy

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781472595119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Musical Theatre Song is a handbook for musical theatre performers, providing them with the wide-ranging skill set they need for success in today's competitive musical theatre environment. Breaking down the process into knowing how to select your song material based upon your individuality and how to prepare and perform it in a manner that best highlights your attributes, Stephen Purdy provides a succinct and personalized trajectory toward presentation, taking the reader through a series of challenges that is designed to evoke original, personal and vibrant song performances. Written by renowned Broadway and West End vocal and audition coach Stephen Purdy, Musical Theatre Song is a must-have guide for all performers who are looking to succeed in the musical theatre industry.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction to Song Selection and Historical Context:

What You Should Know (and Why You Should Care)

Introduction

The theatre is full of surprises. Anyone who has ever sat saucer-eyed in a darkened theatre, aghast as the chandelier hurtles earthbound to the chromatic crescendo of the Phantom’s theme or felt goose bumps on their arms as Eliza Doolittle descends the stairs on her way to the ball or even felt unapologetically child-like when Peter Pan asks the audience to clap their hands without restraint to save Tinkerbell’s life knows the matchless thrill of those ineffable moments. The theatre, unlike recordings and film, materializes in the here-and-now, carrying the audience to multitudes of fanciful, exotic, and even daunting places. On any given day, a musical theatre-goer may find himself transplanted to France during revolutionary times as in Les Misérables, the South Pacific ocean, a shoddy lower-Eastside New York apartment in Rent, or the craggy, Dickensian streets of London in Oliver! Wherever the locale, the theatre makes us feel as if we have been magically, as though by a time-and-distance traveling machine, transported to places both past and present that we might otherwise never have expected to visit in an ordinary lifetime.

But stagecraft, locale, and dramatic convention aside, the theatre can only embody itself as a flesh-and-blood affair with actors, those blessed, can-do, gritted-teethed wonders of the universe. This slightly batty band of folks, as characters on the stage, open their worlds to us, confide in us, confess their failings to us, and invest their unique stories in us. We, in turn, listen and empathize with them, laugh with them and at them, hum along with them, and reveal ourselves to ourselves through them, becoming willing audience participants as they solve the problems of their lives. In doing so, we become well acquainted with their circumstances, and we discover what they want in that particular context and what or who is standing in the way of their having it. All the while, knowingly or not, we are being led to a greater, more richly defined understanding of what it is to be human and alive. From the moment that the house lights are darkened, the wheels of theatre have begun to turn, and we’re on our way.

The musical theatre, as we think of it, utilizes a course of not only “acting” through speech and gestures to accomplish these means, but also the disciplines of dance and song to enliven, enrich, and propel its storytelling. The artistic union of these elements appoints the musical theatre as a stand-alone entity; opera comes close, and operetta probably closer, but in these genres, the principal storytellers rarely dance (there is a separate ensemble for that) and a well-ordered delivery of the text is often a distant second to delivering an ideally formulated sound. By contrast, the actors of today’s musical theatre sing, act, and dance, often simultaneously, and the circumstances of the characters are often far more accessible than those of the opera, which routinely tends to inhabit mythical and long-ago places and circumstances and sometimes doesn’t even involve mere mortals. Indeed, in the modern musical theatre, the performers do it all, and the theatre at large—whatever the form and on whatever continent—is a far more exhilarating and enlightened place for it.

Anyone requiring evidence that singing, dancing, and acting make natural bedfellows in theatrical storytelling and character realization and who can’t readily attend a well-produced musical production is urged to view one of any number of stellar performances captured on film and video. Watching these, we can barely imagine the marvels that must have pervaded the theatre as Yul Brynner preened and prowled about the stage like a tiger uncaged in The King and I or the electric energy bouncing madly around as Chita Rivera belted out her exaltation to the wonders of “America” (West Side Story). And what about the collective audience astonishment during Jennifer Holliday’s gut-heaving, banshee-wailing pleas and defiance in her rendition of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” (Dreamgirls) or even the uproarious reaction to witnessing the scarecrow-legged Dorothy Loudon hamming it up as the boozy Miss Hannigan in “Easy Street” (Annie)? The parallel universe of Theatreland London has been equally astonished watching some of these performances that originated on Broadway, and a remarkable number of home-grown ones such as Robert Lindsay relishing “The Lambeth Walk” (Me and My Girl), Michael Ball camping and dragging it up in Hairspray, or Elaine Paige stirring the stardust in her seemingly endless line of star turns. While readers of a certain age might recall seeing these performances live, present-day audiences no doubt recall the same pleasures watching Idina Menzel defy gravity, Bertie Carvel channel Miss Trunchbull, and Norbert Leo Butz’s charm-laced swindle game in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Getting and having these species of too-wonderful-for-words moments are the reasons we go to the theatre, and conversely, giving them is why you are an actor.

The above-referenced performances, along with a host of others, should be requisite viewing for the musical theatre performer, always a warrior of his present and a steward of his past. He should also pore over the Hollywood renditions of both many classic and contemporary musicals. While not all of the film renditions of Broadway musicals hit their mark as compelling filmmaking and/or in being entirely faithful to the stage musical upon which they were based, many did, and some of Broadway’s most astounding performers and performances translated well onto the big screen. The big-budgeted, extravagantly produced MGM (and others) 1930s and 1940s movie musicals should factor in as well to this viewing curriculum as they consistently delivered treasure troves of movie musical moments not to be missed.

All of the above-mentioned hallmarks add up to a rendering of the lengths that singing, acting, and dancing together may go to tell the sort of gripping tale you want to stick around for a couple of hours with, particularly when told by skilled storytellers. To enlighten the point on the three disciplines operating and functioning together in service of the story being and getting told, I only need to point out that it’s all but impossible to imagine West Side Story without dance as a critical storytelling device, In the Heights with the music or singing removed, or My Fair Lady devoid of dialog. Moreover, these reveal how singing-and-dancing actors are at the innermost workings of the theatre machine not as meager cogs, but rather as the propulsion itself. Although the nature of this writing prevents detailed narratives and descriptions of all the great performances and productions of theatrical musicals, it is reassuring to know that these performances and shows can and will forever be defined as seminal ones. We can, though, however humbly, summarize the broad-stroked history of the Broadway¹ musical and characterize the readers’ familiarity with it as a necessary, fundamental component of what lies ahead in these pages. We, as theatre folks, must, after all, know from where we came if we are to know where we are. This requisite information must figure prominently in your trajectory toward becoming the most formidable version of yourself in the modern musical theatre universe, for to be without it is to sail a rudderless boat.

Accordingly, what follows should be understood as a condensed backward glance into the historical context of musical theatre for the musical theatre performer as a practitioner of all that has preceded him. It is no substitute for hands-on training, studying, and performing these shows and their respective songs and vocal performance styles, but it will provide historical reference and overview. Likewise, it should not be read as a substitute for a great number of texts on the history of the musical theatre, many of which provide this information in a more comprehensive and developed way. Much of the emphasis of this modest history is placed upon the songs that drive these shows, many that still steer much of our musical theatre culture. Space is also allotted to the principal points of the storylines of many shows as a means of reference, particularly when choosing to perform a song from the show and/or auditioning for that particular show. As a means to ground the discussion, invention and climate change in the musical theatre (this includes historical, societal, and cultural trends and events) throughout the past 100-plus years are the signposts that dictate the direction.

Additionally, the Broadway musical (in this context as a geographic reference) is at the heart of this discussion because the origins of the musical began as many different theatrical and musical cobblestones that, in time, paved a road to a new form of entertainment in America.² This is not to subvert any contributions to its inventions and advancement made elsewhere; these are noted accordingly over the course of the discussion as keystones that have led us to this point. Great Britain, for example, has made enormous contributions to the musical theatre, and the vast popularity of musicals in many European countries (and more recently, much more far-reaching global locales) has happily led to its perpetuation and longevity for a larger populous. These are noted appropriately in what follows. The present discussion, purely for convenience, is set (as a play would be set) on Broadway (see Endnote 2).

This chapter began with a remark regarding how surprising the nature of the theatre can be. In 1927, an audience attending Show Boat certainly understood that before them was an offspring of musical “comedy” with a variety of content that had likely never before been experienced, or for that matter contemplated for the escapist musical stage. And that, of course, required pause to digest for the average escapist entertainment-Joe. The show, which provided a vigorous (and given audience expectations, mandatory) dose of lighthearted entertainment as well, aimed openly at addressing, grappling with, and inviting discussion of such taboo topics for the musical stage as racial and cultural unrest and miscegenation, a first for the heretofore relatively frivolous Broadway musical. As visionaries no longer possessing a willingness to churn out boy-meets-girl fluff, the playmakers of Show Boat, Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern, did not just press the boundaries of conventional content allowances of the musical and the form and structure of it—they gave them a weighty, off-the-cliff shove. The team also wrote a bouquet of incandescent, timeless songs for the show that blissfully persist and endure today: “Ol’ Man River,” “Make Believe,” and the revelatory “Bill” are all pristine examples of the “classic” show song. But appealing songs and the musical stage had always taken one another for granted, although often occurring in a pastiche, this and that, catch-as-catch-can format. Prior to Show Boat, the songs of a musical comedy were largely written independently of any serious integration with plot line, if there was one to speak of. The remainder of the creation—storyline and script—was by and large affixed around the songs. With Show Boat, the libretto (Oscar Hammerstein II) and the score (Jerome Kern) moved in a linear fashion, signifying that the songs’ relevance was pinned to the libretto, and the libretto was pinned to the songs. This, in structural terms, was a giant leap forward for the Broadway musical. When Show Boat arrived on the Broadway stage, the first cannonball of the revolution of the musical theatre’s aspirations toward social and political themes was lobbed over the bow of the Great White Way, the West End, and musical theatre showplaces everywhere.

In today’s musical theatre, even as content and aesthetics have dramatically evolved, Show Boat is still performed with some regularity, in spite of the fact that nearly 100 years have passed. This fact is bullet-proof evidence that the knowledge and comprehension of the shows and styles of yesteryear are of immense consequence for those who carry them forward. When styles change or fall from favor, they may take along with them certain prior convention. Even so, the former style remains and is performed with a high degree of repetition. (Think of summer stock or regional theatre, which will often present the latest, trendiest shows to be released for production soon after a mainstream closing and follow it or precede it by a week of a classic show written some sixty-plus years earlier.) The theatre is a cumulative workplace; and the enlightened and most marketable performer is not only adept at as many styles as possible, however antiquated he might think the styles may be, but is also a willing and gracious envoy and custodian of them. It may solidify the point by stressing that Oklahoma!, another early pioneering musical, is still one of the most often-performed musicals worldwide. Indeed, the old-school style of musical theatre is still very much with us; and most successful, often-working actors willingly confess that fluency in these styles is a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Music Credits
• Foreword
• Preface
• SECTION I Song Selection
• 1 Introduction to Song Selection and Historical Context: What You Should Know (and Why You Should Care)
• 2 Song Selection for Singing Actors Part I: What to Sing and Where to Find It—the Philosophical
• 3 Song Selection for Singing Actors Part II: The Song Is You—the Practical
• SECTION II Song Preparation
• 4 Introduction to Song Preparation
• 5 Off the Table and Off the Page: Techniques for Playability
• 6 A Music and Musical Theatre Term Lexicon
• 7 Coaching Songs Through
• SECTION III Song Presentation
• 8 Your Turn at Bat, Sir
• 9 Musical Theatre Song and Collaboration
• 10 How They See Us: Body Language Onstage and Media Online
• 11 Finale
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Copyright