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Main Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s
Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90sMiranda Lundskaer-Nielsen
Directors and the New Musical Drama offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic shifts in musical theatre in the 1980s and 90s. Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen explores the cultural differences between British and American musicals, examines their critical reception, and demonstrates the crucial role of British and American directors in developing musical dramas that have initiated change in the parameters of this popular art form. Starting with the provocative idea of the "British Invasion," this volume includes analysis of groundbreaking musicals such as Sunday in the Park with George, Les Mis?rables and Jelly's Last Jam, as well as interviews with leading musical theatre writers, directors and producers.
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Directors and the New Musical Drama PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE HISTORY is a series devoted to the best of theatre/performance scholarship currently available, accessible and free of jargon. It strives to include a wide range of topics, from the more traditional to those performance forms that in recent years have helped broaden the understanding of what theatre as a category might include (from variety forms as diverse as the circus and burlesque to street buskers, stage magic, and musical theatre, among many others). Although historical, critical, or analytical studies are of special interest, more theoretical projects, if not the dominant thrust of a study, but utilized as important underpinning or as a historiographical or analytical method of exploration, are also of interest. Textual studies of drama or other types of less traditional performance texts are also germane to the series if placed in their cultural, historical, social, or political and economic context. There is no geographical focus for this series and works of excellence of a diverse and international nature, including comparative studies, are sought. The editor of the series is Don B. Wilmeth (EMERITUS, Brown University), Ph.D., University of Illinois, who brings to the series over a dozen years as editor of a book series on American theatre and drama, in addition to his own extensive experience as an editor of books and journals. He is the author of several award-winning books and has received numerous career achievement awards, including one for sustained excellence in editing from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Also in the series: Undressed for Success by Brenda Foley Theatre, Performance, and the Historical Avant-garde by Günter Berghaus Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Sally Charnow Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain by Mark Pizzato Moscow Theatres for Young People by Manon van de Water Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre by Odai Johnson Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers by Arthur Frank Wertheim Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing by Wendy Arons Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific by Daphne P. Lei Transatlantic Stage Stars in Vaudeville and Variety: Celebrity Turns by Leigh Woods Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance edited by William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918 by Susan Harris Smith Representation and Identity from Versailles to the Present: The Performing Subject by Alan Sikes Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s by Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen Directors and the New Musical Drama British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen DIRECTORS AND THE NEW MUSICAL DRAMA Copyright © Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60129–1 ISBN-10: 0–230–60129–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. Contents x List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Anglo-American Perspectives 1 1. Harold Prince in Context 15 2. From Cabaret to Sweeney Todd: Musical Drama on Broadway 29 3. Cultural Barricades: Reading the West End Musicals 45 4. Beyond the Logos: West End Musical Drama 59 5. New Horizons: Nonprofit Musical Drama 73 6. Nonprofit Directors in the 1990s 89 7. Rethinking Revivals 109 8. Staging the Canon: British Directors and Classic American Musicals 121 9. The Legacy of the 1980s and 90s 141 Interviews 151 Adam Guettel Matthew Warchus William Finn David Leveaux Ira Weitzman James Lapine 152 158 163 168 180 186 vi Contents Margo Lion Jack Viertel Richard Maltby, Jr. 195 198 206 Notes 211 Bibliography 223 Index 227 List of Illustrations x 4.1 Opening scene from Les Misérables 5.1 The Act One finale from Sunday in the Park with George 6.1 Scene from the Hollywood section of Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk 6.2 Scene from Floyd Collins 8.1 Opening scene from Nicholas Hytner's Carousel 8.2 Company scene from Trevor Nunn's Oklahoma! 8.3 Final moments from Sam Mendes's Cabaret 65 86 100 106 124 127 131 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments x T he research for this book was made possible by a Fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. In particular, I would like to thank Joy Hayton, the wonderful administrator of the English Department, as well as Professor Martin Meisel, Professor Martin Puchner, and especially Professor Arnold Aronson who gave invaluable feedback during the writing process. Laurence Maslon at New York University first gave me the idea for this book and his feedback and seemingly infinite knowledge of American musical theatre has been both a resource and an inspiration along the way. I am also indebted to Anni Parker, a fellow Anglo-American theatregoer, for her feedback and suggestions. In addition to the Columbia University libraries, I made extensive use of the theatre archives of the V&A Theatre Collections in London and the Performing Arts branch of the New York Public Library and would like to thank all the helpful and efficient staff. At Palgrave Macmillan, my thanks to Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Julia Cohen, and to my editor Don B. Wilmeth for their support, assistance, and encouragement throughout the editorial and production process. My research for this book over the past few years has included conversations with British and American theatre professionals who gave generously of their time to answer my questions. Some of these interviews have been cited within the chapters and a selection of the transcripts is reproduced in full at the back of the book. I should note that the views and arguments expressed in this book are my own and are not necessarily all shared by my interviewees who represent a wide cross-section of backgrounds and perspectives. However, all these people have helped me to gain an understanding of the period that I cover and I am enormously grateful to them for sharing their professional experiences and insights with me. In particular, I would like to extend my thanks to writers and directors John Caird, William Finn, Adam Guettel, James Lapine, David Leveaux, Richard x Acknowledgments Maltby, Jr., and Matthew Warchus; to Ted Chapin, president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, and Henry Little at the Arts Council of England; and to producers Marty Bell, Joanne Benjamin, Georgina Bexon, Chris Grady, Philip Hedley, Paul James, Margo Lion, Michael Lynas, Desi Moynihan, Tim Sanford, Deborah Sathe, Rachel Tackley, Jack Viertel, and Ira Weitzman. On a personal note, I would like to acknowledge my brother Patrick Nielsen, an actor and director whose shared interest in theatre has been a source of great pleasure to me over the years. My parents, Jean and Tom Lundskær-Nielsen, also deserve a special mention. My interest in theatre stems from my early exposure to different kinds of performance and I am deeply indebted to them for giving me this wonderful gift. Finally, I extend love and gratitude to my husband Michael Kenyon for his support, encouragement, and perceptive feedback throughout the preparation and writing of this book. Introduction: Anglo-American Perspectives x I n the 1980s and 90s, a series of bold, commercially successful musicals arrived on Broadway from London's West End, with Evita followed by Cats, Les Misérables, Me and My Girl, Phantom of the Opera, Starlight Express, Miss Saigon, Aspects of Love, and Sunset Boulevard. This created a dilemma for the New York theatre industry and critics as well as for traditional Broadway theatregoers. There is no question that the shows arrived at a time when the Broadway musical was ailing, bringing in desperately needed audiences and revenue. Equally, Cats and its successors are widely acknowledged as having reinvigorated the "road"—the receiving houses outside New York that constituted the post-Broadway national tour. But the fact that the most successful shows on Broadway had originated abroad challenged the idea of musicals as an intrinsically American art form and the New York theatre community looked on in bemusement as the West End started to assume the role that Broadway had enjoyed in the previous four decades. To make matters worse, these shows did not look or sound like Broadway musicals and yet they were pulling in the kind of audiences that local producers could only dream of. Questions abounded. Where did these shows come from? Who were these artists? How did these musicals fit into the narrative of musical theatre history? And what did they signify for the future of the art form? In short, what happened? This book highlights some of the cultural factors that underpin the extraordinary shifts in British and American musical theatre during the 1980s and 90s. Specifically, it offers an Anglo-American perspective on the way in which the recent developments have helped to broaden our perception of the musical as an art form, going beyond the usual focus on marketing, box office, and stage technology that has led to this being dubbed the era of the megamusical. By examining the critical reception, cultural contexts, and development processes of shows that came out of Broadway, the West End and the American nonprofit theatres in the 1980s and 90s, I highlight the 2 Directors and the New Musical Drama evolution of new approaches to the art form and, specifically, the crucial role of directors in establishing a type of musical that I have called musical drama. CRITICAL RECEPTION One of the most distinctive factors of this era is the strength of the response from theatre critics and audiences. Interestingly, these have often been polar opposites. In New York, the imported West End musicals were enthusiastically embraced by local, national, and international audiences who kept the shows running for unprecedented lengths of time. From the "insiders" (the New York theatre industry, critics, historians, and traditional musical theatre fans), the response was less effusive and the tone and language employed in many theatre reviews at the time tell us as much about the critics' underlying assumptions about the art form as they do about the shows themselves. In May 2001, opera critic Anthony Tommasini gave voice to a prevalent sentiment in the New York musical theatre community. In "They Do Write 'Em Like They Used To," a New York Times article about the annual Broadway TONY awards, Tommasini noted that while the nominees for Best Score had been "an embarrassment ever since Broadway was occupied by British invaders and Disney investors" the current contenders sounded reassuringly familiar: "What's refreshing, perhaps even a breakthrough in a backward-looking sort of way, is that the scores for 'The Producers' and 'The Full Monty' sound as if the last 25 years of pseudo-operatic spectacle had never happened. For that alone, each score deserves grateful cheers from die-hard devotees of the musical and awards galore next month."1 He went on to suggest more explicitly that "one way to salvage the Broadway musical genre is to go back a couple of decades and start over." While Tommasini is best known as a conservative opera critic, his comments express a common feeling of bemusement and resentment at the British musicals on Broadway—the inner sanctum of the American musical theatre. These feelings of hostility may explain the common reference to this period as the "British Invasion" with its connotations of the Revolutionary War and an unwelcome presence. It is not the first time this military phrase has been applied to cultural imports: notably, it was previously used to refer to the influx of British rock music to the United States in the 1960s. In the case of the musical, the phrase serves to reveal the intense American sense of ownership surrounding the art form that is so deeply Anglo-American Perspectives 3 embedded in American culture. The West End musicals met with a very mixed reception in New York ranging from rather grudging admiration (sometimes accompanied by an attempt to identify American elements or collaborators in the show) to disdain or downright hostility. Among these, New York Times critic Frank Rich wove an interesting path as one of the few critics to assess shows on their individual theatrical merits rather than rejecting them all out of hand. However, it is clear where his primary loyalties lay. In his 1987 article "The Empire Strikes Back," Rich gave voice to the dominant New York attitude to the West End musicals, framing the shows in commercial rather than artistic terms: For the New York theater, the rise of London as a musical-theater capital is as sobering a spectacle as the awakening of the Japanese automobile industry was for Detroit. Whether it is a real cultural phenomenon or merely a passing series of coincidences is another question. One could argue that the new London musical is a triumph of merchandising and of a handful of English artists, frequently abetted by Americans, rather than a significant and lasting artistic breakthrough.2 The reference to the American artists "abetting" the British creative teams is particularly telling here with its implication of enabling an act of wrongdoing. This attitude, found in contemporary journalism, theatre criticism, and theatre histories, has also pervaded the New York theatre industry. As the co-lyricist of Miss Saigon, musical theatre writer, director, and producer Richard Maltby Jr. was one of the few Americans to work on the West End shows. To many of his colleagues this amounted to cultural treason and he still describes himself wryly as "the Benedict Arnold of musical theatre."3 More alarmingly, perhaps, the existing scholarship on this period largely shares this Broadway-centric view. The pre-1980s musical has inspired a growing body of work that theorizes the musical through the lens of race, gender, ethnicity, sociocultural contexts, and gay and lesbian spectatorship. However, the current scholarship on the 1980s and 90s largely consists of general surveys overlaid with nostalgia, sporting elegiac titles such as Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical, and Ever After: The Last Years of Musical Theater and Beyond. Theatre historians have overwhelmingly characterized this period as driven by commerce rather than artistry. What analysis there is of the shows themselves tends to focus almost exclusively on the perceived divergences from Broadway musical theatre traditions, such as the sung-through scores, new marketing strategies and technology behind musicals such as Cats, Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon. Where Broadway directors such as 4 Directors and the New Musical Drama Jerome Robbins, Michael Bennett, and Bob Fosse are (justly) acknowledged as central artistic figures within the musical theatre of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the directors of the 1980s and 90s have been largely sidelined in historical narratives in favor of the composers and producers.4 WHAT'S IN A NAME? The common depiction of West End musicals as aberrations has led to some unhelpful terminology. In New York, the term "British musicals" has become common shorthand for large commercial musicals that place spectacle over artistry. This idea is furthered by the common adoption of the term "megamusicals" to describe commercial West End and Broadway shows in the 1980s and 90s. The most comprehensive work in this respect is Jessica Sternfeld's The Megamusical. Sternfeld undertakes an illuminating and thoughtful analysis of many of the most successful commercial musicals of this era, offering a general production history of each before engaging in a more detailed musicological reading of shows that, as she puts it, "many scholars dismiss, disdain, and purposely ignore."5 In her opening definitions, Sternberg notes that "the features that make a musical a megamusical come both from within the show itself and from its surrounding context" and goes on to lay out the general criteria: It features a grand plot from a historical era, high emotions, singing and music throughout, and impressive sets. It opens with massive publicity, which usually leads to millions of dollars in advance sales. Marketing strategies provide a recognizable logo or image, theme song, and catch phrase. Successful (re)productions spring up all over the world. Audiences rave; critics are less thrilled. It runs for years, perhaps decades, becoming a fixture of our cultural landscape.6 Using this definition as a guide, Sternberg goes on to discuss a broad range of shows that commonly fall under the megamusical banner, including Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Blondel, Chess, Starlight Express, Aspects of Love, Sunset Boulevard, Miss Saigon, Jekyll and Hyde, Titanic, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Rent, Ragtime, Aida, and The Producers. As Sternberg herself points out, classifying works of art is never an exact science and this is certainly true of an interdisciplinary art form like the musical. In his 1977 book on Writing the Broadway Musical, Aaron Frankel notes the list of terms in current usage including the "music drama" associated with Wagnerian opera as well as categories of Broadway musicals such Anglo-American Perspectives 5 as "revue," "musical comedy," "musical play," "Broadway opera," "new operetta," "plays with music," and "concept musicals."7 Clearly, many of these are overlapping terms but crucially they are all defined by artistic criteria. By contrast, while Sternberg includes some artistic signifiers in her definition, the term "megamusical" in common usage is largely a reference to the external factors that she mentions rather than the tone, dramatic structure, or musical style that determine the other categories in Frankel's list. This creates two problems as we start to come to terms with recent musical theatre developments. First, "megamusical" is an inherently reductive term for an artistic work, implying that what is noteworthy about these shows is not their artistry but their size, be it big tunes, big scenery, big marketing campaigns, or big box office success. Second, the broad range of signifiers commonly used to identify megamusicals means that we end up grouping together shows that really have very little in common artistically. In particular, it obviates the need to look closer at individual shows in terms of the libretto and score, cultural origins, the relationship to the audience, or staging vocabularies—in short, the kind of artistic analysis that would reveal considerable differences between the shows that commonly fall under the "megamusical" banner. Clearly, the recent past has seen a greater trend toward aggressive marketing, the stage technology has advanced, and there has been a shift toward through-sung scores and a different kind of subject matter than the Broadway musicals of the preceding decades. Equally, there are undeniable artistic difference between the West End musicals and their Broadway predecessors. The sense of wit and exuberance that marks the majority of Broadway musicals is less dominant in West End shows such as Les Misérables and Miss Saigon, and the tendency of the London musicals toward a through-scored and through-sung format has often sacrificed the linguistic nuances of the most sophisticated book musicals. There is also a different approach to set design, although this has often been a result of innovations in British theatre design and general technological advances rather than a simplistic love of spectacle. And the increased emphasis on the overarching theme is often at the expense of the star performances that are central to the Broadway musical theatre tradition. However, rather than simply seeing the West End musicals as a failure to comply with the traditions of the Golden Age Broadway musical or seeing them as commercial ventures where size is everything, I would argue that they form part of a wider shift over the past few decades: namely the expansion of how we define the musical in relation to other performing arts. In 1991, American theatre critic and historian Martin Gottfried noted of the 6 Directors and the New Musical Drama previous decade that "the British were not taking over our musical theatre really, although they were opening its eyes to possibilities for growth" and the result was "not that musical comedy or concept musicals had seen their last but that Broadway no longer could be monopolized with formula showmaking by a small group of insiders."8 In the 1980s and 90s, the commercially successful West End musicals found a way to reconnect with a broader audience and move the musical back toward the cultural mainstream. At the same time, the American nonprofit theatres began to embrace the musical theatre as an art form and to experiment with tone, form, and subject matter within the contexts of their particular artistic missions. Together, they started to create a more pluralistic idea of what musical theatre could look, sound, and feel like. Given these developments, it seems to me that we might usefully look at the musical theatre of the 1980s and 90s as a number of different artistic impulses and try to develop a more precise vocabulary that reflects the artistry and cultural origins of individual shows. By looking beyond the traditional Broadway-centric narrative of musical theatre developments, we can start to see the 1980s and 90s as a time of broadening horizons, dramatic innovation, and formal experimentation in which the musical became a meeting point for a number of different theatre traditions. MUSICAL DRAMA If we look at the recent developments from a pluralistic rather than a Broadway-centric perspective—including British, American, commercial, and nonprofit musicals of this period—one of the most interesting "subgenre" to emerge is a group of shows that has as much basis in contemporary theatre as it does in the traditions of the Golden Age Broadway musical. I have called these shows "musical dramas." At this point, a brief definition of terms might be helpful. The differences between the three most common musical theatre categories—musical comedy, musical plays, and concept musicals—have been discussed elsewhere and I do not intend to engage in detailed analysis here. However, for the benefit of newcomers to this subject, musical comedies are generally energetic, upbeat, and often witty in tone and include shows like Anything Goes, Kiss Me, Kate, Annie Get Your Gun, Guys and Dolls, and Hello, Dolly! Musical plays often tackle more serious subjects and place more emphasis on the "book" (the story, characters, and plot); the musical numbers are intended to advance and deepen the story rather than simply to entertain as is often the case with musical comedy. Early examples of musical plays Anglo-American Perspectives 7 include Show Boat (1927), which highlighted the human cost of miscegenation; The Cradle Will Rock (1937), a Brechtian-influenced musical written and set in the depression; Pal Joey (1940), which presented unusually mature and unsentimental "romantic" leads; and Lady in the Dark (1941), which explored the new phenomenon of psychoanalysis. However, it was the writing team of Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics) that is widely seen as establishing this genre of musical in the 1940s and 50s through shows such as Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), and The King and I (1951) which combined memorable, melodious songs with psychologically motivated characters, thoughtful storylines, and serious social themes. The term "concept musical" was first applied to Company in 1970 and is now commonly used to describe musicals that are based around a central theme or idea. The musical dramas that I look at combine the fundamental traditions of the Broadway musical plays and concept musicals (using songs written in a popular idiom to advance a story and/or explore a theme) with dramaturgical and staging approaches from developments in nonmusical drama. By identifying this category of musicals, it becomes possible to draw artistic connections between ostensibly very different shows that originated in the 1960s and 70s on Broadway (Cabaret, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd) and in the 1980s and 90s in the West End (Evita, Les Misérables, Miss Saigon) and in American nonprofit theatres (March of the Falsettos, Falsettoland, Sunday in the Park with George, Jelly's Last Jam, Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk, Floyd Collins). My primary focus here is on the crucial role of director-dramaturgs and director-writers in the development of this body of work. There is, of course, a history of acknowledging musical theatre directors as central to the development of new work. The work of choreographer-director Jerome Robbins was key to this shift. In West Side Story (1957) and Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Robbins created a unified staging vocabulary to reflect the shows' themes and helped to raise the status of the director in the creative process. Subsequently, choreographer-directors such as Gower Champion, Bob Fosse, and Michael Bennett played a key role in shaping as well as staging their shows. To call these artists auteurs would be inaccurate (the very collaborative nature of musical theatre makes this harder to achieve than in other performance arts) but certainly they were often what William Goldman calls "the muscle" in their shows, functioning as the most powerful member of the creative team by shaping the development process and having the final say on creative matters.9 8 Directors and the New Musical Drama However, while these choreographer-directors—and later Broadway descendants such as Tommy Tune and Susan Stroman—have been accorded a central place in the historical narrative of musical theatre, the directors of musical dramas have so far been relatively ignored.10 I would argue that this is an important omission and that in order to study these musicals, it is essential to recognize the vital contribution of a group of American and British theatre directors who have infused the mainstream musical with new ideas, techniques, and approaches. Starting with the work of Broadway producer and director Harold Prince in the 1960s and 70s, these include Trevor Nunn, John Caird, Nicholas Hytner, James Lapine, George C. Wolfe, Tina Landau, Sam Mendes, Matthew Warchus, and David Leveaux. In particular, this group of directors effected two major changes in the developmental process for new musicals. First, they established a different kind of relationship between writers and directors. Unlike the Broadway directors of the 1960s and 70s who rose through the ranks as dancers and choreographers, the directors of musical drama came from text-based theatre. Their background in classical drama and new plays not only made them adept at dramaturgical work but also deeply respectful of the writers' intentions and instincts, prompting a collaborative rather than authoritarian approach. Second, while the more serious tone and subject matter of the musical dramas are foreshadowed in the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, these new writers and directors took a more confrontational approach to social politics and to the theatre audiences themselves, often raising questions rather than resolving them, and eschewing the "feel-good" factor that characterize even the more daring Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS: AN HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Given the impact of British musicals on Broadway in the 1980s and 90s, and the critical responses that have helped to shape our perception of the period, it seems clear that in order to understand these shows artistically it is necessary to understand the theatre traditions that they came out of and the Anglo-American cultural history that led to a sense of British musicals on Broadway being characterized as an "invasion." While we commonly think of the musical as an intrinsically American art form, this was not always the case. Musical theatre is widely acknowledged to have developed out of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art forms such as the ballad opera, opéra comique, operetta, and Anglo-American Perspectives 9 Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy Operas as well as American vaudeville. In some ways the musical theatre landscape of the 1980s and 90s was a return to the first few decades of the twentieth century where it was a transatlantic art form. New York producer Florenz Ziegfeld frequently featured artists from Paris and London in his Follies; British actress Gertrude Lawrence played the lead in Broadway's Oh Kay! (1926);11 and Noel Coward's Bitter Sweet (1929) was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic combining a British author, an American star, and appropriation of European operetta traditions. Conversely, much of the work of the Guy Bolton /Jerome Kern/ P.G. Wodehouse writing team crossed the Atlantic to London while Broadway's Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart also wrote material for British impresario Charles Cochran's London revues.12 However, the term "musical theatre" has become synonymous with twentieth-century American culture and in particular the rich cultural heritage of New York's immigrant population. While the 1920s was a fertile time for the musical on Broadway, the supremacy of America (and specifically New York) as the musical theatre capital of the world can be dated to the "Golden Age" of the 1940s, 50s, and into the 60s.13 It is true that there was a flurry of British musical imports in the 1960s, and John Degen has referred to this as a "British invasion" when (chiefly through the efforts of Broadway producer David Merrick) "musicals began to be imported wholesale to New York" including Irma La Douce (1960), Stop the World, I Want to Get Off (1962), Oliver! (1963), and the less successful transfers of Oh, What a Lovely War! (1964) and The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd (1965).14 However, the term "invasion" should be viewed relatively: compared to the avalanche of Broadway musicals that transferred to London in these years, the flow in the other direction was more of a trickle. Certainly it did nothing to upset Broadway's preeminence as the world capital of musical theatre. THE RISE OF THE BROADWAY MUSICAL The enormous popularity of the musical in the Golden Age can in some measure be explained by the growing demand for accessible "culture" in this era. In The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin notes that in the 1950s "middle-class Americans were becoming cultural omnivores."15 This included increased travel and active participation in cultural activities both abroad and at home. As cultural historian David Savran has pointed out, cultural hierarchies became a national obsession and magazine articles 10 Directors and the New Musical Drama began to appear in which different pastimes were ranked on a scale from highbrow to lowbrow.16 The increase in cultural activity was reflected in the terminology that came into standard use: this was the era in which cultural hawks "no longer judged the opposition between highbrow and lowbrow sufficient to account for the unprecedented variety of cultural productions made in the United States, from bebop to Queen for a Day, from "Hound Dog" to The Sound of Music. . . ."17 Increasingly, they began to recognize a third category of "middlebrow" culture to reflect the tastes of the growing ranks of middle-class cultural consumers. This demand for middlebrow culture was a perfect fit for the developing Broadway Musical. The mixed heritage of the musical (drawing on opera, operetta, vaudeville, and drama) had always placed the art form at the populist end of the cultural spectrum, but in the 1940s and 50s it consolidated its status as middlebrow art with the rise of musical plays that were thoughtful adaptations of respectable source material and the influx of artists from more prestigious areas of the performing arts. In the 1940s, these included Lynn Riggs's Green Grow the Lilacs (Oklahoma!), Ferenc Molnar's play Liliom (Carousel), James Mitchener's book of short stories Tales of the South Pacific (South Pacific), Elmer Rice's Street Scene (Street Scene), Alan Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country (Lost in the Stars); in the 1950s, they included an adaptation of Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (My Fair Lady) and an updating of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into a contemporary tragic love story (West Side Story). Mainstream Broadway musicals attracted artists such as composer and longtime Brecht collaborator Kurt Weill, African-American poet Langston Hughes, and classical composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. The advent of the original cast album in the 1940s became an important vehicle for the widespread dissemination of the musical, coinciding with the rise of consumer culture. Show music had been available to buy since the 1930s as recordings of hit songs by the stars of the shows. But following the success of Oklahoma! in 1943, record producers started to create original cast albums that included most or all of the songs.18 These albums— sold alongside other kinds of pop music—helped to make the songs part of the popular culture by allowing for repeated listening and by bringing musicals into the lives and homes of people who had never set foot in a Broadway theatre. The popularity of the cast album with its uplifting show tunes might also help to explain the sunny image of even the darker musicals. Rodgers and Hammerstein shows such as Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific address some difficult social problems, but with a few notable exceptions (such as "Carefully Taught" in South Pacific) the uncomfortable ideas generally tend to be in the dialogue rather than the songs. Anglo-American Perspectives 11 The success of the Golden Age Broadway musical can also be credited to the rise of television in the 1950s. While radio had previously enabled songs to travel beyond the theatre, television provided a more dramatic showcase. Of particular importance was the enormously popular Ed Sullivan Show that ran from 1948 to 1971.19 This provided a showcase for new musicals as part of the eclectic programming that featured highbrow artists such as Rudolph Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn, Maria Callas, and classical pianist Eugene List alongside comedians such as Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and the rising stars of the rock 'n' roll generation: Elvis Presley appeared on the show as did The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Janis Joplin, and Marvin Gaye. The Broadway musical was an ideal fit for this and many major stars appeared on the show to promote their shows, including Julie Andrews and Richard Burton in a scene from Camelot, Sammy Davis Jr. with the Golden Boy cast, and Yul Brynner performing material from The King and I. The rise of the musical in America can also be explained in more sociopolitical terms. Broadway's Golden Age coincided with a period of national growth—economically, socially, and demographically—following World War II when the United States established itself as a powerful world leader. The energy, confidence, and social engagement of these postwar years were reflected in the Broadway musical and there was a noticeable increase in musical plays that reflected the dynamic social debates of the time. In Our Musicals, Ourselves, John Bush Jones explicitly makes this connection in his readings of the American musical as a reflection of wider social preoccupations. In particular, he identifies three major sociological shifts during the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s: the surge in prosperity after the war years; domestic social reform, including civil rights and race relations; and the nationalism bordering on xenophobia that followed World War II into the Cold War era. Thus Jones identifies in Oklahoma! and Carousel themes of national unification and criticism of blinkered entrepreneurship; he interprets Brigadoon and Camelot as shows about "isolationist Utopias"; he highlights the social liberalism in Bloomer Girl and Finian's Rainbow, one advocating women's rights and the other a satirical critique of bigotry and intolerance; and he emphasizes the theme of racial tension in Lost in the Stars and West Side Story.20 BRITISH MUSICALS DURING BROADWAY'S GOLDEN AGE The sociological explanation for the rise of the Broadway musical can usefully be reversed to understand the demise of the British musical. While 12 Directors and the New Musical Drama musical comedy in London started to wane even before World War I— becoming increasingly nostalgic rather than modern in tone—it was in the postwar years that the British musical lost its power as a cultural force when the optimism and sense of solidarity that characterized musical comedy began to seem irretrievably naïve in the face of a changing social climate. In Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890–1939, Len Platt explains this decline partly in sociological terms, pointing out that the middle classes felt increasingly under threat from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s as trade unions gained a national political platform and the middle classes became radicalized in response.21 These sociopolitical changes, coupled with the cultural shifts embodied in the new music, literature, and art in the 1920s and 30s, meant that the West End musical comedy was no longer in tune with the cultural shifts of the modern world. In the following decades, the social and political shifts in Britain did little to alleviate these problems. Where the late 1940s and 50s saw America rising as a world power, postwar Britain was an empire in decline: the handover of India in 1947 was followed by the erosion of territories in Asia and Africa. As the nation tried to rebuild after the social and economic devastation of the war years, political focus shifted from empirical matters to domestic policy and the establishment of the welfare state in the mid- to late 1940s with the introduction of the National Health Service and the nationalization of coal, railways, and electricity. Economically, the British postwar recovery was built on a crippling loan from the United States and in 1949, in a grimly symbolic act of reversal, Britain had to acknowledge its increasing reliance on the former colony and accept a heavily devalued pound against the dollar. This economic and political relationship was echoed in the arts as American plays, music, and films started to infiltrate British popular culture. As Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright point out, "The American presence—and the 'special relationship'—started to saturate British life politically, economically and culturally, invoking unease about our lack of democracy, unsatisfied desire for consumer goods, and restlessness and insecurity about our own culture. We became willingly, enthusiastically, and comprehensively colonized."22 From a practical standpoint, the lack of exciting and accomplished British musicals can be attributed to a dearth of committed creative producers in the West End. Musical theatre scholar John Snelson has argued persuasively that the perception of postwar Britain as a barren ground for musicals is partly due to scholars and critics advancing a "Broadway-led agenda which has denied [the] British shows their own home character."23 As evidence, he cites shows such as Bless the Bride (1947), Her Excellency Anglo-American Perspectives 13 (1949), and King's Rhapsody (1949) whose topicality to postwar Britain made direct comparisons to the American shows misleading. But the fact remains that Britain did not enjoy a musical theatre boom comparable to the one on Broadway, and this was to a great extent due to a lack of infrastructure. Snelson himself acknowledges that in the 1950s "the production of British musicals collapsed, principally because of the increasing lack of confidence of West End producers who preferred proven Broadway shows to the financial risks of unknown British ones."24 In 1961, Noël Coward summarized the problem in his explanation of why he was premiering his new musical Sail Away across the Atlantic: "In New York light music is treated properly, taken seriously, and given a whole production expertise backstage which is still totally unknown in London. We just don't have the choreographers, the orchestrators, the dancers, the technicians to cope with the complexities of a big musical."25 Another reason for the lack of a British Golden Age in the 1940s and 50s is that the musical was perceived as commercial entertainment at a time when the British theatre was moving in a very different direction. The establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946 (and with it the start of government funding for the arts) changed the landscape of British theatre with the emergence of subsidized companies such as the English Stage Company (1955), the Royal Shakespeare Company (1960), and the Royal National Theatre (1963), as well as prestigious regional theatres. (The English Stage Company soon became better known by its home at the Royal Court Theatre.) During the latter half of Broadway's Golden Age, Britain's most exciting writers, directors, and producers were found in the subsidized theatre, which was more influenced by the arrival of Brecht's Berliner Ensemble production of Mother Courage in 1956 than by the possibilities of musical theatre. Where the buoyant national mood in America found expression through musical theatre, the British postwar mood was more accurately reflected in the bleaker worlds of playwrights such as John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, and Edward Bond. A NEW ERA By the mid-1960s, however, the Golden Age of the Broadway musical was in decline, largely due to two major sociocultural developments. Mirroring city-dwellers around the country, the traditional Broadway audience (white, middle class) moved from Manhattan to the suburbs taking their disposable income and theatre-going habits with them: in the 1960s alone some 14 Directors and the New Musical Drama 900,000 whites moved out of New York and were largely replaced by African Americans and Latinos with less cultural attachment to Broadway.26 The other key factor in Broadway's demise was its inability to stay abreast with changing musical tastes and the newly politicized culture. As popular tastes shifted from showtunes to the sound of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, and Bob Dylan—and as an increasingly disillusioned generation started to question, criticize, and protest the status quo— Broadway musicals were left behind. All of these factors conspired to erode the Broadway audience base and weaken the position of musical theatre at the center of mainstream culture. There were a number of different responses to this. One was to keep writing in the style of the Golden Age musicals with an increasing emphasis on nostalgia, such as the Jerry Herman musicals Hello, Dolly! (1964) and Mame (1966). Another was to reconceive the musical in terms of contemporary pop culture, as in Hair (1967) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1971). But a third response came from artists who started to approach the musical as contemporary drama and to explore ways in which the musical theatre might engage with audiences through different kinds of subject matter, musical style, characters, structure, and staging. And crucial to this crosspollination was a group of theatre directors, starting with Broadway's Harold Prince, whose work on musical dramas helped to reposition the musical within the wider cultural landscape and open up new creative possibilities for one of our most popular art forms. 1. Harold Prince in Context x H arold Prince is widely acknowledged as a crucial figure in the development of the postwar Broadway musical. He is associated with some of the most groundbreaking and acclaimed musicals of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, first as a producer (West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof ) and then as producer-director (Cabaret, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd). In addition to his autobiography, Contradictions, Prince is the subject of several profiles, most notably Carol Ilson's Harold Prince: A Director's Journey and Foster Hirsch's Harold Prince and the American Musical Theatre, which focus on his dual identity as the inheritor of Broadway showmanship and as a pioneer in bringing darker themes to the Broadway musical theatre. What has not been as widely recognized is how Prince's work foreshadowed the musical dramas of the 1980s and 90s by redefining the relationship between musical theatre and contemporary drama in two crucial ways. First, he used the musical to explore the same kind of social questions that were engaging social dramatists such as Neil Simon, Edward Albee, and David Rabe. Second, his musicals developed a more confrontational relationship with the audience through staging that drew on elements of Russian Expressionism, British Music Hall, French Grand Guignol, German Expressionist film, and on the work of practitioners such as Bertolt Brecht, Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov, Joan Littlewood, and film director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. By incorporating these influences, Prince moved the musical beyond the traditions of the American musical, widening the frames of reference and, in the process, establishing a new kind of musical drama. In the following discussion, I do not wish to imply that Prince was an auteur in the sense of directors such as Robert Wilson or that he was the sole instigator and influence on these shows. Prince's work has always been collaborative, and one of his great gifts has been to surround himself with world-class writers and designers. Indeed, many of his shows are more commonly identified with his collaborators than with Prince, such as 16 Directors and the New Musical Drama composer-lyricist team John Kander and Fred Ebb (Cabaret), Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice (Evita), and composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim (Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd ). In addition, much of his staging owes a great debt to the vision, imagination, and ingenuity of designers such as Boris Aronson, Eugene Lee, and Maria Björnsson. It is not my intention to deny the contributions of these artists, which have been extensively documented elsewhere; my aim here is to explore the impact of Prince's approach to theatre on the development of musical drama on Broadway. From Cabaret onward, Prince performed multiple roles as producer, co-conceiver, dramaturg, and director that often made him the "muscle" in the creative process.1 As the producer of his own work, Prince was in a unique position to hire collaborators who shared his vision and, although not a writer himself, he had a profound influence on choosing and shaping his directorial projects, establishing the tone and point of view, building characters, and honing the dramatic structure in such a way as to broaden the horizons of the Broadway musical and lay the groundwork for the directors of musical drama in the 1980s and 90s. SOCIAL CONTEXTS Prince spent his formative professional years on Broadway at a key moment in America's social and cultural development and the critical, questioning tone of his musicals reflect the era in which they were created. The 1960s have rightly become synonymous with sweeping social changes. Through their social politics, economics, fashion, music, and literature, the generation who came of age in this decade actively and loudly questioned the conformist culture of the 1950s, replacing it with a more individualistic, experimental, and spiritual approach to life. Social structures were redefined, with the traditional family unit often superceded by social groups such as the hippie "tribe" or organizations based on race, gender, and sexuality. The growing feminist movement questioned the idea of women's primary identity as wives and mothers, finding a voice through publications such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), Mary McCarthy's novel The Group (1963), and (in smaller circles) the distribution of Casey Hayden and Mary King's manifesto on "Feminism and the Civil Rights Movement" (1965). The sanctity of marriage was undermined by increasingly liberal ideas about sex, the introduction of the contraceptive pill in the early 1960s, and California's legalization of the no-fault divorce in 1969. That same year, a police raid on the gay and transsexual Stonewall Inn in New York served as Harold Prince in Context 17 a catalyst for the gay rights movement. This period also saw the intensification of the Civil Rights Movement, with hundreds of local uprisings, student sit-ins, and numerous high-profile marches: in August 1963, the March for Jobs and Freedom culminated in 250,000 people gathering at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC to hear Martin Luther King announcing "I have a dream . . . ."2 Most prominently, perhaps, the 1960s were marked by increasingly vociferous public protests against the war in Vietnam. The national pride and confidence of the post–World War II era gave way to feelings of doubt, guilt, and a sense of betrayal. CULTURAL CONTEXTS These radical social shifts were echoed throughout the arts scene during the 1960s and 70s as artists began to conduct formal and thematic experiments in music, visual arts, and drama. Musically, the rock 'n' roll and Motown sounds of the 1950s and early 60s were replaced by the arrival of British rock bands including The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Political singersongwriters such as Bob Dylan became the voice of the more socially idealistic generation. The art world saw a radical shift, too, as the early trailblazing work of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in the 1940s and 50s was followed by further formal experimentation in the 1960s, not least through the rise of pop art and artists such as Andy Warhol. By the time Prince started directing in the mid-1960s, the American theatrical landscape had also changed significantly from the time of the Golden Age musicals, both in terms of infrastructure and aesthetic parameters. Most obviously, the geography of the American theatre expanded, with Off Broadway creating an alternative home for New York theatre and the Regional (or Resident) theatre movement starting to challenge the Broadway-centric model of generating theatre. These changes did not always result in radically experimental work. Since 1950, Off Broadway has been a technical term employed by Actors' Equity to denote Manhattan theatres with a particular seating capacity and a set union pay scale: then (as now) Off Broadway included commercial as well as more experimental productions. Equally, many regional theatres were simply trying to provide their own homegrown productions rather than importing them from Broadway. However, the growth of the American theatre had significant aesthetic repercussions as many of the new theatres encouraged artists to explore different kinds of stories and storytelling. In New York, the 1950s saw the 18 Directors and the New Musical Drama emergence of theatre companies like the Living Theatre (1948), Circle in the Square (1952), and the New York Shakespeare Festival (1954), all of them attempting new approaches either to classical plays, new writing, or both. This was echoed across the country with vibrant new theatres starting to create their own work, including Margo Jones's Theatre '47 in Dallas (1947), Nina Vance's Alley Theatre in Houston (1949), and Zelda Fichandler's Arena Stage in Washington DC (1951).3 In 1965, the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts resulted in even more new theatre companies and institutions. MUSICALS IN THE 1960S AND 70S The new developments in American drama were not generally reflected in musical theatre, although a few isolated musicals did begin to appear Off Broadway that started to open up new possibilities for the genre, expanding the kinds of subject matter and staging that could be explored through musical theatre. Hair famously brought the hippie movement to the musical stage while Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road did the same for feminism and Boy Meets Boy featured overtly gay characters. The most interesting figure in this respect is probably director Tom O'Horgan, whose artistic roots were in the highly experimental Off-OffBroadway theatre La MaMa Etc. but who went on to direct the Broadway productions of Hair (1968) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1971). O'Horgan's staging was highly visual and structurally experimental, based to a great extent on a physical translation of texts and ideas into film, mime, music, and dance. His work on Hair retained these avant-garde impulses: specifically, Arnold Aronson has drawn connections between Hair and the neoExpressionist physical ensemble work of the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre.4 Altogether, the musical provided a new and more active experience for Broadway audiences, with O'Horgan making unexpected use of the auditorium and the stage space: as Gerald Berkowitz notes, "Singers appeared in the aisles, popped out of trap doors, climbed the walls and hung from the proscenium arch"—and, of course, took off their clothes in one highly publicized but dimly lit scene.5 Overall, however, Broadway continued to produce musical plays and comedies that followed the models established in the 1940s and 50s, demonstrating only a cursory interest in the social, cultural, and theatrical shifts outside the theatre doors. In "The Dream Shattered: America's Seventies Musicals," Barbara Means Fraser argues convincingly that many Harold Prince in Context 19 musicals of this period manifested a darker sensibility and a stronger measure of cynicism and disillusionment than the more wholesome worlds of Rodgers and Hammerstein—a reaction to an era where "the basic institutions that had stabilized our country in times of trouble were the very culprits of the disillusionment."6 However, this is manifested much more strongly in the Prince-directed musical dramas that she mentions (Sweeney Todd, Follies) than the musicals staged by choreographer-directors Bob Fosse (Chicago) and Michael Bennett (A Chorus Line). Despite its credentials as a concept musical, A Chorus Line is closer to musical comedy than musical drama: any implicit criticism of the American dream in the chorus dancers' struggle is drowned out by the celebratory tone of the musical numbers and, tellingly, the most memorable song ("What I Did For Love") is in fact a love song to the theatre. Equally, Chicago—ostensibly a show about corruption and crime—dresses its cynicism in sequins and is fundamentally a satirical musical comedy that emphasizes two comic star turns, sleek production numbers, and Fosse's distinctive choreography of splayed hands, jazz isolations, and erotically charged gestures. By contrast, Prince's early work as a producer-director-dramaturg on Cabaret (1966), Company (1970), and Follies (1971) addressed some of the most fundamental social issues of the day. The direct impetus for Cabaret was the intensifying Civil Rights movement and the show's creators saw a clear parallel between the racial prejudices that allowed the Nazis to gain power and contemporary racial prejudice in America.7 Four years later, Company gave voice to the increasingly complicated attitude toward the institution of marriage as a result of the redefinition of gender roles by the growing feminist movement. (Produced the year after the Stonewall riots ignited the Gay Rights movement, the show also lends itself easily to a gay reading although the creative team has maintained that the central character of Bobby is a straight man who is afraid of commitment rather than a closet homosexual.) In 1971, Follies reflected the national mood following the American engagement in Vietnam. Not only was this a military defeat, but the sense that America was engaged in an immoral war led to a sense of a lost Eden—a feeling that was reflected in the musical's twin underlying themes of nostalgia and disillusionment. PRINCE AND INTERWING THEATRE Perhaps the most useful way to classify Prince's work in relation to the Broadway musical and the more experimental theatre of his day is through 20 Directors and the New Musical Drama the term "interwing" theatre. In A Theater Divided (1969), Martin Gottfried identifies two kinds of theatre in mid-twentieth-century America, which he terms "left wing" (theatre that innovates and challenges) and "right wing" (theatre that replicates and reassures). Gottfried singles out the musical as the one kind of theatre that occasionally manages to straddle these opposite impulses to create "interwing" shows that combine the technical expertise of the right wing and the innovations of the left-wing theatre.8 A closer examination of Prince's musicals reveals the "interwing" nature of his work: namely, his ability to combine the formal experimentation of the Off-Broadway and avant-garde theatre movements and the thematic preoccupations of contemporary social dramatists with the sophisticated stagecraft and structural precision of the Broadway musical. Despite Prince's affiliation with Broadway, his approach to staging has clear parallels in the more avant-garde theatre of his day. Prince's use of direct audience address in Cabaret and his repeated use of the chorus as an extension of society (and of the audience) in shows such as Cabaret, Company, Evita, and Sweeney Todd echo the preoccupation of the avantgarde theatre with confronting the audience and making them complicit in the theatrical event. In addition, Prince's interest in formal experimentation can be seen in his Off-Broadway work, including an Expressionist production of Durrenmatt's provocative The Visit and his original, environmental staging of Candide in a 180-seat theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the audience seated on bleachers amongst runways and ramps. However, while both these productions demonstrate Prince's genuine interest in exploring theatrical alternatives to Broadway, he is not an avantgarde artist in the mold of Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson and he retains a traditional approach to the supremacy of plot, character, and text within the theatrical event. It is no accident that Prince's main venture into Off-Broadway work was with the Phoenix Theatre—which was founded by experienced commercial producers and maintained some links to Broadway—rather than more radical theatres such as the Living Theatre or La MaMa ETC. Equally, his Off-Broadway production of Candide, while experimental, was not too avant-garde to transfer to Broadway. OKLAHOMA! VERSUS COMPANY The distance between Prince's musical dramas and the musical plays that preceded them can be seen in a comparison between Rodgers and Hammerstein's breakthrough musical Oklahoma! and the Prince musical Company. Harold Prince in Context 21 In 1943, Oklahoma! signaled a new era for the Broadway musical, establishing the dominance of musical plays on Broadway. Based on Lynn Riggs's play Green Grow the Lilacs, Oklahoma! tells the story of farmers and cowboys during the taming of the West. The storyline centers around Laurey, the niece of farm owner Aunt Eller, who attempts to choose between the swaggering cowboy Curly and the brooding farmhand Jud. The show's book and musical numbers touch on broader social themes— the antagonism between farmers and cowhands, the importance of assimilation in a volatile society—and through a dance number called "Laurey Makes Her Mind Up" (originally choreographed by Agnes de Mille as a Freudian dream) it explores Laurey's fearful fascination with Jud in terms of the subconscious desires that govern sexual attraction. Company is set in the late 1960s when it was created. While the show was written by librettist George Furth and composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, it was Prince who saw the potential for a thematic musical in Furth's collection of short plays on the theme of marriage and who acted as a dramaturg as well as director and producer. The show is structured as a series of vignettes around the central character of Bobby, a single 30-yearold in Manhattan whose life consists of casual romantic relationships and his friendships with married friends for whom he serves as a confidant. The show portrays Bobby's ambivalent response to settling down with one person, and the musical numbers highlight both the costs and benefits of marriage as seen through the eyes of Bobby and his social circle. Company both honors and challenges the tradition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals as embodied in Oklahoma! Like the earlier musical, Company is a product of the sociocultural context in which it was created. However, while Oklahoma! encompasses some serious questions such as social assimilation it largely reflects the sense of patriotism that was prevalent in 1943; by contrast, Company reveals the rather more complicated attitude toward social relationships after the upheavals of the 1960s. Where Oklahoma! reassures and celebrates, upholding marriage as the bond that unifies society, Company questions the institution of marriage and highlights the inevitable compromises that a union between two individuals entails. A comparison between the finales of the two shows clearly illustrates the difference between them. In Max Wilk's account of the creation of Oklahoma! he notes that after an encouraging first half on opening night, "on rolled that second act, gathering momentum as it went, resonating to an enraptured audience that laughed and sighed in all the right places" until "that exultant 11 o'clock chorale version of 'Oklahoma' with the cast down front belting out to the New Yorkers a hymn to a brand new 22 Directors and the New Musical Drama state: 'Oklahoma, O . . . K!'" 9 The Evening Post critic noted approvingly that although the show had "a mild, somewhat monotonous beginning," it picked up steam and turned into a rousing, festive affair: "By the time Curly and Laurey were married and everybody was out shouting the title song 'Oklahoma!' we were having a very good time."10 The ending of Company is much more muted. The original final song (a forceful rejection of marriage) was vetoed by Prince for being too negative; however, even in the modified version, the tone is hesitant and philosophical rather than jubilant. In "Being Alive" Bobby makes only a statement of intent to marry; moreover, it is couched in ambivalent terms that suggest a fear of loneliness and an intellectual embrace of the sacrifices and compromises of marriage rather than unbridled enthusiasm. Tellingly, his decision to marry is not connected to anyone in particular. Earlier in the show his friend Amy points out to him that it is not enough to love "somebody"—rather, you have to love "somebody." Bobby's decision at the end that he is ready to commit himself to a relationship is tempered by the fact that he is addressing his final song to an unknown "somebody" ("Somebody hold me too close / Somebody hurt me too deep").11 Where Oklahoma! ends with a joyous wedding celebration and a full-cast reprisal of the triumphant title song, the final number in Company has Bobby alone onstage persuading himself that committing to another person might, on balance, be a good thing. In terms of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, Company is probably more closely descended from their most experimental (if commercially unsuccessful) musical. Allegro (1947) is an episodic allegory about a man who climbs the ladder of professional and economic success but loses himself in the process. Prince and librettist George Furth were both admirers of Allegro as was Hammerstein's protégé Stephen Sondheim who started his career as an assistant on the show. Sondheim later reflected that while much of the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon consists of realistic plays with songs, "in Allegro Oscar used theatre convention frankly as theatre convention: the chorus that oversees the action, the abstract scenic design. These techniques have had a large influence on Hal's work and on mine."12 After Allegro failed at the box office, Rodgers and Hammerstein returned to more traditional territory and the musical's dramaturgical innovations became a digression rather than immediately forging a new path for the mainstream musical. MENTORS AND PEERS Prince's relationship to—and distance from—the dominant Broadway musicals can also be measured through a comparison with his directing Harold Prince in Context 23 mentors and peers. In his autobiography, Contradictions, and in numerous interviews he has acknowledged the influence of George Abbott and Jerome Robbins. However, this debt is one of stage technique rather than underlying philosophy regarding the musical's relationship to the audience and to the world around it. As the coproducer of West Side Story and producer of Fiddler on the Roof, Prince observed Robbins at first hand. Trained as a ballet choreographer, it was Robbins who introduced Prince to the idea of a unified production vocabulary and to a more fluid use of the stage. In his autobiography, Prince notes how Robbins used the entire depth of the stage rather than moving actors horizontally (as was traditional in musical theatre) and the importance he attached to the aesthetic use of lighting rather than the usual approach of "lights up for the scene, and lights down for the song."13 He also recalls the effectiveness of improvisation and empathy techniques in Robbins's rehearsals—elements of "the method" that he had learned under Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio. These included hanging articles about real gangs backstage at West Side Story and deliberately creating tension between the actors playing the Jets and the Sharks to allow them to access personal feelings akin to those of their characters. In 1966, this technique was used by Prince on Cabaret where he brought in a contemporary photograph of young white Americans at an anti-integration rally in the South to point up the parallels between anti-Semitism in Weimar Berlin and racism in 1960s America.14 Prince's admiration for George Abbott was also based more on stage craft and discipline than on philosophy. As a producer, director, and bookwriter, Abbott specialized in energetic, light musical comedies: his directing credits include Billion Dollar Baby (1945), High Button Shoes (1947), Wonderful Town (1953), How Now, Dow Jones (1967) and his work as a book writer and director includes Where's Charley (1948) and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951). His approach to directing, typical of Broadway musicals at the time, was a very pragmatic one and Prince came to emulate his mentor's discipline and professionalism.15 However, while Prince inherited staging and rehearsal techniques from his colleagues, his vision of theatre as a cultural force was very different, emphasizing the musical stage as a place to explore topical and uncomfortable issues. Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion, Bob Fosse, and Michael Bennett graduated from the chorus line to choreography and direction and although they reinvigorated the musical through new approaches to physical staging, their work remained largely unaffected by the social revolution that was occurring outside the theatre. Tellingly, as Bennett and Fosse gained more influence over their shows, they focused increasingly on 24 Directors and the New Musical Drama musicals set in the world of show business where social commentary was secondary to distinctive staging: although touching on genuine social issues, Bennett's A Chorus Line and Dreamgirls and Fosse's Sweet Charity and Chicago are ultimately stories that celebrate individual resilience in the face of adversity. Years later, Bennett's longtime choreographic partner Bob Avian worked on Miss Saigon and Martin Guerre in London but noted of Bennett that "he would not have accepted these shows. He didn't do anything he didn't understand—like 16th century France. He wouldn't have even read the script. He was a kid from Buffalo, he didn't even finish high school—although he won his Pulitzer Prize."16 And even though Robbins was instrumental in the development of musicals such as West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof, his contribution did not consist of honing the social politics but of creating a unified production vocabulary through fluid staging. By contrast, Prince's college years helped to foster his fascination for history, playwriting, and the world around him.17 The subject matter and the sometimes confrontational tone of Cabaret and Follies can be traced to this key divergence from George Abbott as voiced by Prince in a TV interview: "I have a darker sensibility . . . I'm political, he's not. I'm issueoriented, he's not."18 This translated also into a very different attitude toward the audience. "He really unabashedly wants people to have a good time," Prince explained, "and sometimes I don't give a damn. I want to stimulate them." Where Abbott created shows to uplift and amuse his audiences, Prince aimed to use the emotional and seductive power of musicals to address serious subjects and make the audiences confront or at least acknowledge their own prejudices, fears, and insecurities. PRINCE AND BRECHT In a sense, the difference between Prince and his colleagues can be seen as the tension between the Wagnerian and Brechtian impulses of the Broadway musical. In Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical, Andrea Most notes that there are points of similarity between the separation of different theatrical elements in Brecht's verfremdungseffekt ("alienation technique") and the presence of music, dance, and spoken dialogue in traditional musical comedy. Indeed, Mark Blitzstein's 1938 political musical The Cradle Will Rock was actually dedicated to Brecht. However, there is also a connection between the emotional and cohesive emphasis of the Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk and the rise of the integrated musical, and Most notes that "when Broadway musical composers and writers began to Harold Prince in Context 25 refashion themselves as 'artists' in the postwar period by integrating songs with dialogue, they turned not to Brecht but to Wagner for their inspiration."19 The musicals spearheaded by Bennett and Fosse, based around a central directorial vision, can in a sense be seen as examples of gesamtkunstwerk, although they still retained a level of showmanship and a relationship to the audience that revealed their roots in vaudeville and musical comedy. Prince's desire to stimulate his audiences and to confront them with uncomfortable social issues connects him more strongly to the philosophy laid out in the seminal essay "The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre" in which Brecht contrasts the "epic theatre" with the "dramatic theatre." While not all of his criteria apply to Prince, his definition of epic theatre as something that "turns the spectator into an observer," "forces him to take decisions," makes him "face something," and brings him to the "point of recognition" is strongly applicable to almost all of Prince's work.20 Prince himself has denied a conscious debt to Brecht, objecting mainly to the emphasis on "alienation" and arguing that "I want to be enveloped, engaged in the theatre."21 The desire to "envelop" the audience both mentally and emotionally is evident in Prince's work, not only through empathy with characters and through seductive musical numbers but also through his use of the theatre space: in Cabaret, a large tilted mirror onstage reflected the auditorium from the audience's perspective and in Evita he used roving searchlights to create the sense of being at a political rally. However, there is a clear correlation between Brecht and Prince in their view of theatre as a forum for addressing serious contemporary social issues and their use of nonnaturalistic narrative techniques to forge a direct relationship with the audience. This sociopolitical approach to musical theatre did not sit well with all audiences or critics. Both Cabaret and Follies had audiences walking out in sizeable numbers, objecting to the dark and uncomfortable subject matter and tone. Cabaret also came under fire from Jewish groups for one supposedly anti-Semitic lyric when the Emcee refers to his gorilla girl friend as Jewish in "If You Could See Her through My Eyes." The number was intended as a criticism of anti-Semitism in popular entertainment, but was not universally understood that way. It would be inaccurate to paint Prince as uninterested in popular appeal—as a commercial producer, this was part of his job and he did compromise at times, such as when he made the writers amend the offending lyric in Cabaret and demanded a less depressing ending for Company. However, it is also clear that overall his interest was in creating work that could engage with topical issues, even if it reduced the mass appeal of the show. 26 Directors and the New Musical Drama PRINCE AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN DRAMA In addition to the Brechtian impulses, a closer examination of Company and Follies—both set in contemporary New York City—reveals a thematic connection between Prince and some of the leading social dramatists of the day. In 2002, Stephen Sondheim reflected that "until about 30 years ago, people went to musicals not wanting to be anything but entertained on a very easy level. But starting in the late '60s and '70s, we began experimenting with form, with content. Musicals were trying to encroach on the territory that previously had belonged solely to plays."22 Certainly, Company was an anomaly among the other musicals that opened in 1970. These included Oh! Calcutta! (a revue that featured onstage nudity), Coco (a biographical showcase for Katherine Hepburn as Coco Chanel), and Applause (a backstage musical showcasing a series of prominent actresses starting with Lauren Bacall). Considered in the context of contemporary plays, however, Company is less unusual. The characters and the central theme of Company resonate with many of the plays that were appearing at a time when sexual taboos were loosening and the social and marital roles of both men and women were being redefined. On Broadway, Neil Simon had a stream of plays and musicals produced from the early 1960s, three of which dealt specifically with the malaise of married couples. Although he excelled in witty dialogue and comic punch lines, there is an underlying cynicism and sense of loss in plays such as Plaza Suite (1968), Last of the Red-Hot Lovers (1969), and California Suite (1976). In all three, husbands and wives struggle with varying degrees of success to juggle their personal needs with marriages that both define and strangle their sense of self. Even sharper was Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which, from 1962 to 1964, offered Broadway audiences a vicious dissection of middle-class married life. Nor was Company at the tail end of this trend: eight years after the musical opened, Curse of the Starving Class (1978) was the first of Sam Shepard's family plays—followed by Buried Child (1978), True West (1980), and A Lie of the Mind (1985)—all of which undermined the myth of the supportive family unit as the center of American life. Certainly, there is a difference of tone and central preoccupations between Company and the plays listed earlier, but there are also telling similarities which indicate that they have all come out of the same period in American social history. Company's cynical, wise-cracking, alcoholic society wife Joanne inhabits a world very similar to that of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite, while Bernie's middle-aged crisis in Last of the Red-Hot Lovers has clear Harold Prince in Context 27 connections to the identity crisis of the two couples in Follies as they measure the distance between their youthful selves and their current status as unfulfilled, lonely individuals married to the wrong people. Similarly, the married men in Company speak for many of the married couples in the plays, not least in songs such as "Sorry-Grateful" ("You're always sorry / You're always grateful / You're always wondering what might have been")23 or "Have I Got a Girl For You." In the latter, Bobby's married male friends try to live vicariously through him, idealizing his unfettered, romantic single life and contrasting it with the prosaic reality of married life: "Whaddaya like—you like indescribable bliss? / Then whaddaya want to get married for?"24 Bobby's genuinely mixed feelings about the marital state—although out of step with those of romantic musical comedy—are entirely in keeping with the frustrations and fears that underpin the Albee, Simon, and Shepard plays. Another interesting if initially unlikely connection can be made between Follies (with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Goldman, and co-conceived and directed by Prince) and David Rabe's play Sticks and Bones. Both shows premiered in 1971 (on Broadway and Off Broadway, respectively) and both used well-known icons from the past to emphasize the change of mood in post-Vietnam America. Ostensibly, Follies depicts a reunion of ex-Follies girls, focusing on the unhappy marriages of two of the women, Sally and Phyllis, and their husbands, Buddy and Ben. During the evening it transpires that all four are unfulfilled—Sally has always been in love with her idealized fantasy of Ben, Buddy has a mistress who loves him while he remains in love with Sally, Ben feels cheated by the emptiness of his financial success, and Phyllis's hollow existence as Ben's society wife has resulted in a combative and cynical worldview. As the ex-Follies girls reminisce around them, the two couples' anxieties and frustrations start to spill out, and the memories of their carefree, optimistic youth highlight the disillusioned middle-aged people they have become. Stephen Sondheim has described Follies as a reflection of the era where "the country is a riot of national guilt, the dream has collapsed, everything has turned to rubble underfoot."25 Capitalizing on the setting and on the women's background as performers, the show is set in the now rundown Weissmann Theater on the eve of its demolition and uses musical comedy pastiche to point up the distance that the characters, the country, and the musical theatre itself has traveled since the heyday of the late 1910s and 20s. Onstage, this point was reinforced by staging that had ghostly showgirls drifting around the set and by having the younger alter egos of the women performing the routines alongside their older selves. The sense of 28 Directors and the New Musical Drama nostalgia was increased by casting aging stars of the stage and screen (including Yvonne De Carlo) as the ex-chorines looking back on better days. This disturbing use of recognizable, reassuring American icons was echoed later that same year when Joseph Papp's Public Theater presented the professional New York premiere of Rabe's play Sticks and Bones. Rabe evokes an all-American family modeled (and named) after the stars of the popular American television show Ozzie and Harriet only to expose the dark underside of the characters when their son returns from Vietnam with horrifying stories of American transgressions. The all-American geniality quickly peels away to reveal the seething racism, misogyny, and blinkered patriotism of characters in deep denial about themselves as individuals and, by implication, as Americans. Follies is in many ways very different from the play, but although the tone of the Rabe play is much darker and more violent than the musical there is an interesting similarity in the way that these shows evoke an idealized past in order to highlight the post-Vietnam shift in the American self-image. In conclusion, while Prince is rightly acclaimed as a descendant of Broadway directors and producers, his most important legacy may be the way in which he broadened the boundaries of the musical in terms of both form and content. His pioneering work in aligning the musical with current events, with contemporary American drama, and with the techniques and aesthetics of European and Russian theatre directors have resulted in a varied and groundbreaking body of work that is explored more fully in chapter 2. 2. From Cabaret to Sweeney Todd: Musical Drama on Broadway x H arold Prince's role in establishing musical drama on Broadway can be clearly seen in his body of work from Cabaret (1966) to Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1993). A closer examination of four early shows—Cabaret, Company (1970), Evita (1978), and Sweeney Todd (1979)—reveal the way in which Prince anticipated the directordramaturgs of the following decades through his active participation in the development process, his need for social relevance, and his incorporation of structural formats and staging techniques beyond the traditions of the American musical theatre. Just as much of American drama in the 1970s was heavily indebted to European playwrights such as Brecht, Beckett, and Pinter, so the structure and staging of many Prince musicals were influenced by a number of foreign directors and theatre traditions. Although these connections have been touched on elsewhere—notably in Ilson—the extent of Prince's interest in theatre outside America has not been extensively analyzed and can usefully be examined here to demonstrate the incorporation of foreign theatre traditions into the Broadway musical even before the so-called British Invasion of the 1980s and 90s. CABARET Cabaret is based on John Van Druten's play I Am a Camera, which was itself based on Christopher Isherwood's semiautobiographical novels Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The musical is framed as the experiences of American novelist Cliff Bradshaw who arrives in Berlin just as the hedonism of the Weimar years are giving way to the Nazi era. The central focus is on Sally Bowles, a mediocre cabaret performer who works at the seedy Kit Kat Klub; on the Emcee of the club, whose musical numbers mirror 30 Directors and the New Musical Drama and comment on the growing Nazi presence; and on a cast of regular workingclass and middle-class characters who fail—or refuse—to see the menace behind the idealistic rhetoric of a new Germany. When Cliff arrives in Berlin, he is caught up in the nightly parties and the decadent lifestyle of Sally and her acquaintances. By the end of the show, however, the party is over and in the final moments he looks back on the fear that has stunted the characters' lives: Sally has aborted their baby and refused Cliff's offer of a new life in America in order to stay on at the cabaret, and their landlady has turned down her chance of happiness with the Jewish shopkeeper she loves for fear of retribution. Although Prince's directorial debut was with A Family Affair and She Loves Me (both traditional musical comedies), Cabaret was his directorial declaration of intent and it was this show that signaled his departure from his musical theatre predecessors and contemporaries. Where Oklahoma! epitomizes the Rodgers and Hammerstein oeuvre, Cabaret clearly illustrates Prince's deviation from their model. Although both shows address some serious issues and reflect the times in which they were created, Cabaret was based on a central idea that aimed to challenge rather than reassure the audience. Prince was not the librettist of Cabaret (the book is by Joe Masteroff ) but he was the initiator of the project and, as producer, it was he who hired the rest of the creative team and guided the development process. Lyricist Fred Ebb has since attested that the songs were to a great extent "made to order" and that he did not really appreciate the significance of the show as a metaphor until it was pointed out to him. Equally, composer John Kander recalls the writing process as a collaborative undertaking led by Prince, with the director's concept influencing the song writing and dictating the overall style.1 Prince's impact on Cabaret is perhaps best measured against what the show nearly became. As Carol Ilson has pointed out, I Am a Camera had long been considered a potential star vehicle for a musical comedy star such as Gwen Verdon. This phantom version held no interest for the more socially minded Prince as he explains in his autobiography: "[Sally Bowles] works in a club, see, and she dances and sings, sings all night long, and it's racy. . . . No point."2 For Prince, Cabaret was neither a star vehicle nor a choreographic showcase but a cautionary tale about the poisonous infiltration of hatred and prejudice into everyday life. His contention was that what happened in 1930s Germany could happen—and to some extent was happening—in 1960s America: "Cabaret to its creators was a parable of the 1950s told in Berlin, 1924. To us, at least, it was a play about civil rights, the problem of blacks in America, about how it can happen here."3 Earlier Broadway treatments of the holocaust and the spread of Nazism such as The Diary of Anne Frank (1955) and The Sound of Music (1959) are From Cabaret to Sweeney Todd 31 less confrontational. The former uses theatre as a way of finding some optimistic message of hope and ends with Anne's expression of faith in the human race. The Sound of Music uses the war as a frame for a spirited love story and a celebration of individual courage and fortitude, and while there are uncomfortable moments as the Nazi invasion grows nearer the threat is never allowed to overwhelm the story. When Cabaret opened a few years later, it was still a sensitive topic but rather than looking back and finding a ray of hope in the devastation of the war, Prince saw Cabaret as a platform from which to address contemporary social prejudice. This active sociopolitical engagement is apparent throughout the development of Cabaret as documented by Prince's biographers and by composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb in their book Colored Lights. Prince consistently resisted the clichés of musical comedy, devising a story and physical staging that would shock and unsettle rather than reassure the audience. Thus he featured not glamorous showgirls but seedy-looking chorus girls of different shapes and sizes and the Kit Kat Klub was based on a sleazy nightclub that he had frequented while stationed as a soldier near Stuttgart.4 He also steered composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb toward an authentic score written in the tradition of the jazz and vaudeville songs of the German music hall rather than in the idiom of Broadway musical comedy.5 This connection to German rather than American performance style was further strengthened by casting Lotte Lenya, a veteran of Weill-Brecht shows such as The Threepenny Opera, as the pragmatic landlady. Above all, rather than using the musical to showcase a female star, he was instrumental in shifting the dramatic emphasis from Sally Bowles to the Emcee during the development stages. Where Sally Bowles is the central character in Cliff Bradshaw's memories of Berlin (and in the musical comedy that this might have become), the Emcee is the focal point of Prince's cautionary tale about the spread of prejudice, blurring the line between the onstage and offstage audience as he seduces both into laughing at his prejudiced jokes and tempts them to "leave your troubles outside."6 While the thematic impetus for Cabaret was race relations in 1960s America, the show's structure and staging were a result of Prince's trip to the Taganka Theatre in Moscow in 1965. From its inception in 1964, the Taganka Theatre had been a magnet for the intelligentsia and artistic community under the leadership of Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov. The production that Prince saw was Ten Days that Shook the World, a political revue based on John Reed's book and directed by Lyubimov. Ten Days told the story of the final days of the Russian Revolution in 1917 in a montage of scenes using a wealth of theatrical styles and techniques from naturalism to farce and 32 Directors and the New Musical Drama shadow play. It is described by historian Alexander Gershkovich as "an organic unification of theatre, music, pantomime, and eccentricity with vivid marketplace theatre."7 Above all, Gershkovich emphasizes, "Lyubimov's theatre strived to create a sense of involvement between the spectators and the action. Lyubimov's direction consciously brought the dozing spectator out of his subliminal state of passive contemplation, making him a participant in the performance."8 By his own account, it was this aspect of the production that appealed most powerfully to Prince. In his autobiography, he recollects the vivid impact of the staging even though he could not understand the spoken text: A curtain of light behind which the scenery was changed . . . paintings on the wall spoke, inanimate objects animated, disembodied hands, feet, and faces washed across the stage. There were puppets and projections, front and rear, and the source and colors of light were always a surprise. All of it made possible by the use of black velour drapes instead of painted canvas. . . . Each of these ideas capitalized on the special relationship of live actors and live observers.9 Prince has specifically cited this production as "a turning point in my thinking as a director" and certainly the nonnaturalistic staging, the revelatory use of space, and the direct engagement with the audience have pervaded his work as a director ever since.10 In Cabaret, the impact is clearly seen in the role of the Emcee. The idea of the Master of Ceremonies leading the audience through the show was not original in itself—most obviously, Archie Rice in John Osborne's play The Entertainer (1956) was a precursor to the Emcee, continuing to perform Edwardian musical hall numbers even as the British Empire crumbled around him. Prince himself has also acknowledged the similarities with a German Emcee that he saw in a small sleazy nightclub while he was stationed in Stuttgart in 1951: "A dwarf MC, hair parted in the middle and lacquered down with brilliantine, his mouth made into a cupid's bow, who wore false eyelashes and sang, goosed, tickled, and pawed four lumpen Valkyres waving diaphanous butterfly wings."11 There are clear parallels between this description and the physical appearance of both the Emcee and the Kit Kat dancers in the original production of Cabaret. The Emcee's dramatic function in Cabaret was more directly due to Prince's encounter with Russian Expressionism. Initially, there was to have been an opening montage of Berlin nightlife performed by the Emcee. However, Prince notes that his night at the Taganka Theatre "showed me that there was another way of structuring theatre. . . . When I came back, we took all those numbers and peppered them throughout the show."12 From Cabaret to Sweeney Todd 33 The staging of Cabaret also drew heavily on the Taganka's emphasis on audience involvement. Lights were used in surprising ways, blinding the audience at key moments, picking out only the legs of a dancing chorus to produce a nightmarish effect, and creating the division between the real world (events and places in the Sally Bowles story) and the "limbo area" where the Emcee performed numbers that represented shifts in the German mind-set.13 Designer Boris Aronson's famous tilting mirror (placed upstage to reflect both the cabaret numbers and the Broadway audience watching them) also came out of a desire for audience complicity and involvement in the events onstage. This staging device was reminiscent of both nineteenthcentury theatre and of Busby Berkeley's overhead shots in movie musicals, but it functioned here as a menacing reminder to the audience of their own culpability in promoting prejudice. The point was further emphasized by Prince's use of the chorus as an extension of the audience, placing the ensemble on the iron staircase in the "limbo" area of the stage to watch the action unfold as silent collaborators. Cabaret was the first of many Prince shows (Company, Follies, Evita, Sweeney Todd) in which the chorus was not an anonymous group of singers and dancers but individual characters who served to heighten dramatic tension as narrators and as an extension of the audience. In the following decades, this would become a trademark of many musical dramas, including Les Misérables. COMPANY As with Cabaret, the structure and tone of Company can be traced to multiple influences. The thematic echoes with contemporary social drama have already been noted, and Martin Gottfried points out that Prince's dramaturgical abilities played a crucial role in shaping the show: "Few directors could have conceived of a musical made from George Furth's related playlets about marriage. Prince's literary imagination gave him the edge."14 This is undoubtedly true and as Sondheim points out, Company was "the first plotless musical [on Broadway] that wasn't a revue and that ushered in a whole era of shows such as A Chorus Line, for example, that depend on vignettes and not on plot."15 But in addition to Prince's literary sensibility, there are a number of influences in the staging and in the published libretto that can be traced to an interest in foreign artists. Russian-born designer Boris Aronson created a cubist set made up of steel and glass that evoked the feeling of an overcrowded city where people struggle to connect with each other; in his review of the show in New Republic, Stanley Kauffman notes 34 Directors and the New Musical Drama Aronson's debt to the Russian constructionist sculptor, architect, and stage designer Vladimir Tatlin and to the influential Russian stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold who is best known for his work with symbolist theatre.16 By contrast, the episodic structure of the show and the sudden changes of tone within the piece can be traced to British director Joan Littlewood. A fervent believer in theatre as a populist rather than an elitist enterprise, Littlewood ran the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London's East End on a shoestring budget and worked largely through improvisation. Most famous for her broad satire of World War I, Oh What a Lovely War, she echoed Brecht in her emphasis on social criticism, her working-class perspective, and her use of documentary techniques and episodic structure. The startling juxtapositions and sudden changes of mood and tone in Company are particularly indebted to Littlewood's 1959 production of Brendan Behan's The Hostage at the Theatre Royal. In his autobiography, Prince notes that he especially admired how Littlewood "cued in fragments of songs—the show had many—and how they erupted from rather than grew out of moments. They had the abrasive effect of attacking when you least expected, creating such life . . . a decade later the songs in Company were cued out of a conscious debt to The Hostage."17 Initially a fairly tightly structured political piece (reminiscent of Behan's earlier The Quare Fellow), Littlewood turned The Hostage into a broad satire of Anglo-Irish relations using lively snatches of song, direct narration, banners, and music to break down the fourth wall and launch a sensory assault on the audience. At the end of Act One, the hapless young soldier caught up in a farcical British-Irish conflict is pushed around while the company dances wildly. In the ensuing silence, he solemnly sings a song based on the meaningless, pseudo-patriotic platitude that "there's no place on earth like the world."18 The company then join in and proceed to satirize the easy piety of sentimental songs by subverting audience expectations: WOMEN: Never throw stones at your mother, You'll be sorry for it when she's dead. MEN: Never throw stones at your mother, Throw bricks at your father instead. The bathos and startling subversion exemplified by this song is clearly echoed in Company. The score contains several numbers that are in the Littlewood tradition of ironic commentary through unexpected juxtapositions. In "The Little Things You Do Together," the singer's witty and acid From Cabaret to Sweeney Todd 35 reflections on marriage are a recurring counterpoint to a domestic scene. In "Not Getting Married" a disembodied voice sings beautifully of wedded bliss only to be interrupted by the frantic agonizing of the nervous bride-to-be. In "Another Hundred People," Company echoes Littlewood's techniques for jolting the audience out of complacency. In this number, a girl who we do not know evokes the incessant movement of New York in a series of documentary, third-hand descriptions of people arriving, departing, and navigating the city. The song functions as a commentary, framing three other scenes and exists outside the narrative storylines of the central characters. It is a frenetic song, difficult to follow, interspersed with only a few extended notes that allow the audience to catch up and it echoes Littlewood's emphasis on stimulating and challenging the audience through unexpected juxtaposition of moods. EVITA Prince's work on Evita eight years later demonstrated a similar emphasis on social politics and staging that created an interactive and at times confrontational environment for the audience—in this case through the emulation of political rallies and the use of documentary theatre techniques and staging based on German Expressionist cinema. Evita tells the real-life story of Eva Peron, the Argentinean B-movie actress who married Colonel Peron and became the first lady of Argentina, garnering widespread popularity through her loud advocacy of workingclass issues even as she and her husband were accused of corruption by their powerful detractors. A controversial figure, Eva had many political enemies but her early death at the age of 33 helped to solidify her iconic image as a martyr of the people, and her funeral created an enormous outpouring of grief. The musical Evita is essentially biographical: starting with the grief and near-hysteria that greeted her death, it takes the audience through her life from her poverty-stricken childhood to her escape to Buenos Aires, her mediocre career as an actress, and her ascent up the social ranks through a series of affairs with high-ranking men. The show is narrated by Che, a Che Guevara figure who punctures the myths around Evita with cynical commentary on her motives and methods, pointing out the discrepancy between her saintly image and the realities of her life and of the Peron regime. Labeled variously a pop or rock opera (or, in the case of New York critic Stanley Kauffman, a "secular oratorio"), Evita is in many ways a descendant 36 Directors and the New Musical Drama of the concept albums epitomized by The Beatles' Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.19 It was already a best-selling album when Prince was hired to turn it into a stage musical, building the show from the lyrics on the album rather than from a traditional libretto. He made a significant shift of emphasis from album to show, making cuts, requesting new material, and conceiving the staging so as to sharpen the show's political angle. It was an approach based not only on stage craft but also on painstaking research and on the first day of rehearsals Prince gave a historical talk to set the events in a sociocultural context.20 Prince's emphasis on factual research changed the piece drastically from the more thematically lightweight album to the musical drama that it became. In the notes to the original cast recording, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice were at pains to present the story as a fairy tale. To them, this was "a story of people whose lives were in politics, but it is not a political story. It is a Cinderella story about the astonishing life of a girl from the most mundane of backgrounds who became the most powerful woman that her country (and indeed Latin America) had ever seen." Prince's interpretation was far more socially oriented. Just as his approach to Cabaret had made it less about Sally Bowles than about the insidious spread of prejudice and hatred, so Prince's Evita was less about Eva Peron as a Cinderella figure than about the nature of fame and the media's role in creating icons. The idea of multiple images and reflections was demonstrated even more strongly in Prince's original idea of having every actress in the cast assume the role of Eva Peron at some point in the story. This was narrowed down to three actresses (playing the young Eva, Eva the actress and Peron consort, and finally the mythical, iconic Evita) but a dearth of qualified candidates meant that the role was eventually played by a single actress.21 Prince's contemporary, sociocultural approach had a particularly strong resonance in late 1970s Britain where it was developed and produced. Theatre critic and Andrew Lloyd W