Musical Mondays: Lloyd Webber 3

successful but frankly inadequate

I’ve never been a big fan of Joseph or his dreamcoat, although my mother quite likes it. Some of this is undoubtedly attributable to our very different attitudes towards children on stage (or indeed in life). The original 1982 Broadway production ran 747 performances, which is decent, but British productions seem to have become showcases for minor celebrities. It’s really a fancy Christmas show with expensive staging and nice costumes, mildly interesting because once again Lloyd Webber and Rice deployed a narrator and a variety of musical styles. But no more than mildly.

Let’s be honest, ‘Any Dream Will Do’ is one of those songs in which Tim Rice jotted some lyrics on the back of a napkin and never bothered to revise them:

“Far far away, someone was weeping
But the world was sleeping
Any dream will do”

WTF? is this the biggest non sequitur in musical theatre? And seriously, any dream will do? including the dream of a thousand-year Reich?

Speaking of Nazis, the best song is probably ‘Close Ev’ry Door’ because it has (if you’re looking for them) resonances of the great Jewish exile and longing for return. Maybe you have to be fairly versed in German history, which obviously I wouldn’t expect of audiences in general, but it’s difficult not to think of the Holocaust with these lyrics:

“Just give me a number
Instead of my name
Forget all about me
And let me decay.”

It’s one of the few moments in which the show really acknowledges its source.¹

We’ll come back to Tell Me On A Sunday, but Lloyd Webber’s next Broadway show after Evita saw him swap Tim Rice for original source material, the author of which was conveniently dead and unlikely to make trouble. Which was, on the whole, rather a shame, because T.S. Eliot might have stopped Cats before it began. If you’re going to adapt Eliot as a musical, I would prefer Notes Towards the Definition of Culture above Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Nothing against the latter, but it permitted Lloyd Webber to dispense with any sort of book and simply throw some songs at the stage, which did nothing at all for the original verse, buoyed by some quite nice choreography and cat costumes. As David Letterman commented, the night Cats marked 5000 performances on Broadway also marked the 5000th occasion on which a husband turned to his wife and said “what the hell is this??” Eventually it racked up 7485 performances despite, as Mark Steyn put it, being the first Broadway smash in which it was impossible to tell if anyone was acting badly.

John Kenrick greeted the final performance of the original run, in September 2000, by sighing that his “only objection to Cats was that so much of it it was a crashing bore. Oh the first and last fifteen minutes have enough spectacle to bedazzle anyone, but the two hours in between yawn with mindlessness.

[…]

It pains me to think of the millions of children who were taken to Cats as their first Broadway show. What a sad standard to set! No wonder so many now think of The Lion King as theatre. We once would have dismissed it as a puppet show, not worthy of consideration for the "Main Stem." Now it seems that no new musical can afford the luxury of anything as dangerous as an idea. I am not saying that Cats was the beginning of the end for the Broadway musical, but it certainly was a milestone in the art form's descent into vapidity.”²

It says a lot about the wisdom of the whole enterprise that the best song by miles doesn’t have lyrics by Eliot. ‘Memory’ was by Trevor Nunn, which suggests that he rather missed his calling in life. If nothing else, he uses the verb “gutters” with great facility, which pleases me greatly.

“Burnt out ends of smoky days
The stale cold smell of morning
The streetlamp dies, another night is over
Another day is dawning

Touch me
It's so easy to leave me
All alone with the memory
Of my days in the sun
If you touch me
You'll understand what happiness is

Look
A new day has begun.”

The imagery, sustained throughout the lyric, is effective and genuinely evocative of a state of mind that may or may not be familiar to cats (to be honest I don’t imagine cats being so self-critical) but is certainly familiar to humans. It can be acted, although it can be (and often is) one of my betes noires, a song that’s sung for the benefit of the singer and not the song. Here’s Betty Buckley, from the original Broadway cast, who is certainly doing something interesting:

Bloom & Vlastnik clearly felt obliged to include Cats in their 101 Greatest because of its overwhelming success rather than its inherent quality, noting that it “struck a chord with prepubescent girls, school trips from places that didn’t have their own thee-ay-ter, and a few other people - we’re not sure who, but it certainly ran.” Miaow.

Tell Me on a Sunday became, in 1982, one half (the first half) of Song and Dance. A one-woman show for Marti Webb, it told the story of an English lady in New York. The idea began life with Tim Rice until Lloyd Webber realised that it was being written for Elaine Paige’s, Rice’s mistress, so Don Black eventually wrote the lyrics.

Now, I am in no position to criticise any Broadway professional but I have some problems with Don Black’s work. Consider his Oscar-winning ‘Born Free’:

“Live free / where no walls divide you…”

But that’s not right. Walls divide territories. They separate people (from other people). Obviously you do want to live ‘where no walls divide you,’ because that would be fatal and messy. Surely a competent lyricist could have figured out a solution?

Back to Tell Me on a Sunday / Song and Dance. ‘Take That Look Off Your Face’ is a good song about throwing the pleasure of the ‘candid friend’ back in her face:

“No, I didn't dig deep
I did not want to know
Well, you don't interfere
When you're scared of the things you might hear”

is great, but

“When he's back, you think I will end it right there and then?”

is clunky, especially as the stress falls on it. But my real objection is to ‘Tell Me on a Sunday,’ in which the character arranges the break-up in advance:

“Don't write a letter when you want to leave
Don't call me at 3 a.m. from a friend's apartment
I'd like to choose how I hear the news”

is fine, if a little cold-hearted, but

“Take me to a park that's covered with trees
Tell me on a Sunday please”

is terrible.

Ok, you want a natural rhyme for ‘please’, although the music doesn’t help by landing very heavily on the note and drawing attention to it. Nonetheless, there is no excuse for a line so vacuous, so lame, so utterly meaningless - especially in New York, in which there is one obvious park that would immediately leap to mind.

Once might be misfortune, but twice:

“Let me down easy, no big song and dance
No long faces, no long looks, no deep conversation
I know how I want you to say goodbye
Take me to a zoo that's got chimpanzees
Tell me on a Sunday please”

!!!!

There is no other rhyme for ‘please’ in the English language? Take me to a zoo that’s got chimpanzees?? Is the character so committed to this particular great ape that it makes sense to include that lyric ahead of any other???

It positively begs for some alternate lyrics with just as much weight:

‘Take me to a store that sells cheddar cheese…’

‘Take me out for lunch so I can have peas…’

‘Take me to your mom whose name is Louise…’

“Find a circus ring with a flying trapeze
Tell me on a Sunday please”

That’s his ACTUAL SOLUTION.

Still, it would be remiss not to applaud the genuinely good ‘Unexpected Song’, which was added to the Broadway production:

“I don't know what’s going on
Can't work it out at all
Whatever made you choose me
I just can't believe my eyes
You look at me as though
You couldn't bear to lose me”

That’s a sweetly perceptive description of being in love.

“Now, no matter where I am
No matter what I do
I see your face appearing
Like an unexpected song
An unexpected song
That only we are hearing”

Oh, dang it all. The conceit of an ‘unexpected song / that only we are hearing’ is fresh and striking, but Black’s determination to rhyme with ‘hearing’ leads him to a very unwise choice. The use of ‘appearing’ as a present participle is odd and throws the entire verse off-kilter. “I see your face appearing” is frankly weird, because it conjures a sort of Cheshire Cat image in which the face of the beloved constantly flickers in and out of focus. “No matter what I do / I see your face appearing” is more like a scene from a horror film than a romantic ballad.

Still, Song and Dance came to Broadway in 1985, where it ran 474 performances, and Bernadette Peters overcame the lyrics to win a Tony. And Don Black was nominated, so what do I know?

I acknowledge that this mini-series has been devoted to the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber despite my lack of ability to analyse music. Other people can do that, but I can criticise (in the nicest possible sense) the book and lyrics. As far as I can tell, the music for JCS, Joseph and Cats is ok but only Evita and Tell Me on a Sunday have any sort of musical coherence (not that it makes the latter particularly good, necessarily. Somewhat ironically, given the provenance of JCS and Evita, it sounds like a concept album).

Next week, the longest-running show in Broadway history: Phantom of the Opera. As per its tagline, Cats may have felt like ‘now and forever’ but Phantom actually is. Paging Dante Aligheri…

1. The Book of Genesis, if you didn’t know. Please don’t tell me if you needed that footnote.

2. ‘Journal 2000: Cats - The Last Meeeeeoooow’. To be fair to Broadway, it should be said that ideas returned to musical theatre in the 21st-century - not very good ideas, necessarily, but more ideas than Cats.