Wouldn't a good analogy be useful right about now?

Suppose you wanted to learn to bake cookies.  And suppose for the sake of this analogy that baking cookies was some arcane, esoteric process that very few people really understood, and that there were no such things as cookbooks, FoodTV or Nestle's Tollhouse chocolate chip bags.

If you were really serious about learning, and had good instincts, you could probably make certain assumptions on your own.  Cookies are baked goods, so they’d probably involve flour.  And they’re sweet, so they’d almost certainly require sugar, and so on.  You could probably extrapolate a process for making something that was shaped like a cookie, and had an essential “cookiness” to it — a recognizable flavor and texture, for instance.  You might even eventually land on a combination that was inherently a “cookie” for all intents and purposes, and maybe even a pretty good cookie.  It’s not impossible — that’s pretty much what the first cookie bakers had to do, after all.

But suppose you were really committed to learning and understanding the art and science of baking cookies, and suppose you discovered that for only $400, you could take a 6-week “cookie workshop,” taught by someone who for whatever reason you believed to have some measure of expertise vis-à-vis cookie baking. 

So you signed up, paid your tuition, attended every class, took copious notes, never arrived late or left early.  And over the course of the workshop, you were taught the following things about how to bake cookies:

·         The word “cookie” comes from the Dutch word “koekje” which means “little cake.”

·         The first cookies are believed to have been baked in Persia in the 7^th Century.

·         There will almost always be variations between the temperature indicated on the gauge and the actual oven temperature, so baking time are always estimates.

·         “Bar,” “drop,” and “sandwich” are just some of the different varieties of cookies.

·         The better the quality of your ingredients, the better the resulting cookies will be.

·         In Great Britain, cookies are called “biscuits.”

… and so on.  On and on and on.

How long would you wait before you demanded your money back?

Now, it’s important to note that every single piece of information taught in our hypothetical cookie symposium is 100% true, accurate, informative and, in the right circumstances, even potentially useful.  It's also important to note that none of it is even remotely informative or useful to anyone who doesn't already know how to bake cookies.

And unfortunately, this is how the vast majority of musical theater writing classes and workshops address the writing of the libretto.

“Active characters are more interesting than passive characters.”  “Try giving your characters a ‘secret!’”  “Study the musicals you like and figure out what makes them tick.”  “Only work on projects you are passionate about.”  “Show, Don't Tell!”  “Cut anything that isn’t ‘essential.’”

Again, it’s not that there’s anything inaccurate or misleading about any of these statements.  It isn’t even that they’re not important to the process.  In some cases their importance is often understated, if anything.  Many years ago I read a quote from a well-known “expert” on musical theater, who said that in her experience, she found that musicals were more interesting if there was someone in the play who “wanted” something, which is kind of like telling an aspiring cookie baker, “it’s just my opinion, but I find that the cookies often turn out better if you turn the oven on before you bake them.”  Giving your protagonist (not just a character, but the character) a stated goal or desire isn’t just a good idea, it’s wholly necessary to creating drama, and that’s true in all forms of dramatic writing.  In a musical, however, it’s not just necessary — it’s the alpha and omega. 

The problem is that while these “helpful hints” may or may not actually be helpful, they tell us literally nothing about how to actually write a musical theater book. 

In a real cookie-baking class, there are two main components that would be discussed:

First, there’s the recipe.

The basic recipe for all cookies is pretty much the same:  butter, sugar, maybe some eggs, flour, salt, and baking powder.  The proportions may vary slightly, but those will always be the main ingredients, and they will tend to be included in ratios of butter to sugar to flour that are fairly consistent. 

Second, there’s the method. 

You’re not just going to dump everything into a bowl and mix it up.

First you’ll sift together your dry ingredients, then you’ll “cream” together the butter and sugar, and add the eggs if the recipe calls for them.  A good instructor will explain that “creaming” in this context means to beat the sugar and slightly softened butter together until the crystals in the sugar further break down and soften the butter, allowing them to become emulsified. 

Next, you’ll combine the wet and dry ingredients, then form the cookies and place them on baking sheets an inch or two apart.  This allows the cookies to spread as they bake, without melting together into a giant mess.

Both these components (the recipe and the method) are equally important, and both should be reasonably well understood before undertaking the process of baking.  At a minimum, they should be learned and absorbed as you go.  The nice thing about baking cookies is that the whole process only takes about twenty minutes per batch.  Even if you screw up, it’s no great loss.  With luck, you’ll learn from your mistakes and the next batch will be better.  But again, we’re talking about hours, maybe a couple of days of trial and error.

With a musical, it will almost certainly take years before you even realize that your early mistakes were, in fact, mistakes.  And a certain percentage of writers will simply refuse to believe it even after their mistakes are pointed out to them.

So what if you could learn to write a musical in the same way you learned to bake cookies?  Here’s your recipe.  Here’s your method.  Learn it, internalize it, use it over and over until it becomes second nature.  What if there were a simple, provable, testable and repeatable process for writing a solid musical theater book, not just once, but every time?  And what if it didn’t just help you to write a better book eventually, after months or years of rewrites and workshops — what if it could help you to write a book that would be 90% “there” on the very first draft? 

If you’ve read this far, it probably won’t come as too great a shock when I say, there is. 

And if you’ve read this far, come back and keep reading.  'Cause we're getting there.

Why Musicals Don’t Work (Part I – The Historical View)

Here’s a cheerful fact with which to kick off a blog about musical theater writing: 

Most musicals fail.

A musical may fail when a writer thinks “I’ve got a great idea for a musical!” — and then never takes it any further than that.  A musical may fail when it opens on Broadway to terrible reviews and closes after twelve performances.  Or it may fail for almost any reason at almost any point in between.  But ultimately, for one reason or another, the vast majority of musicals have always failed. 

Now, this may seem like a depressing thing to consider, but the truth is that if you don’t consider it; if you don’t hold it up to the light and examine it with a critical eye, then there’s really nothing you can do about it.  On the other hand, if you acknowledge that reality, you can approach it in a logical and pragmatic way, as a problem to be solved.  And that is not only not depressing, but actually a really exciting and empowering task to undertake.  So let’s undertake it.

Obviously the first step in solving any problem is to look at its root causes, and in this case there are two that stand out for me:  a proximate cause and an historical one.  I’ll get to the proximate in a later post, but first I’d to look at the history of the musical play in the context of modern dramatic history.  I think this will be helpful not only in terms of understanding the immediate question (Why are so many musicals so deeply flawed?) but also later, when we ask the even more important question (How do we go about writing better ones?)

So let’s take a quick-and-dirty look at what I will somewhat arbitrarily define as “modern drama,” specifically the history of Western dramatic writing since the early 20th Century.  Playwrights like Ibsen, Strinberg and Shaw are highly regarded for their innovative and influential works, which brought a new realism and psychological insight to the theater.  But they did something else too — something for which, at least in non-academic circles, they rarely get the proper credit.  What they did, whether by design or purely as a matter of intuition, was to help usher in the era of what we now recognize as modern dramatic theory, characterized by 3-act structure, a well-defined protagonist with a clear goal or desire, and an emphasis on seamless exposition, clear and compelling conflict, and the particular rhythms of rising and falling action we immediately recognize as the elements of strong dramatic writing.   

That’s not to say that any of these individual elements were new, even a hundred years ago.  Shakespeare used them.  Aristophanes used them.  But it wasn’t until the early 20th century that a clear system of rules for how to use them to their best effect began to be codified.  As we moved further into the teens and twenties, these rules became more sophisticated, and around that same time, something else happened that was kind of important to the evolution of dramatic writing:  Movies. 

Once dialogue became a standard component of the Hollywood movie, the rules that had been developing in theater over previous few decades started to be applied to film.  Some of the most important screenwriters of the 1930s and ‘40s were imported from the New York theater scene, in fact, and for a while, playwriting and screenwriting developed alongside one another.  But very quickly, Hollywood began to outpace Broadway in terms of the sheer volume of work it could produce — dozens and later even hundreds of films for every stage play.  And while screenwriters had previously taken their cues from their colleagues in the theater, that relationship began to reverse itself.

This was actually to everyone’s advantage.  The film industry was able to turn out huge numbers of movies, in a comparatively short period of time, and unlike live theater, movies could be seen by almost everyone.  The need to make ever more and better pictures, combined with a vast and demographically diverse audience turning thumbs-up or thumbs-down, sending almost instant messages of approval or disapproval, provided Hollywood writers with an intensely fertile, hothouse-like environment in which to cultivate their skills, and in the process to further refine and perfect the art of screenwriting. 

Meanwhile, by the 1950s, a new player had entered the game:  television.  And TV had to do everything movies did, only in a much shorter space of time — while still leaving room for commercials.  Suddenly, dramatic writing found a new economy and a faster pace. 

All of these elements continued to advance and merge together until around the late 1960s and early ‘70s, by which time dramatic writing had evolved pretty much to where it is now.  Very little has changed in the forty or so years since, and with good reason:  if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

So where does the musical fit into all this?  The short answer is:  it doesn’t.

For any number of reasons, the musical simply never jumped on the same evolutionary bandwagon with film, television and “straight” theater.  The musical as we know it happened fairly suddenly in the early ‘40s, and has kind of stumbled along its own separate trajectory ever since.  Oklahoma became a huge hit, and suddenly every writer and producer in the world was looking at it as a commodity to be exploited.  "We need to make one of those!"  But how do you make a thing that’s never really existed before, when your only model is something whose success is hard to quantify or even understand?  In this case, you made your thing as much like their thing as possible and kept your fingers crossed.  But that meant you had to copy everything — the parts that made the show successful as well as the parts it succeeded in spite of — and hope to sort it all out later.  And in fact, that actually worked pretty well, as long as musicals continued to be viewed as nothing more than light-hearted entertainments, with no other goal but to provide a few laughs and some hummable tunes.

But in the years after the Second World War, audiences became more sophisticated, and more demanding.  By the 1960s, they'd started to grow bored and a little embarrassed by the traditional Broadway musical.  By the ‘70s the “musical was dying” and by the ‘80s it was sad joke.  And all during those years, there was always a small number of people — writers, mostly — who genuinely loved the musical theatre art form and longed to help lead it into the modern age.  Unfortunately, there were many, many more — usually the ones with the money — whose primary concern was how to keep plugging the holes and keep the whole enterprise afloat just long enough to make a few more million dollars from it.  And their ideas for how to accomplish this tended to boil down to variations on the same theme:  make the musical different.  Make it sound more like a rock (rap/hip hop) album; make it look more like a special effects-laden movie (or video game or high-wire act).  Make it flashier, more spectacular.  Give it lasers!  Chandeliers!!  TURNTABLES!!  Just keep making it more like something else, and less like … well, a musical. 

And again, up to a certain point, it worked.  It was a band-aid on a mortal wound, but at least it bought some time until somebody came up with another solution, which, in the early ‘90s, they did (more about that later).  But sadly, it was really no better or worse than any of the previous “fixes,” just a little smarter.  And that, in a way, made matters even worse.  Stupid bad decisions are easy to poke holes in, but smart bad decisions are harder to argue with, so they tend to take hold even more intractably.

Most frustrating of all was the fact that all of these ideas were in service to the same misguided goal:  to find a way to “fix” the musical without having to do the one thing that actually needed to be done to fix it for good. 

Because that one thing would prove to be really, really difficult.