Notes on Musicals, Artifice, and TEETH
As a card-carrying homosexual, I love musicals. I loved them well before I actually carried the card, skipping through the hallways of my middle school to “Weekend in the Country;” lip-syncing Cabaret to myself in the bedroom mirror; staging an entire production of Jesus Christ Superstar in my notebook for bar mitzvah lessons; wishing harm to that lucky prick who got cast as Gavroche in the Les Miz national tour.
My love for musicals came in part, I suspect, from knowing that I should not love musicals. At least in the teenage patois of my Orange County suburb, it was clear I'd be more successful at life as a jock, thrasher, or surfpunk. Because musicals were lame, loving them meant that I either a) didn't understand that they weren't cool; b) wasn't aware of or good at other things that were more cool; c) was a laughably unfortunate not-yet-card-carrying homosexual with a dilemma. (Only one of the above was true.)
Later, as I honed my tastes in theater beyond high school (mind blown by Genet, Len Jenkin, Ionesco, Fornes!) and I began to work in theaters' literary offices reading play submissions, I learned that a great number of musicals are, in fact, lame. That I do not love all musicals. When I attend the theater today, my passion for the musicals I love is amplified by the childhood joy that returns, and by the artifice of the form — an artifice that, when executed just so, can heighten live theater into an experience that's exalted.
Anna K. Jacobs' and Michael R. Jackson's musical Teeth is a musical I love, and as I sit on the subway the evening before our first rehearsal, in that giddy anticipation I always feel before we launch a new show, a few questions spring to mind:
- What is it that the people who say they hate musicals hate about musicals?
- What is it about being a homosexual that makes the artifice of musicals so fucking delightful?
- What are the qualities that make up, specifically, a Playwrights Horizons musical?
***
I just googled, “What is it that the people who say they hate musicals hate about musicals?,” and it presented some piquant perspectives. Critic Alexis Soloski just recently wrote about musical-phobia in The New York Times, noting that all three movie musicals in theaters right now (The Color Purple, Wonka, and Mean Girls) totally neglect to mention in their marketing that these movies they are musicals because, as Deadline reports, musicals are “a genre that’s been deemed dead.”
My inquiry reveals that the single most common gripe, expressed succinctly in the Door County Pulse, a Wisconsin local news source: “people don't just break into song and dance in real life.” (Which may be true, generally, but not in my household, where my husband and I have created an entire genre of musicals about our dog.)
This gripe, however popular, should be dismissed as nonsensical because plays very rarely aim, and even more rarely succeed, at recreating real life. Real life doesn't employ dramatic structure. Other things that don't happen in real life include: fairies putting donkey heads on humans (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), angels crashing through rooftops (Angels in America), folks returning from the dead (Our Town), lights dimming between scenes, and the very backbone of American theater: people pretending to be alone in a room in front of an audience.
The reason it's not jarring for that fairy Puck to curse Bottom with a donkey's head in Midsummer is that Shakespeare built a play-world in which it's possible. The reason an angel can crash through an apartment roof in Angels in America is that Kushner created a context for it. And the reason that the third act of Our Town is so damn beautiful, and not a crime against the Realism Police, is that Thornton Wilder carefully wove this into the play's DNA.
If in a musical, whether on stage or screen, the music is a distraction, then there's a flaw in the execution of that one attempt, in the world-building of that one show, rather than in the entire genre. All theater is artifice; musical theater is just more blatantly so.
***
Which is a neat segue into my second question for the internet: “What is it about being a homosexual that makes the artifice of musicals so fucking delightful?” (Yes, I know, I know, it’s a generalization: not all homosexuals love musicals, and etc., but I throw shade at anyone who denies this is a Thing.)
In this sweet personal essay published on Medium, one man cites the influence of his late husband: “Well, I did it because Lenny did. I inherited a certain love of musical theater and opera from him. He inherited it from other, older gay men when he was a teen. They had inherited it too, and the generation before them. That's culture. That's how culture works.” This account, simple and clear-eyed, resonates. Somewhere in the midst of my own deeply closeted, melancholic boyhood, I intuited the inherent gayness of musicals and found there a lineage I had no other access to. Gay kids usually don’t have gay parents. And where middle and high school were a minefield, these cassette tapes were a second world I knew how to live in, a home. I had two lives: the one I created for other people, and the one that existed inside, hidden, a cosmic secret.
The word “artifice,” when it was coined in the 16th century, carried a positive meaning: “workmanship, the making of something by craft or skill.” In the 18th century, the word began to be used differently — “crafty device,“ “deception,” “trick” — and that negative connotation has stuck. In the 19th century, Realism was born as an artistic movement which rejected Romanticism, and its sublime, idealized vision of the world, in favor of rationalism and an unembellished depiction of life. Around the same time, the introduction of gas lamps allowed lighting to be controlled from a distance and at different angles, which — for the first time in theater history — made it possible to dim indoor lights over an audience and direct it toward the performance.
This separation between audience and art was among the most impactful events in the course of theater history, and it was a great tool for the advancement of Realism, in that it emphasized the notion of a “fourth wall” — a theatrical convention which assumes an imaginary wall at the foot of the stage which the audience can see through but the actors cannot. In a theater which employs the fourth wall convention, an unspoken contract is made with the audience: that they will willingly suspend their disbelief for the duration of the play, and join the actors in pretending that the actors are alone.
By contrast, the audience of a musical is placed firmly in the same room with the actors. There is no fourth wall, no disbelief to suspend. It’s clear from the get-go that what’s happening is really happening. I think of the opening moments of Sweeney Todd, for example. That dreadful steam whistle blows, and the orchestra begins their ominous, rumbling vamp as an ensemble of heavily-made-up actors take formation in direct address to us. “Attend the tale,” they sing.
If Realism hinges on the pretense that the artifice of theater is not happening, then aren’t musicals — in which the artifice is undeniably happening — more real? To grow up gay, at least in my experience, was to grow up in a constant contradiction between what’s real and what’s illusion. And if it was possible for an amateur like me to create an exterior facade so believable, then how much was I meant to trust anyone else's exterior? In theater — specifically, non-Realism — the artifice of what’s onstage was allowed to be real. Nobody needed to pretend otherwise.
***
And my final question, which I did not need the internet in order to answer: What are the qualities that make up, specifically, a Playwrights Horizons musical?
Which brings us to the uniquely awesome musical Teeth (for more on the topic of its awesomeness, see Natasha Sinha’s accompanying essay) Teeth sits confidently in the eclectic continuum of musicals premiered at Playwrights Horizons, a list which includes Sunday in the Park With George, Assassins, The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, Floyd Collins, Violet, Iowa, Bella: An American Tall Tale, and A Strange Loop.
My thoughts rush to the first musical on that list, the iconic Sunday in the Park With George, which Playwrights Horizons premiered in July 1983. This musical's first act nears perfection: In 19th century France, Georges Seurat paints his masterpiece, isolating himself from the world — from its banality and its chaos — in order to find harmony on his canvas. But its second act defies perfection: Whisking us into the art world of the late 20th century — a more commercialized, cynical, messier place — the play lands on Seurat’s great grandson, also named George, also an artist, who fights to stay creatively fresh in a cultural climate that puts a premium on hype, fashion, and the tyranny of the marketplace.
George-past and George-present are each consumed by their singular, uncompromising pursuit of what’s beautiful. Which creates a conflict, because they also have to live in a world that doesn’t always seem to care so much about such things. (Georges Seurat never sold a painting in his lifetime.) How does George live within that conflict, between art and commerce? How does George reconcile his idealism with the realities of this world? Like all great plays, Sunday in the Park with George leaves us with no answer. The question is the point.
And this, I think, is the common denominator of Playwrights Horizons musicals: They resist time-tested axioms, structures, and easily-digested ideas. They are unafraid of “second act problems.” They test the boundaries of what a musical can be, pushing past formula to discover — like George — new terrain. They are serious about being musicals, about the potential of the form. As Usher sings in A Strange Loop, “I’m into entertainment that’s undercover art.”
By the time Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine brought Sunday in the Park With George to Playwrights Horizons, Sondheim had been produced commercially on Broadway for three decades; he had never worked off-Broadway. But for this play — arguably his most original, most personal, most enigmatic — he came to Playwrights Horizons, a non-profit off Broadway theater in the sketchy Hell's Kitchen of the early 1980s. Because the entire project of our theater, then and now, is the pursuit of what's next. It's in our name: Playwrights Horizons is a constant pursuit of the future, the horizon, that playwrights create for us.
And there are so many ways to push an envelope. Teeth behaves like other musicals, in the way it moves and unfolds. But, in a much deeper sense, it may be the most genuinely subversive and unexpected, frightening comedies I know. To go into detail about what happens onstage would be a crime, and I am not a criminal so You’re Welcome, I’ll end my essay now. Just Come See It. And when you do, I dare you to talk smack about musicals. So tear down the wall, and come be in the room with us.
