Free The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built by Jack Viertel Page B

Company ’s opening, which combines both genres—giving voice to the full ensemble of the show as well as to its leading character as a soloist. The time is the present (that would be 1970); the place is New York, whose heartbeat, one character says, is “a busy signal”—this was before call-waiting was invented. And, indeed, the opening number pulses like a busy signal. We meet a series of married couples spouting social niceties like “Bobby, come on over for dinner!” and we come to quickly understand that all these couples are, for some reason, obsessively interested in the life of someone named Bobby, whom we haven’t met yet. When he bursts onto the scene, singing, “Phone rings, door chimes, in comes company!” we may be puzzled—he seems like an ordinary fellow, maybe an adman or a business executive, but that’s about it. And what he’s telling us is a big distance from “there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow,” though, interestingly enough, it’s just as redolent of his time and place. And that’s the point. He’s nobody special. He’s the focus of a lot of needy people who project their hopes, dreams, fears, and anxieties on a blank slate of a man who, whatever else he does, appreciates the attention.
    The number is so propulsive, and it attacks the audience with so much nervous energy, that we also come to understand that this is a show about a Manhattan gripped by its careening—if sometimes pointless—pace. There’s no time to stop and think; there’s no time for anything except “come on over for dinner.” The show was audacious in many ways: it was virtually plotless, organized around an idea instead of a story, written so that the songs commented on the action but were not exactly a part of it. But its greatest contribution to the development of musical theater in America may simply have been that it was gimlet-eyed: it didn’t promise a happy ending. It had propulsive energy but no simple joys. It used musical theater conventions for ironic commentary, not simply to gin up the audience. It cast a jaundiced eye on urban Americans and found them wanting. There was no propaganda about our can-do, communitarian population. In many ways, it signaled the end of the Rodgers and Hammerstein ethos, though it was shot through with the kind of craftsmanship R&H most admired. And the opening number laid all this out by giving us the familiar huge buildup to the protagonist, but lacing it with irony and an energy that was more neurotic than positive. Then it dared to introduce its hero and hand him the floor, just for him to reveal that he was only Bobby, with nothing much to say. By the end of the evening, the hollow man found desire, and the audience found itself in shock, in a wonderful and new way.
    The Sondheim-Prince musicals drove the decade artistically but not commercially. That was left to others with less upsetting ideas about life but just as much theatrical savvy. In 1975, the era turned, with the arrival of A Chorus Line , conceived and directed by Michael Bennett, who, as a choreographer, had been Prince and Sondheim’s junior partner on Company and served as codirector of Follies . A Chorus Line presented a fascinating challenge: a twenty-five-headed protagonist. The hero of this story of a Broadway audition is everyone who came to try out.
    Given the impossibility of individually introducing each of the eager young applicants for a job in a Broadway chorus, Bennett chose to go in the opposite direction. He exploited the disorientation. The curtain went up on all of them, mid-audition, fighting to learn a dance combination as quickly as it was hurled at them by a taskmaster choreographer. The performers and the audience were in the same boat, trying to process information at a pace beyond the normal capabilities of the human brain. It was audacious. Bennett had everyone in trouble—on purpose. He seemed to have complete faith that kinetic energy alone, expertly deployed,