The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built

by Jack Viertel

Overview

A New York Times Bestseller

For almost a century, Americans have been losing their hearts and losing their minds in an insatiable love affair with the American musical. It often begins in childhood in a darkened theater, grows into something more serious for high school actors, and reaches its passionate zenith when it comes time for love, marriage, and children, who will start the cycle all over again. Americans love musicals. Americans invented musicals. Americans perfected musicals. But what, exactly, is a musical?

In The Secret Life of the American Musical, Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, marvels at their unflagging inventiveness, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings. In the process, he invites us to fall in love all over again by showing us how musicals happen, what makes them work, how they captivate audiences, and how one landmark show leads to the next—by design or by accident, by emulation or by rebellion—from Oklahoma! to Hamilton and onward.

Structured like a musical, The Secret Life of the American Musical begins with an overture and concludes with a curtain call, with stops in between for “I Want” songs, “conditional” love songs, production numbers, star turns, and finales. The ultimate insider, Viertel has spent three decades on Broadway, working on dozens of shows old and new as a conceiver, producer, dramaturg, and general creative force; he has his own unique way of looking at the process and at the people who collaborate to make musicals a reality. He shows us patterns in the architecture of classic shows and charts the inevitable evolution that has taken place in musical theater as America itself has evolved socially and politically.

The Secret Life of the American Musical makes you feel as though you’ve been there in the rehearsal room, in the front row of the theater, and in the working offices of theater owners and producers as they pursue their own love affair with that rare and elusive beast—the Broadway hit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374536893
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/14/2017
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	123,768
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jack Viertel is the senior vice president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns and operates five Broadway theaters. He has been involved in dozens of productions presented by Jujamcyn since 1987, including multiple Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winners, from City of Angels to Angels in America. He has also helped shepherd six of August Wilson’s plays to Broadway. He is the artistic director of New York City Center’s acclaimed Encores! series, which presents three musical productions every season. In that capacity he has overseen fifty shows, for some of which he adapted the scripts. He conceived the long-running Smokey Joe’s Cafe and the critically acclaimed After Midnight and has been a creative consultant on many shows, including Hairspray, A
Christmas Story, and Dear Evan Hansen. He was the Mark Taper Forum’s dramaturg and the drama critic and arts editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and he has spent a decade teaching musical theater at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Table of Contents

Tuning Up: or, How I Came to Write This Book
A Note About the Shows Discussed-and a Few Other Items

1. Overture
2. Curtain Up, Light the Lights: Opening Numbers
3. The Wizard and I: The "I Want" Song
4. If I Loved You: Conditional Love Songs
5. Put On Your Sunday Clothes: The Noise
6. Bushwhacking 1: Second Couples
7. Bushwhacking 2: Villains
8. Bushwhacking 3: The Multiplot, and How It Thickens
9. Adelaide's Lament: Stars
10. Tevye's Dream: Tent Poles
11. Coming Up Roses: Curtain: Act 1
12. Intermission
13. Clambake: Curtain Up: Act 2
14. Suddenly Seymour: The Candy Dish
15. All er Nothin': Beginning to Pack
16. The Little House of Joseph Smith, the American Moses: The Main Event
17. I Thought You Did It for Men Mama: The Next-to-Last Scene
18. You Can't Stop the Beat: The End
19. How Woody Guthrie-of All People- Changed Broadway Musicals Forever: Curtain Call

Listening to Broadway
Acknowledgments
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Both revelatory and entertaining. Viertel combines a scholarly approach with a light touch that enables us to see anew familiar songs and musical theater moments we'd long taken for granted." —The New York Times Book Review

"Viertel’s knowledgeable, engaging blueprint of [the] Broadway musical framework is instructive fun for cognoscenti and general readers alike." —The Washington Post

"A lively manual for writers and public alike on how the songs suit the story and how the story needs the songs." —The Wall Street Journal

"The best general-audience analysis of musical theater I have read in many years." —The Charlotte Observer

“Jack Viertel changed my theater-going life, and he might change yours . . . The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built is a delightful, accessible guide to why your favorite productions work. It’s a little bit history, a little bit memoir, a little bit criticism and, for any theater fan, a whole lot of fun.” —The Dallas Morning News

"Viertel is well-steeped in Broadway culture, lore and productions . . . An enlightening trip for lovers of musicals." —Kirkus Reviews

"A valuable addition to the theater lover’s bookshelf." —Publishers Weekly

"[An] engaging, insightful anatomy of a singularly American art form . . . There is much to savor." —MORE

"Viertel articulates his rules of commercial success so lucidly that even seasoned hands will come away with a clearer understanding of why some shows work while others flop." —Commentary

"Thoroughly interesting . . . There’s just something very pleasant about reading someone intelligently and affectionately look at what make a show tick, beat by choreographed beat." —The A.V. Club

"Viertel has written what will become a classic textbook on the architecture and construction of the American musical . . . What Harold Bloom did for Shakespearean exegesis and Peter Drucker for management, Viertel has done for theater: written a definitive work by raising the curtain and laying bare the work of playwrights, composers, librettists, choreographers, and directors." —Barry X. Miller, Library Journal (starred review)

“Viertel is well-steeped in Broadway culture, lore and productions . . . An enlightening trip for lovers of musicals.” —Kirkus Review

“Jack Viertel writes about the master craftsmen of the American musical, past and present, and reveals his own mastery on every page—his knowledge of the Broadway musical and of the intricate formula in the making of a show (or the breaking of it), and his passion for Broadway and the citizens who make the street come alive. I’ve been schooled.” —Patti LuPone

“In The Secret Life of the American Musical, Jack Viertel, a Broadway producer and dramaturgical swami, has broken down Broadway’s greatest musicals into their constituent storytelling parts (a sort of anatomy of joy) and delivered a showstopper: one of the best-written, most illuminating, and most infectiously entertaining books on the genre I know. Delight and insight vie with each other on every scintillating page. ‘It’s boffo!’ as they say on the Rialto.” —John Lahr, author of Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

“This is unfair: no one who knows so much should be able to write so well. And no one in the world knows as much about the shape and substance of the classic American musical as Jack Viertel. His book is a treasure.” —Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“Jack Viertel’s remarkable book has the uncanny effect of making us see something we thought we knew everything about in a way that makes us feel as though we are seeing it all for the first time. He invents a way of thinking about musicals that is utterly fresh and insightful, and while doing so he makes us remember exactly why we love them so much—by somehow re-creating the overwhelming, heart-stopping feeling we had when we were likely ten years old and fell in love with them the second our first overture began. By simultaneously (and brilliantly) embracing and deconstructing a beloved American art form, he brings us back to our most innocent selves, and all we can do is be grateful to him for reminding us of who we used to be.” —Scott Rudin

From the Publisher

…both revelatory and entertaining. Viertel combines a scholarly approach with a light touch that enables us to see anew familiar songs and musical theater moments we'd long taken for granted…There is, moreover, an authority to Viertel's analysis; he knows from whence he speaks, given a background in dramaturgy…criticism…and producing…Accessible and breezy…the book offers a fresh way to look at familiar musicals—to break them down, pull them apart and examine more closely the structural elements that make them strong—even as Viertel acknowledges that there is ultimately no blueprint for the frisson that leaves audiences floating on air.

The New York Times Book Review - Robin Pogrebin

11/09/2015
Viertel’s friendly scrutiny of Broadway is a valuable addition to the theater lover’s bookshelf. Viertel, senior v-p of Jujamcyn Theaters (owner of five Broadway houses) and artistic director of New York City Center’s Encores! series, writes from authority and experience, having had a hand in such Broadway hits as Hairspray and The Book of Mormon. As a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, he began to offer critical courses on Broadway musicals. This book emerged out of those classes. It uses iconic shows such as Gypsy, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, and South Pacific to explain and explore the patterns underlying much of musical theater. Viertel shares unvarnished opinions—for example, he declares that the bench scene from Carousel (when “If I Loved You” is sung) is “arguably the most perfect scene ever written in a musical”—as he takes readers from overture to the “11 o’clock number,” or final star turn. It’s a shame that Viertel doesn’t acknowledge a debt to legendary Broadway musical director Lehman Engel, whose Words with Music set the bar. In the end, theater fans will appreciate the dips into memoir and Viertel’s takes on original cast albums. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 12/01/2015
Writer, critic, musician, former dramaturg, and current senior vice president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns and operates five Broadway venues, Viertel knows his way around the American musical block. Inspired by the Grecian ruins of Delos and the meticulously comprehensive and analytical approach to William Shakespeare's plays employed by his wife's uncle, Harvard comparative literature professor Harry Levin, Viertel has written what will become a classic textbook on the architecture and construction of the American musical. Beginning with the overture, the author methodically wends his way through the musical by devoting a chapter to each constituent part. Opening numbers, "I Want" songs, conditional love songs, "the Noise," secondary romantic couples, all the way sequentially through the finale are expertly explicated with spot-on examples from a plethora of productions that fluidly illustrate Viertel's analysis. Ever the shrewd theater executive, he even provides an intermission chapter in which he illuminates his own experiences and introduces us to Jujamcyn impresarios Rocco Landesman and Jordan Roth. An appendix, "Listening to Broadway," provides a chapter-by-chapter list of Viertel's thoughts and comments on the cast soundtrack for each musical cited in the text. VERDICT What Harold Bloom did for Shakespearean exegesis and Peter Drucker for management, Viertel has done for theater: written a definitive work by raising the curtain and laying bare the work of playwrights, composers, librettists, choreographers, and directors. [See Prepub Alert, 8/10/15.]—Barry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX

Library Journal

Fans of the American musical will delight in Jack Viertel’s informative, amusing analysis of the genre. David Pittu’s lively performance channels Viertel’s accessible language and friendly attitude. Viertel speaks with affection, from a base of knowledge and experience, and Pittu keeps listeners engrossed. In addition to his producing work, Viertel has taught critical classes on the Broadway musical at NYU’s Tisch School. Pittu gives careful attention to Viertel’s explanations of structure and patterns for a wide range of Broadway musicals, from GUYS AND DOLLS, OKLAHOMA, and GYPSY to SOUTH PACIFIC, CAROUSEL, and more. Viertel’s entertaining investigation reveals the nuts and bolts—without losing the magic—that make American musical theater strong. Pittu makes it great listening, especially for Broadway musical mavens. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2016 - AudioFile

2015-09-30
From overture to final curtain, a close look at how musicals work. As a screenwriter and drama critic, senior vice president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five Broadway venues, and artistic director of City Center's Encores! revivals, Viertel is well-steeped in Broadway culture, lore, and productions. He adores musicals, which, he writes, deserve the same kind of attention that literary scholars give to Shakespeare: a scene-by-scene examination, "trying to piece out why every line of dialogue was there, what every lyric accomplished, and how music supported whatever the fundamental idea of the show was." That's the project he brings to his class at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, focusing on four musicals from Broadway's golden age, from Oklahoma! in 1943 to A Chorus Line in 1975. After that, he claims, "formal rigor and craft" faded. This copious book could well serve as his text. Besides the four iconic shows—Gypsy, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, and South Pacific—Viertel adds others, including The Music Man, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Fiddler on the Roof, The Producers, West Side Story, Carousel, and The King and I. He also deconstructs more recent fare, including, among other productions, The Book of Mormon, Wicked, and even the current hip-hop musical Hamilton. Viertel is lively, deeply informed, and irrepressibly enthusiastic, but the problem with translating his analysis into a book is that readers may not know the musicals as well as his students do—students who likely have scripts, lyrics, cast recordings (he offers a list of his favorites), or videos. Nevertheless, he offers discerning insights about structure: the "I want" song that sets out the protagonist's hopes, the "conditional love song" that starts a romance, energetic interludes known as "the noise," subplots, next-to-last scenes, star turns, and resolutions. He examines, too, a good show's "happily unpredictable" qualities. An enlightening trip for lovers of musicals.

Kirkus Reviews