Arts & Entertainment

A Fictional Tip of the Hat to Broadway’s Glory Days

Published 7 months ago7m ago • Bookmarks: 164

May 26, 2024

By Barrett Seaman—

Readers of Broadway Melody need not go very far into this novel about musical theater to understand that its author, Tarrytown resident Jack Viertel, knows whereof he writes.

His depiction of the history and culture of a world encapsulated by the single word “Broadway” is both sweeping in scope and granular in detail. The plot revolves around three characters—a spotlight operator gazing down from the theater grid, a trumpet player in the orchestra pit and the ravishing songstress at center stage with whom these men fall hopelessly in love.

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In telling their stories, Viertel takes readers deep into the complex and changing world centered on New York City’s Time Square Theater District and immerses them in the mechanics of show-making, the politics of theatrical unions and the vicissitudes of the insecure but captivating show biz life.

The book chronicles the heyday of the musical, when shows like Guys and Dolls, Most Happy Fellaand The Pajama Game enjoyed long runs. It captures the decline of musical theater, both creatively and physically, in the 1970s, the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic and the effects of the transition from lyrical tunes to rock on orchestra staffing .

How does Jack Viertel know all this stuff? He started out as a theater critic in Los Angeles, then got pulled into the action as a dramaturg, a kind of academic advisor to theater productions. From there he made the transition to producer and a long stint as Creative Director and Senior Vice President of Jujamcyn Theaters in which he developed five plays by August Wilson, as well as Angels in America, M. Butterfly, Grand Hotel and Jelly’s Last Jam, among others He produced the Patti Lupone revival of Gypsy and more. For 20 years, he was the Artistic Director of the Encores! series that revived 65 Broadway musicals. Before turning to fiction, he wrote the best-selling non-fiction The Secret Life of the America Musical.

Recently, the author responded to questions posed by The Hudson Independent.

THI: When and how did you catch the musical theater “bug?”

My parents and my grandmother took me to see Peter Pan with Mary Martin just before my sixth birthday. It’s hard to believe that the die was cast that early, but I believe it really was. I was completely hooked. And while I flirted with the movie business briefly in the early 70s, it was really a mistake. My heart was with the theater.

THI: Before this, you wrote The Secret Life of the American Musical, a non-fiction book essentially about the same subject. What did the non-fiction form prevent you from saying that a novel allowed you to say?

Secret Life was really a book about how musicals are constructed – it’s an entertaining read, I hope, but there’s a reason it has joined the curriculum of a lot of college programs for young people wanting to know how you write a musical – not what’s a good idea and what isn’t, but the mechanics of telling a story with song and dance. Fiction, obviously, allowed me to spin a yarn about the place and the form I love, and love is the operative word. It had to be a romance, and somehow, I managed to devise an unusual one. But I left the mechanics behind and drew on the many stories and unique characters who have always populated Broadway. Many I knew, many I had heard tales of.

THI: The book is full of granular detail about the show business industry and the New York theater district physically. One example that jumped out at me is the term “clam,” used to describe a botched note by a musician in the orchestra. Are you conversant in insider theater argot? Or did you have to research a fair amount?

Most of it is from experience. Because I was lucky enough to be the Artistic Director of the Encores! series at New York City Center for 20 years, I spent a lot of time in preproduction, in rehearsals, and in orchestra rehearsals. I also became very friendly with a man named Red Press, who was a sax player in the orchestra and the orchestra contractor – the man who hires the musicians, keeps track of them and deals with union disputes, and so forth. Red was a remarkable man, a great musician (he finally gave up being an active player some time in his 80s) and a wonderful source of stories and information. He was really the inspiration for the book. And, yes, the term “clam” is used all the time. If you hit enough of them they get rid of you.

THI: You said in a recent interview that you “came upon this love story that covered many decades.” What do you mean you by “came upon?” Are the main characters—this love triangle involving a trumpet player, a stage hand and a glamorous star—depictions of people you knew or knew about?

The idea that a follow-spot operator could fall in love with a young performer merely by shining his light on her night after night is true. It was told to me by a soprano in the Encores! ensemble to whom it had happened. She moved to Germany to marry a spotlight operator who had followed her performance in a German production of Phantom of the Opera, and he announced out of the blue that he had fallen in love with her and wanted to marry her–which he did. The idea that two men could fall in love with the same woman – one from below the stage in the orchestra pit and the other from far above it on the lighting grid, struck me as something romantic that could only happen in the theater. So, I had my triangle, and it seemed to me that since they all worked on one show after another, it could evolve over time. I wanted to tell the story of how the district and the musical theater itself changed and evolved but tell it through a romance. And one that took decades to resolve.

THI: Generally, there are cameo appearances by real people—Ethel Waters, Joe Papp—as well as fictional characters with varying degrees of similarity to real Broadway people. And then there are, presumably, wholly fictional characters. How did you decide which should be which as instruments of the narrative?

It evolved quite naturally. When I got to the point where I wanted to write about the destruction of two historic Broadway theaters in the 1980s, I needed Joseph Papp because he headed up the protests that ultimately failed. Ethel Waters took me by surprise. Early on I had written about how her singing influenced the young child who, when grown, became the love interest in the story, but I didn’t really expect the two to encounter each other. Then, one day, I realized they had to meet – decades later. And so I devised a scene for the two of them that proves to be the fulcrum of why she chooses one man over the other. It’s a little bit of a mystery even to me, but that’s one of the delights of writing. You wake up one morning and there it is–a discovery. As for the others who are lightly fictionalized and don’t bear the names of real people, I tried to deal fairly with composite characters – partly so no one would be insulted or angry, or so their descendants wouldn’t be. It was never my intention to hurt anyone with this book. Even though some of the characters are scoundrels and cheapskates, it’s a world that allows for them all. And I’m actually charmed by that.

THI: Did you intend to drive readers to Google to find out which characters are real?

No, although it’s ok with me if people want to do that. I just wanted to tell a good story. As I say in a brief note at the beginning, some of it is real, some of it is semi-accurate, and a lot of it is simply made up. But the history of the business and what happened in and to Times Square and the theater district is largely true, from glamor to skid row to tourist mall, from glory to the AIDS crisis and back to relative prosperity – that all happened about the way I tell it.

THI: Dead people are fair game, of course, so you can ascribe whole conversations with them that presumably never happened. Do you have limits to what you can have once-real people say and do? How do you decide how far to take fictional words and deed you attribute to them? Are those decisions driven entirely in service of the plot?

Yes, and I did try to confine my writing of dialogue for people with real names to those who are not with us anymore. I don’t want to quote a living person saying anything they didn’t say, and I hope to hell I haven’t.

THI: While the backgrounds of the main characters stretch back into the thirties and forties, the lion’s share of the plot takes place from about 1960 through the nineties. That would roughly coincide with your career, so you know a lot about it firsthand. But why else is this the appropriate time frame?

This, I believe, is when Broadway musicals really evolved from one form to another. The ‘60s were the last era where the “tired businessman” musical and the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows were the model and the norm. The “golden age” kind of died during that decade and the next, and by the ’90s we were listening to an entirely different kind of music played by different kinds of instruments, and the shows were confronting different kinds of subject matter in different ways. So, it seemed like an opportunity to explore the richness of that transition for both better and worse. It was a very dynamic time, but while we were living through it, we didn’t really realize it. When you look back, it’s obvious. Dear Even Hansen and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying don’t actually have very much in common. But everyone is simply busy making shows for audiences and hoping for the best. The nature of the changes emerges in hindsight.

THI: In many ways, your book is a lament about the passing of that kind of golden age of musical theater. You describe a Broadway that has changed both culturally and physically. Has that era come to an end? Is the American Songbook, as the collective product of this age is often called, now closed and destined to appear only in revivals?

The American Songbook, which really began in the ‘20s with Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart and those kinds of writers, will survive – those songs and the ones from later decades have become jazz and cabaret standards and I don’t think we’ll stop hearing them if we seek them out. They certainly don’t dominate pop music and haven’t since the ‘50s. But they are there. On the other hand the kind of musical shows that produced them, and the style of composing and lyric writing that typified them doesn’t exist anymore. There are seriously composed musicals like The Light in the Piazza that are really closer to opera than traditional musicals, and there are lots of shows that are much more influenced by rock which became our national music about six or seven decades ago. But the traditional “show tune” is not something that gets written any more. So, the book really is a tip of the hat to the last days of that world. My affection for it is unbounded. But I don’t pretend that it’s still with us, except in occasional revivals of those classic shows. It’s a time and a place I wanted to celebrate – with a romance at the center of it.

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