This is the first post in my Building Blocks of a Musical series, where I’ll be exploring the standard format of a Broadway-style musical in the context of shows that are familiar to me. Many of these are shows I love. Others sit in an ambivalent space, where I love many things about them and wish I could change a few crucial aspects to heal the message. I’m finding as I consider the latter group that there’s a lot I can learn from them about the art of winning over an audience. When a musical can get my emotions pulling for a relationship that my intellect tells me is bad news, it’s doing some powerful persuasion. Could those powers of persuasion be applied to stories that can help create a better world?
This week, I’m tackling opening numbers. They exist to invest us in the world (and the music) of the play while grounding us in a sense of the reality that exists before whatever happens to really start the story, happens.
Originally, this was going to be two posts: one about overtures and the other about the opening number. Only, I’ve learned that overtures are optional. They’re mostly a holdover from a time when the orchestra played a mashup of musical themes from the show while people were finding their seats. At that time, it made sense to introduce and warm-up the audience to the music they would be meeting in the next 2-3 hours. But nowadays, the musical doesn’t usually start until the audience is seated. Any overture needs to be just long enough to pull the audience in and get them eager for the curtain to open and the story to begin – usually with a song, a dance, or both.
My Fair Lady’s 1956 overture is a classic example of the traditional style. It lasts almost 3 minutes, touring us past the triumphant “You Did It” to the sweetly longing “On The Street Where You Live” and most of the way through the soaring “I Could Have Danced All Night.” By then, the curtain has opened, and instead of the last two notes of the melody we’re expecting, we hear a fanfare signalling the beginning of the show as Eliza enters. The orchestra immediately segues into the opening number: “Busker Sequence” while we watch London’s wealthy exit the opera house and a heedless Freddy knock Eliza and her flowers over, barely pausing to apologize. We are struck by the contrast between her language and prospects as opposed to his. And the stage is set for the story of her transformation into a lady, and all its attendant consequences.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (2001) starts with a more modern overture, “Civilization,” of just 1 minute and 3 seconds. It pulls us into the world of 1840s Missouri with an upbeat, bluegrass tune that will later return when Huck Finn sings “It Just Aint Me”. The sound is distinctive, far from the show tunes we might be expecting, and that intrigues us as the curtain opens and the opening number: “Hey Tom Sawyer” begins immediately. Here, Tom shows up late to a mock swordfight among his buddies, establishes dominance against his rival, Joe Harper, fails to persuade his friends to play hooky with him, preoccupies the minds of the girls he doesn’t yet notice, and drives the adults in his life to distraction. It grounds us solidly in Tom’s world with enough mischief and humour that we’re eager to see where his story will take us.
Instead of an overture, some more recent musicals often use a prologue. In West Side Story, this is a choreographed piece almost 6 minutes long. It includes just a scattering of words (mostly insults which are flung, not sung), and compellingly depicts the struggle between the Jets and the Sharks for dominance on the streets of New York City. We don’t see kids who are hungry to hurt each other. They’re just boys stuck in a world where the lines between them are rigidly drawn, racism is an unquestioned fact of life, social status demands bravado, and young men have to band together to avoid getting beaten up. For the most part, the boys seem like they’re trying to avoid physical violence, but when it starts, the spiral into a brawl seems inevitable. The prologue ends as Officers Schrank and Krupke break up the fight. We then get a bunch of dialogue with Krupke before “Jet Song”, our first song, conveys a sense of permanence about their gang identities. It invokes family, pride and protection as reasons that it would be unthinkable to leave the gang behind. By now, we know that a romance across gang lines would be incredibly high stakes, and we’re primed for Tony, of the Jets, to meet Maria, the kid sister of Bernardo, who leads the Sharks.
In Fiddler on the Roof, the prologue “Tradition” begins with an almost-overture: a violin solo delivered from a rooftop. Then Tevye arrives and addresses the audience, explaining that, for the Jews of the Diaspora, living pleasantly in an inhospitable environment is like trying to fiddle on a roof. Tradition is how they keep their balance. The whole cast joins him onstage, dancing, and singing about the traditions that govern every aspect of their daily life. There’s even some dialogue thrown in. By the prologue’s end, we’ve become invested in the whole village of Anatevka. We’ve also become aware that their way of life teeters between the dual threats of powerful outsiders and a rising generation that isn’t entirely reconciled to living by the dictates of tradition.
Sherlock the Musical’s use of a prologue deserves mention. Titled “Four Clues” it begins with ominous music behind a ticking clock, while mist swirls on a black stage. The spotlight highlights 4 figures in sequence, a man with his back to us as he opens a suitcase full of bottles and holds up a sealed letter; a man consulting a pocketwatch while waiting by a lamppost; a newsboy about to open his stack of papers; and a man looking perplexed. The montage lasts for less than two minutes, and we are already steeped in a sense of mystery while our brains are busy trying to make sense of the clues. Then the lights come up on a murder scene where Sherlock gives police a description of the killer, who won’t be far, and the cast sings “Streets of London” about Sherlock’s unmatched capacity to catch criminals (though he has no friends); John Watson’s contribution as his chronicler; and the necessity of watching closely as this mystery unwinds. Between the insistent and mysterious music, the visual clues that don’t yet make any sense, the display of Sherlock’s deductive powers, and the warning that we’ll miss the unwinding mystery if we blink, we’re captured. And the plot has yet to begin.
The power of opening numbers is most striking to me in The Music Man. Here’s a show about Harold Hill, a travelling swindler and philanderer who winds up losing his heart to a small-town librarian/music teacher. The difficulty with such a protagonist is there’s so much to hate about what he does that it would be natural for audiences to despise him. But to make the story work, Meredith Wilson needed us to find him, not just relatable, but sympathetic, to the point that we’re rooting for him as he woos a woman of high ideals and bilks an entire town of significant, hard-earned cash.
He accomplishes this with the opening numbers. The curtain comes up on “Rock Island” named after a railroad line that ran through the American Midwest from 1847 to 1980. It features travelling salesmen, rhythmically insisting on cash for a multitude of small goods and bickering about the difficulties of their trade. They are small-minded, and prone to repeating the same lines to an extent that would be annoying, except that the rhythm of their dialogue and the purely percussive accompaniment mimics the sound of a train. Just as this starts to get old, one of them mentions Harold Hill, a man who doesn’t worry about the challenges of their trade, who’s “a bang beat, bell ringing/ Big haul, great go, neck-or-nothing, rip roarin'/ Every time a bull's eye salesman.”
“At last,” we think. “Someone interesting!” By the time Hill reveals himself and deboards the train, we have the driving rhythm of his life on the road in our brains and a grudging admiration for this big thinker and daring-doer, even though he may not be entirely honest. Then we get “Iowa Stubborn,” in which the people of River City paint themselves as so hard-headed, contrary and unyielding that we kind of think they maybe deserve to get swindled. With just two numbers, we’ve been emotionally pulled into sympathy with a con man.
That’s the power of music and lyrics, used artfully and with intent. If they can persuade us onside with Harold Hill, might they also open our hearts to stories that take us outside the comfort zone of our unexamined prejudices? Or pull us into the world of a saint like Francis of Assisi, making him approachable, relatable, and thus, more inspiring?
What opening numbers have been particularly effective in pulling you into a story? What inspiring stories would you like to see onstage, and what are the problems in telling those stories that could be solved by the artful use of opening numbers?
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See you next week when we dive in to the I Want Song!
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