What do “Oklahoma,” “Gypsy,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” and “The Book of Mormon” have in common? They’ve got all the right technical elements to make them hits. If you look past the cowboys, stage mothers, and evangelists, you'll see musicals with remarkably similar DNA. Even contemporary blockbusters like “Hamilton” follow a traditional map. That’s according to the producer Jack Viertel, and when it comes to musical theater, he’s a sort of human encyclopedia. His book “The Secret Life of the American Musical—How Broadway Shows are Built,” reveals the blueprint that has been crucial to the most successful shows going.
Viertel is the artistic director of Encores, a New York series that resurrects vintage musicals. He’s also an incredibly prolific producer of Broadway shows like “Hairspray,” “Kinky Boots,” and “The Producers.” Though Viertel is a theater veteran, having worked in the business since the 1970s, he’s been a fan for much longer. As he tells Kurt Andersen, Viertel’s love of American musical theater goes back to watching “Peter Pan” on Broadway when he was a little kid.
Jack Viertel: I was five years old, and my grandmother Daisy and my parents took me to see “Peter Pan” at the Winter Garden with Mary Martin. The end of the first act of that show, when they all fly out the window to Neverland and the curtain falls on the last note of music, is one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to me.
Kurt Andersen: Did a 40-year-old woman playing a boy not strike you as weird?
It didn’t strike me as weird. I do remember my parents telling me that I would be able to see the wires — they weren’t really going to fly. And I think they wanted to keep me from disappointment. Although actually the wires were one of the most exciting things about the whole event for me, because I could watch magic in action.
So you were happy to not suspend disbelief totally?
I was happy to know what the terms of suspending disbelief would be — that I had to accept the wires, that I had to accept that people were going to sing.
You have written this fascinating, entertaining book that is sort of the decoder book for the musical. I’ve seen one musical since I read it, and it made me watch it in a different way. Break down the component parts of a great opening.
Michael Blakemore, the director, has this wonderful thing he said: the minute the curtain goes up, the audience is in trouble. You don’t really know where to look or what you’re looking at. But a great opening number I think should do all of that work in an unexpected way that makes you want to get on the ride.
When you look past the innovation and newness of “Hamilton,” using hip-hop, racially counterfactual casting, it’s really an old-fashioned musical.
In some ways it is. It has an opening number, it has an “I want” song, it has a lot of typical pieces of the machine in it. [Two] great things about hip-hop: energetically, it really does drive you forward. And the other is that thematically, a lot of the best hip-hop is about social change and this is a show about a society being formed, so they really go very well together. A much better natural mate for musical theater than classic rock ’n roll, which tends to have lyrics that are repetitive or very simple-minded. Jerry Leiber, who wrote a lot of the early rock songs, once said, “My songs are content-free.” And I thought it was a great phrase!