You Never Know When, Where, and How

In Sweet Smell of Success, many of the songs have an ironic under-layer; sometimes the singer is aware of the irony, others times they're not.

All through the scene-song "I Could Get You in J.J.," we already know Sidney can't get either of them in J.J.'s column, that in fact Sidney is a two-bit con man. We also already know that Susan has had dinner with J.J., even as Sidney is promising to get her in J.J.'s column.

Dallas' gorgeous ballad "I Cannot Hear the City," is straight-forward the first time we hear it, but when it returns late in Act I, it takes on a double-meaning, also reminding us that Dallas really doesn't understand how the Big City works... as we watch J.J. slowly realize he's being lied to. Dallas is in the big leagues now, and he's really not ready...

I've already blogged a bit about Sidney's big "aria" in Act I, "At the Fountain." It's another brilliant exercise in subtle irony. This big, gorgeous music camouflages the needy, creepy lyric. As I wrote in my other post:

More so than the movie ever does, this helps us understand why Sidney goes along with everything J.J. wants. Sidney is metaphorically at Schwab's soda fountain, and he fancies himself a "star" being "discovered" by J.J. He thinks he's the next Lana Turner. It's ironic that in the earlier scene in the Voodoo Club, Sidney's bullshit agent's pitch to Susan includes the line, "The Voodoo Club could be your Schwab's," but it turns out to be Sidney's Schwab's instead. He thinks.

But also notice, Sidney thinks J.J. looked into his soul and saw greatness. (No, J.J. looked into Sidney's face and saw an easy mark.) Sidney thinks meeting J.J. was Fate. (No, J.J. looked into Sidney's face and saw an easy mark.) The grand, powerful emotion of the music takes us inside Sidney's head. This is how he sees himself.

Dallas' clubby, sexy "One Track Mind" works both as an authentic period jazz number, as Brubecky as the real thing, but this is also Dallas' case for the nobility of impoverished happiness (we're to assume Dallas wrote this song), in stark contrast to the previous scene in which we learned, in waltz time, about the dozens of famous, rich, and powerful people who frequent the Hunsecker penthouse. Notice that J.J.'s music is all old-fashioned -- a hymn, a waltz, a vaudeville number...

Subliminally, the music tells us that J.J.'s penthouse world is old, creepy, oppressive, isolating, while Dallas' world is new, adventurous, romantic. The penthouse is (musically) minor and dissonant, while Dallas' club is major and playful. These are two very distinct worlds that Susan has to choose between. And when J.J. realizes she's made that choice, all hell breaks loose.

Likewise, "Rita's Tune" is a companion piece to "Somewhere That's Green," an ironic charm song about how little this women needs to be happy, all while we know she won't get even that. But "Rita's Tune" is even darker and more ironic. It succeeds brilliantly on three levels at the same time: 1.)  as a great, period pop tune celebrating domesticity; 2.)  as unintentional irony because we already know Sidney's a louse and bad shit is coming; and 3.)  like "Somewhere That's Green," it's such a naked, honest, simple plea, and we know she won't get any of what she needs. She won't get killed, like Audrey, but she'll come damn close.

As the song begins, we either know or suspect that Sidney's about to pimp out his "available" girlfriend, then we watch Rita sing of domestic bliss, and then we actually watch Sidney pimp her out to Otis Elwell, in exchange for getting an item in Otis' column. That's some heavy irony. And then after Sidney leaves, the writers drop one more irony on us, as Rita admits to Otis that yes, he does recognize her because she was pimped out to him two years ago. Holy shit.

Another example of shattering irony is "Don't Look Now," J.J.'s old vaudeville number, which he performs on his telethon.

This lyric is a fictionalized version of the real 1880 vaudeville staple, "The Fountain in the Park" (usually known as "While Strolling Through the Park One Day"). This number serves both as a J.J.'s famous signature song from decades ago, but also as a postmodern song-and-dance that slyly, almost subliminally, describes the danger of New York nightlife. The nostalgic music and choreography work ironically against the deceptively dark lyric, which literally describes the brutality taking place during the song, as Lt. Kello and his thugs beat Dallas unconscious. You just don't notice that's what it's doing...

J.J. starts the song, with a startlingly honest intro:

Magicians always tell you
They've got nothing up their sleeve,
But why would someone tell you that,
Unless it's to deceive?
There's always been a lie
To misdirect the eye,
Since Adam did his magic tricks for Eve.

Here, the song itself is the magic trick -- the music and dance misdirect us from the dark, violent content of the lyric.

Don’t ever trust a gent
Who pulls a bird from someone’s ear,
Who makes his living
Making you believe that he's sincere.
He's looking for a chump,
Expectin’ you to jump,
When he pours on all the charm and says,
“I need a volunteer.”

Underscoring continues as Sidney and Kello arrange the beating of Dallas over the phone. Dallas is the chump, the lyric is telling us, the "volunteer." And J.J. is the guy "who makes his living making you believe that he's sincere." It's both a conventional song and it isn't, at the same time. This is the territory of the neo musical comedy, the new form that uses the conventions of old-school musical comedy for more ironic, more socio-political aims. Sweet Smell of Success is not a neo musical comedy -- it's a thriller -- but this number works on the same principle.

J.J. sings the first verse now, surrounded by a chorus.

Don't look now
But somethin' that you had is gone.
It's somethin' you depend upon.
Don't look now...

Is J.J. talking to Dallas? Or Sidney...? Or is it a warning to the rest of us? Maybe it's the writers reminding us that everyone loses in this story. And in life...

Take a bow;
Someone made a fool of you.
You're standin' there without a clue.
Don't look now...

Again, which of J.J.'s victims is the object of this? Or is it all of J.J.'s victims, and all his victims to come...? Everybody (else) is a patsy...

He took you to the cleaners,
Don't you know.
He walked you like a dog,
The so and so...

So...
Say "bow wow,"
A piece of what you had is gone;
The magic act goes on and on.
You're wonderin' when, where and how?
Well, don't look now.

The magic act -- J.J.'s column and the power it brings with it -- goes on and on. Both the opening and closing numbers tell us that "on and on and on it goes..." The closing also tells us, "There no end to the column..."

There's a short dialogue scene in which Sidney lies to Dallas to get him to the docks, where Kello will beat him up. The chorus continues the song, with a lyric that mixes the benign with the sinister, set to a sweet, swinging, old-fashioned softshoe:

Strolling along the avenue,
Cutting across the park,
Rushing to make a rendezvous,
You could become a mark.
Somehow the magic will find you,
Find you alone in the dark.

You could become the "mark," the sucker, the victim of a con or a crime, alone in the dark. Are Kello and his goons "the magic [that] will find you"...?

Maybe we get to pick our spots,
Maybe we choose the date,
Maybe we get to call the shots,
Maybe it's up to fate.
Somehow the magic will find you,
Find you alone,
Alone in the dark.

Are they talking about dying...?? Is this a threat...?

Don't look now,
But somethin' that you had is gone;
The magic act goes on and on.
You never know when where and how...

Now we start to wonder if "somethin' that you had" is your health or even your life, as Kello and his Goon beat Dallas to the beat of the music, while the chorus continues:

He'll make your bunny disappear
Along with your hat;
He'll saw your girl in half,
And then he'll leave her like that.

What the fuck...?

So don't look…
Don't look…
Don't look now!

Don't look, he says, because if we pay attention, people like J.J. can't get away with nearly as much. The whole script and score are this rich, this complex, this subtle, this beautifully crafted. It's been such a joy working on this show! I love my job!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Makin' Music to Make You Die

It's hard to write about music without the reader actually hearing it. But I've been doing my best in my books to write about really interesting scores as simply and accessibly as I can, and I'm gonna try to do the same with the sizzling jazz score for Sweet Smell of Success.

One of the things that provides the show's considerable suspense and tension, and that gives it such a relentless pace, is Marvin Hamlisch's remarkable music. As strong as all his scores are, this was his masterpiece, endlessly inventive and deeply expressive, while fully inhabiting the language of 1950s club jazz.

One of the central reasons the show works so well is the underscoring under most of the show. Jazz is part of the environment here; the music provides the story's cultural context as much as it's the language of our storytelling.

Hamlisch embraced the idea of film noir with this score, and his decades of experience scoring films gave him the composing chops to use music so effectively throughout the show. In this story, it's the stopping of the music -- emotional silence -- that provides powerful dramatic punctuation, rather than the other way around.

Like his film music, and like his extensive underscoring in A Chorus Line, the underscoring in this show is expressionistic music, built not so much on melody or harmony, but on the abstract expression of emotion.

He also uses leitmotifs throughout the score, small musical ideas that come to represent an idea or person. J.J. has an ironic vaudeville leitmotif that pops up here and there.

There's also a "column" leitmotif for Sidney, two notes that recur all over the score, two notes that are part of the show's central melody, first set in the opening number to the word "column" in the first line, "Gotta get in the column" (which shows up again in "Dirt"). These two notes come back every time Sidney makes another moral compromise. These two notes also accompany the disturbing, repeating "Do it... Do it... Do it... Do it!", from the Greek Chorus in "Break It Up," this time urging Sidney to pimp out his girlfriend.

In "Break It Up," the first song in Act II, the Greek Chorus goads Sidney into one more immoral act. But more than just a musical Devil on the Shoulder, it's also a deconstruction of Sidney's triumphant, hopeful, Act I "aria," "At the Fountain." "Break It Up" has one new melody, but the rest of this very long musical scene is built on musically tearing apart the optimism of Act I.

Likewise, the reprise of "I Could Get You in J.J." is also a dark deconstruction of the scene-song from Act I, as Sidney conjures up his destructive chaos. Another long musical scene, it's built on the Act I "I Could Get You in J.J.," with a new short leitmotif, "Bye bye, blackbird, bye bye Dallas, Bye bye blues," all peppered with interruptions, fragments, and lots of underscoring.

By design, there's really not a lot of new musical material in Act II. There's the new "Break It Up" music, the short "Bye bye blackbird" fragment, most but not all of "Dirt," and the vaudeville number, "Don't Look Now."

The rest of the music in Act II, and there's a lot of it, is built on the musical ideas established in Act I. Hamlisch takes those ideas, changes them, twists them, adapts them, interrupts them; and in the process he changes the emotional context and colors of those melodies we've already heard.

There are also only three self-contained songs in Act II, "Rita's Tune," the ironically retro torch song; "Dirt," the Greek Chorus' statement of purpose; and "Don't Look Now," J.J.'s old vaudeville number. Although really, "Don't Look Now" is more musical scene than self-contained song, with several ironically offset dialogue scenes with underscoring, inside the song.

It's a shame that they weren't able to make a two-disc cast recording and preserve this entire extraordinary score. Easily a third of the score is not on the recording. Maybe someday they'll "rediscover" this brilliant score and record the whole thing...

Meanwhile, we get to live inside this glorious, sinewy music for another three weeks! Come join us!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Nothin's as Sweet as the Fall

You don't really notice it when you're watching the show or listening to the cast recording -- at least I didn't -- but bookwriter John Guare and lyricist Craig Carnelia have built an incredibly sophisticated, complex, subtle, artful piece of storytelling with Sweet Smell of Success.

It succeeds in all three of the important categories: Poetry, Popcorn, and Politics; or in other words, artistry, pure entertainment, and substance. It seems a mystery and a shame that it didn't run longer on Broadway, this exquisite film noir musical, from the pens of three top professionals, Guare, Carnelia, and the great Marvin Hamlisch, writing the score of his career (his last theatre score, unless you count The Nutty Professor, which never made it to New York). But honestly, it's another show (like many we've resuscitated) that belonged off Broadway in a more intimate production.

I've already blogged about our show's form, its content, its historical and culture context, and its craftsmanship. But as I'm discovering now that we've opened our production, you never stop discovering new things in this rich, dark material. It's only after the fact, in retrospect, that we recognize that the song "Welcome to the Night" isn't welcoming Sidney into New York nightlife as much as welcoming him to the moral Dark Side.

One thing I noticed only after we put the whole show together, how Guare and Carnelia have peppered the word sweet throughout the show, often meaning very different things, always underlining the irony of the title (which is never mentioned verbatim, by the way).

In "Break It Up," early in Act II, as all hell is breaking loose, Sidney sings these lines:

Ooo, once you been there,
It's tough to settle for less.
Ooo, I'm so close I can
Smell the smell of success…

And that's when the irony of the title hits us. At this point, the shit Sidney is tangled up in doesn't seem much like success. Even though he can't see it, we can. Which means the "smell" isn't a good one. Which means the word sweet in the title is darkly ironic.

In this world in which almost everyone lies, what value do words have? And in a show in which the word sweet can mean anything, we realize there's no one here to trust, not even our narrators, Sidney and the other press agents as our Greek Chorus.

So here's a quick tour through the sweet in Sweet Smell of Success. You'll notice our two "decent" characters, Susan and Dallas, never use the word.

It first pops up late in Act I. When Sidney successfully cons J.J. into plugging Dallas in his column, J.J. says, “This is the sweet part of this racket -- helping your pals.” Of course, he has no idea he’s actually helping the man who’s going to take his sister away, and that Sidney is actively plotting against J.J. It's one of the few times J.J. is ironic without knowing it.

Later in the same scene, in the song “For Susan,” J.J. sings, “Ever so sweetly the orchestra plays for Susan…” But the subtext of the scene, J.J.'s creepy attraction to his sister, works in opposition to the innocence of the memory. It's a sweet memory for J.J., not so much for Susan.

In “Rita’s Tune,” Sidney's girlfriend, thinking she's about to have a romantic night with Sidney (we already know she's not), sings:

Someone in sweet California
Plucked all these grapes from the vine,
To pop a cork in sweet New York…

Rita is only accidentally ironic here. She means it; she just doesn't know her boyfriend is about to walk in, shatter her, and leave. That's sweet New York.

Immediately following, in “Dirt,” the press agents sing about the celebrities they write about:

Watchin' them rise is a ball,
But nothin's as sweet as the fall…

Yeah, schadenfreude-sweet...

Backstage at the telethon, when J.J. and Sidney are pretending outrage over the lies Sidney himself has planted, J.J. says to Susan, “No worry, sweetheart. You're safe at home.” That's two sweets for Susan. But soon after, J.J. is on the phone bullying the club owner Billy, and J.J. snaps, “Warm up the brain, sweetheart. Insert the truth.” Susan hears this; does that make the word sound different to her now...? It's a word that reminds the listener of the power structure -- the powerless would never call the powerful "sweetheart," only the other way around...

The last time the word sweet appears in the show is when Sidney is arranging for Kello to beat up Dallas, and Kello ends their conversation with, “Very sweet doin' business with you, Sid.” Sweet, as in nothing of the kind.

So how does all this work on us? How does it enhance the storytelling? It tells us, even if just subliminally, that there are no rules in this world, despite the outward appearance of 1950s order. Words mean whatever you want them to mean. Lies and truth are interchangeable. Readership equals power equals Truth.

In 1952, J.J. (and his real-life counterpart Walter Winchell) had a false authority because his column appeared in a daily newspaper, not because of the veracity of his items. Readers generally believed that if it was printed in the paper, it was properly vetted for accuracy and it could be trusted fully. Today we are living through the inverse, when it's incredibly easy to create the appearance of authority online, so that the average reader can't tell the difference between a hack blogger and an experienced, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, between Drudge and Breitbart and Vox.

Truth is secondary, then as now, less important than what's juicy, or in our current lingo, clickbait.

At the top of Act II, when Sidney actually does tell J.J. the truth about meeting Susan, J.J. doesn't believe him. Why should he? The truth has no currency in this world. When we get to the final scene of the show, the lies pile up upon lies, all tangled up in bits of truth. There's no hope of untangling them, only the possibility of escape.

The only other time the word truth is used in the show is the J.J. quote on the truth or lie of the item, and he's lying about his fondness for Dallas. There's no truth here. Plus, he's sort of doing the right thing, but for all the worst reasons.

I've described the show on a couple occasions as a moral horror story, and as a moral thriller. It's been fun over the first three performances to see how quickly the audience engages with our story, and how riveted they are to the crazy, twisting, shocking plot that unreels before them.

I've described some of our New Line shows as roller coaster rides. This is one of those. You will love it.

It's a wild, wonderful, hip ride through the dark depths of modern humanity, and it's a hell of a fun trip! Come join us! We run through June 24, and you can get tickets through MetroTix.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott