This post is Part Five of the Building Blocks series: Once we’ve made it through the opening numbers, established our protagonist’s driving needs with an I Want song, and introduced some relationship tension with a conditional love song, the formula for a musical becomes less structured, because the story is going to be driven by the characters. But there is one element that is almost universally present in a Broadway show: the sexy song and dance. It has been standard fare since the staging of what many describe as the first musical, The Black Crook, in 1866. Its purpose is not usually to further the story. It's just to get seats in the seats, because sex sells and a little bit of scandalous keeps the audience awake. But, is this device worth the price? Can you build the Beloved Community, teach people to deeply see and care for each other, while tossing exploitive spice into the mix? Or are there better ways to fill the seats and keep the audience awake?
One problem with adding exploitive spice is that it mars the recipe. Guys and Dolls is a good example of that. The story is about two independence-minded high-rolling gamblers getting so thoroughly caught by two women that they wind up married and reformed. The main couple are wealthy and womanizing Sky Masterson, who can’t resist a good bet, and Sarah Brown, a Salvation Army Sergeant whose high ideals don’t permit her to admit the attraction she feels for him. The secondary couple are Nathan Detroit, whose illegal floating crap game keeps being thwarted by police, and his fiancee of fourteen years, Adelaide (who doesn’t even get a last name).
There are some interesting themes in Sky’s and Sarah’s romance. Can a singular focus on lofty ideals get in the way of a happy match? Can an attitude of conquer and move-on blind you to the transformative power of genuine love? Both Sky and Sarah grow as they move, awkwardly, toward each other. With the help of some Bacardi rum in the “Cuban milkshakes” he offers her, she unbends enough to admit desire for him, while he acquires a conscience and does not take advantage of her drunken state. Then he discovers he actually loves her, enough to sacrifice $1000 and some social credit for her reputation, despite her rejecting him when it appears that she was played. There’s enough potential there to make a convincing love story if it were adequately developed.
But Nathan and Adelaide are a different matter. His promises to quit the crap game and marry her have never been sincere – they’re just what keeps her in the relationship. And while her disappointment at his refusal to settle down is literally making her sick, she works as a burlesque dancer, stripping down to her underclothing for the show’s two sexy songs and dances. La Grippe, the song about her disappointment, is comical. The lyrics for “Take Back Your Mink” are supposed to be ironic because they accompany a striptease, but given Adelaide’s situation and how she’s losing her self-respect while trying to get a real commitment from her permanent fiancé, it’s just painful if you think about it. However, you’re not supposed to think about it. Adelaide is designed for laughs and titillation, not tragedy; if the audience connected with her trampled dignity, they couldn’t enjoy her striptease. So, to keep it light and comical, she gets a happy ending. Sarah and Adelaide meet, commiserate, and decide to marry their gamblers now and reform them later (really not a productive attitude for starting a marriage). In the final scene, Sky has joined the Salvation Army mission and Nathan now runs a newsstand.
Sky’s transformation is improbable but not quite impossible. Nathan’s is beyond belief. This is partly because we’ve never seen evidence that he wants to marry and settle down, and partly because we haven’t seen Adelaide grow from an object into someone he actually cares about. The sexy song and dance get in the way of our seeing her. And the unbelievability of her happy ending casts doubt on Sky’s and Sarah’s.
What if you round out the character of the sexy dancer? What if you make her real and you don’t shy away from what tragedies exist in her life? Can the sexy song and dance then forward your goal to build the Beloved Community?
I think Cabaret tries to do this. The show revolves around a seedy nightclub in Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power. The main female character is Sally Bowles, an English chanteuse who wants to live for this moment, without ties or constraints. Only, despite collecting and discarding lovers, she eventually falls for Cliff Bradshaw, an American tourist who reads her poetry. When she gets pregnant, doesn’t know who the father is, and plans to get an abortion, he proposes that they stay together and keep the baby who might, after all, be his. She sings “Maybe This Time” a triumphantly hopeful song about actually finding enduring love. Only, when Cliff wakes up to Germany’s descent into Naziism, Sally rejects his plea to leave with him for America. She doesn’t care about politics and doesn’t want to leave Berlin. So she goes out and has her abortion. Cliff slaps her. They break up. And she returns to the nightclub to sing Cabaret. From Sally’s perspective, this time, like the last time, love hurried away. So she’s not going to chase it. And when she goes down, she’ll go down in flames. The show ends with a reprise of the song that started it, but discordant now. The Third Reich has begun and everybody at the nightclub was so preoccupied with forbidden pleasures that they couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it.
The show has a message about how hedonism is complicit with darker evils, like Naziism. It even invites audiences to consider their complicity in the tragedy. How much does a paying audience contribute to a downward spiral like Sally’s? As New York Times critic Jesse Green put it, “we want to unsee the trash.” But it doesn’t show us a better way. If we use voyeuristic sex to sell a message about the dangers of hedonism, aren’t we perpetuating what we claim to be combatting, even though we’re getting our audiences to think.
The Man of La Mancha takes a diametrically different approach to a character who resembles Sally Bowles. Her name is Aldonza, and she is the serving wench at an inn, where she makes a little extra money as a part-time prostitute. Enter Don Quixote, an older gentleman who has lost his wits and is riding about the country under the delusion that he’s a knight of the Middle Ages. He mistakes Aldonza for a lady and calls her Dulcinea. She knows he’s crazy and tries to brush him off, but he treats her with such enduring respect and kindness that she wants to know what’s driving him. He sings The Impossible Dream about his chivalrous ideals. But she is late for a pre-paid rendezvous with Pedro, the creepy leader of a group of muleteers. He arrives and slaps her for making him wait, and Quixote jumps to her defense. By sheer luck and the help of Aldonza and his sidekick Sancho, he manages to knock all the muleteers unconscious.
At this point, the Innkeeper asks him to leave, but he protests that he must first tend to the wounds of his enemies. Aldonza promises to do that on his behalf, but the muleteers repay her by beating, raping and abducting her.
The next day, Aldonza stumbles, battered and with ripped-up clothing, into Quixote. He vows to avenge her, but she has had enough of his high-sounding ideals that only make trouble in real life. In fury, she sings Aldonza, about being “a strumpet men use and forget.” When he insists that she’s Dulcinea, she pleads “Can't you see what your gentle insanities do to me?/ Rob me of anger and give me despair/ Blows and abuse I can take and give back again/ Tenderness I cannot bear.” But Quixote cries out, “Now and forever, thou art my lady Dulcinea.”
The next we see her, she’s come to his bedside where he has been restored to sanity just in time to die. At first, he doesn’t recognize her until she reminds him of his impossible dream and everything he taught her. He rises up from his bed to resume his quest, then collapses in death. But she declares that Don Quixote lives on, and she is no longer Aldonza. She is Dulcinea.
Man of La Mancha shows us how to build the Beloved Community. It teaches that when we really see people, when we look past the surface appearance and reflect to them their intrinsic dignity, we can open up for them a whole new world of possibilities. What they do with that is their choice. And, eventually, as we choose the path of love, others will gather to it.
Despite Aldonza’s being a prostitute, there is no sexy song and dance in Man of La Mancha. It seems writers Wasserman, Leigh and Darion didn’t want the audience to objectify her; that would undermine the message. There is a suggestive song, Little Bird, that the muleteers use to mock and intimidate her, but it’s frightening, not sexy.
So, without relying on sex to sell the show, how well did they fill the seats? The musical opened on Broadway in 1965, one year before Cabaret. It ran for 2,328 performances, compared to Cabaret’s 1166 and Guys and Dolls’s 1200. Evidently, a story that is breathtakingly real at the same time that it lights an idealistic fire in you, doesn’t have to sell itself with cheap tricks.
A little bit of burlesque may be standard fare for Broadway shows, but musicals that aim to lift and unite don’t need it. They are wise to steer clear.
What do you think? Have you seen a show where burlesque added to its ability to build the Beloved Community? Or, at the least, didn't take away from it?
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