Gil Hates Everything

It’s a very special edition of Gil Hates Musicals today. At the request of Scott Ashton Swan of Applause! Musicals, I’m taking a look at this year’s Applause! season. So I should knock out a quick two-way introduction for GHM avids wondering whether I’ve taken the money, and for Applause! readers wondering why they should care what someone who ‘hates musicals’ thinks about musicals…

Applause! appeals to me in principle because it presents musicals without the gloss; a semi-staged reading, even when off-book and directed with movement as their shows often are, obliges you to focus on the material, and spares you (for example) the virtuoso tap-dance designed to make you mistake an individual’s talent for a show’s quality. It’s like watching the soundtrack, and it’s cheaper than going to see a fully-staged show. Scott picks shows which are forgotten or underperformed, and although a cynic might claim that many shows are forgotten for a perfectly good reason, there are also shows which are criminally forgotten, falling through the cracks of musical theatre history, or just too difficult to realize fully-staged.

As for “why GHM”: my wife Sarah and I have collected something like three hundred show soundtracks over the years, but after a while you realize you’re collecting rather than listening, so last year I applied myself to the challenge of an alphabetical listen-through of the entire collection. And after a while, it became impossible not to write about them, to promote what seems good over what gets talked about. To give you an idea of my taste, I’m unlikely ever to go see a show at TUTS, not because they’re done badly, but because I, and probably you too, have seen them all, often as a movie. I’d like to think the musical theatre form could and should move forward; all other forms do. And yet, how to make sure the audience comes with you? I’m not against tunes, but I’m emphatically in favour of intelligence, emotion, and finding ways to be both timeless and relevant. And I hate tap dancing (especially if it’s immortalized on the soundtrack album). The upshot is that while I like to like musicals, it’s expensive going to see them, and since everything else is either enhancing or covering up the quality of the soundtrack (including the script – if it’s a good play with bad songs, that’s no use) I find that listening to the soundtrack is usually enough. Hence my conceptual overlap with Applause!

When I listen to a soundtrack I try to listen to it twice, checking up on the history of the show online, and then I write a review… and so here we go, “Good News” is pouring into my ears, and what do I make of it?

Well, for starters let’s check the labels. The show dates from 1927, the era of Cole Porter and P.G. Wodehouse… and it was a success for its authors, who were Laurence Schwab and B.G. DeSylva (book), DeSylva and Lew Brown (lyrics), and Ray Henderson (music). It ran for a couple of years and was this team’s biggest hit; I freely admit I’ve never heard of it, but a lot of musicals back then were very fire-and-forget, with topical subject matter which doesn’t translate so well to modern times, whether because of the second-rate portrayal of minorities (such as, er, women) plus the sheer randomness and perma-frothy attitudes – last week: rum smugglers! this week: look everyone, black people! next week: the Mafia, those wacky pranksters! What I’m saying is, you’ve got to be a certain age or have a certain dedication to musicals to have even heard of most shows from before 1940… unless they were lucky enough to get a revival. “Good News” was lucky enough, revived in 1973, on the coat-tails of successful revivals of “No, No, Nanette” (a title which always makes me think Nanette is an axe-murderer) and “Irene”. British readers will recognize “Me And My Girl” as a example. Usually the book is revised to fit our contemporary perceptions of the original period; the crap songs are cut, new ones inserted or lyrics rewritten.

And so to the songs.

This show is old enough to have an overture, after which a bunch of the girls sing “He’s A Ladies’ Man”, which sets the tone for the show as “light, verging on antigravitic”. This is a proper old-style song in the sense that the title tells you all you really need to know, and the lyrics are mostly a list of examples. This is followed by “Football Drill” (a dance number) and then “Button Up Your Overcoat”, which turns out to be the official name for that one song which goes “Take good care of yourself, you belong to me”. This is perky, if again a bit on the “yeah, I got it” side. “List songs” like this give you an insight into what was considered mainstream-funny at the time (“You’re The Top” being a perfect example) – which is why they often get rewritten to make sure they still touch on points we’ve heard of (or end up just not being funny eighty years later). Here, preserving yourself entails “be careful crossing streets / don’t eat meats / cut out sweets” from the girl, and “don’t sit on hornets’ tails / or on nails / or third rails” from the guy. The comedy value gets a distinct handwaver, but it’s a perky tune. So far “Good News” is scoring high on the “harmless” scale, although I should point out that “Button Up Your Overcoat” wasn’t in the original.

And now for a slow tune. Unfortunately, old slow tunes often suck… I don’t think the slow romantic song really got nailed until the days of Glenn Miller, so this “Together” is kinda painful… but, happily, it speeds up as the woman starts singing “My Lucky Star”, which is slightly less gruesome. When it switches back to the slow tempo the guy joins in too, and duets are always faintly preferable to solos. I fear I started dozing off at this point, especially since the next song, “On The Campus”, is a brief and unobtrusive ensemble number, and the next song is also pretty relaxed, although it’s one of the hits: “The Best Things In Life Are Free”. It also takes its time getting started: back in the day, hit showtunes often had thirty-second preludes stapled to them as a segue – with varying degrees of abruptness – from what the characters were talking about to what the songwriters wanted to write about (this is why when you hear people performing standards, the audience often only claps once the singer reaches the title, because they honestly didn’t recognize the song until that point). Still, once it starts, it’s another sweet little love song.

It’s followed by “The Cream In My Coffee”, another list song which kinda pushes the metaphor too far; either that or women were much more amenable to being compared to trivial rubbish in a romantic setting… try telling a woman she’s “the lace in your shoe” nowadays, and report back when you get out of the hospital.

Then there’s – oh dear – I’m sorry, avids, it’s time for the obligatory made-up dance craze. This is spoofed excellently in “The Wild Party” (“The Juggernaut”) but here… ick. “Varsity Drag”… nope… from experience, four and a half minutes is a good length of time to stare absently at the backdrop and free-associate until you figure out that problem that was bugging you at work today.

By this point I have to say “Good News” is conforming to expectations, which (a) shows it’s probably quite harmless for its time but sadly (b) means I’m counting the minutes left on the track listing. The problem is, even the upbeat songs are tectonically slow-moving in terms of the new information they deliver lyrically, and the rhyme schemes and word choices aren’t dazzling. The result is that “Lucky In Love”, the big first-half closer, is fatally dull.

The revised edition of this show has more songs than the 1927 version in the second act, but I’m going to spare you multiple paragraphs; there’s the same mixture of optimistic attempts at frothy hitwriting (“Never Swat A Fly”, “Just Imagine”), songs you wish will end soon (“Girl Of The Pi Beta Phi”), and songs by the same songwriters borrowed from other points in history (“Keep Your Sunny Side Up”, from the 1929 movie “Sunnyside Up” but so football-specific that you imagine it was rewritten for the revival, and “Life Is Just A Bowl Of Cherries”, from 1931).

So here I am at the end of the soundtrack, and sure enough, I can’t tell you a damn thing about the actual events of the show, other than that they take place at a college, there’s a plot point about passing tests, and there are some couples, who almost certainly end up together. I realize I’m not shocking anyone here with these predictions, and the purity of the separation of book and songs means that for all I know the second act features a drugs scandal, or a rogue dinosaur. At a guess, though, no… which is a shame, as I’d love to see a show with a rogue dinosaur.

OK, so to conclude. “Good News” fulfilled my expectations but unfortunately didn’t surprise me. GHM regulars will know that my reactions to soundtracks tend to boil down to three schools of thought: 1) “That sounded inspiring, I must go see this”, 2) “That sounded alright but I don’t imagine I need to see the show, having now heard its songs”, and 3) “To whom can I write in an attempt to get the last hour of my life back?” “Good News” definitely lands in the second category, perhaps too close for comfort to the third. But it would be worth reminding you of my perma-provisos here: shows always come across better live; directors (or actors) may find a spin on a show or song which enlivens it; and most importantly, you get the script as well, which can (especially after modernizing revisions) be a completely different beast. All of this can mean that a show which sounds rocky might be smooth as silk in performance… although I’m enough of a cynic to take “can” to mean “won’t”, sorry…

Random Panda awards “Good News” an inflation-adjusted four out of ten pieces of bamboo.

(originally posted 2009)