serious musical comedy

The Serious Musical Comedy

A type of musical we don't see very much any more is what I (and

others on rec.arts.theatre.musicals) used to call the "serious musical

comedy," which is to say a serious, basically non-comic story told in

the style of a musical comedy. Examples I can think of include FIDDLER

ON THE ROOF, FOLLIES, GYPSY, CABARET, I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE,

A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, and my favorite of them all, FIORELLO!

None of the above shows can be described as "musical comedy" (and none

of them billed themselves as such), yet they're not really "musical

plays" of the SHOW BOAT or CAROUSEL kind, either; they don't fuse the

languages of musical comedy and operetta the way SHOW BOAT did. A show

like FIORELLO! or GYPSY is a punchy, fast-paced piece, with hardly a

trace of operetta in it; it uses the theatrical and musical language

of musical comedy even though it's not a comedy.

This style of musical never seems to have really taken off -- shows

like FIORELLO! are exceptions to the general rule that the

musical-comedy style is mostly used for comic stories -- but I love

it. FIORELLO! is a wonderful example because even though it deals with

politics, death, war, and corruption, writer-director George Abbott

conveyed the serious themes in the style of a comedy -- the book

(which I still consider one of the very best books ever written for a

musical) isn't necessarily ha-ha funny, but it has the feel of a

comedy. So does the score by Bock and Harnick, which goes for the

musical-comedy aspect of strikes ("Unfair"), political corruption

("Little Tin Box") and unrequited love ("Marie's Law") One of the

great examples of the "Abbott touch" is that he threw out a rueful

ballad originally intended for Marie, and got Bock and Harnick to

convey the situation through comedy instead, by writing "Marie's Law,"

where she obliquely and comically sings out her frustration at loving

a man who doesn't love her back. ("My law will state, to whom it may

concern / When a lady loves a gentleman, he must love her in return.")

And it does all this without trivializing these things; indeed the

musical-comedy style makes the themes seem more direct and honest

than, say, a deadly-serious, mournful musical scene about corruption

in New York politics.

Another great serious musical comedy by Bock and Harnick is FIDDLER ON

THE ROOF, which is the same thing: a serious story, yet funny all the

way through and using the arsenal of musical comedy (in particular,

the oldest, corniest, most effective Borscht-belt jokes, right down to

the "You're right/you're right/you're also right" routine) to tell a

serious story. Nowadays, FIDDLER would probably be written and staged

as a gloomy tragedy about poverty and violence; indeed, we keep

getting revivals of FIDDLER that think they're being daring by taking

out the Borscht-belt comedy (as the movie did to a large extent) or

playing up the gloomy aspects of the story (as the recent revival

apparently did). They don't understand, as Jerome Robbins did, that

just as a song can be more effective if it expresses emotion obliquely

-- don't say "I love you," say "They all laughed at Christopher

Columbus" -- a whole show can be more interesting if it plays like a

comedy, which lets the big serious moments (the pogrom in FIDDLER,

"Tomorrow Belongs to Me" in CABARET) pack more of a punch by contrast

with everything that surrounds them. And because musical comedy is by

its nature less sentimental than the musical that's serious all the

way through (a song that mocks love is "tougher" than a

straightforward torch song), serious musical comedies don't have the

mushiness that Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals sometimes (not always,

but sometimes) display.

In the years since the original CABARET, I can't think of many shows

that have used the serious musical comedy style. ASSASSINS is close,

but with its big long musical scenes and big Message Moments it

doesn't really have what I'd call a musical-comedy score. Now that

musical-comedy methods of songwriting and storytelling are "in" again,

I wouldn't mind seeing some new attempts to tell a serious story in a

musical-comedy kind of way; it would certainly be an interesting

alternative to the inflated, self-important "serious" musicals we

often get. At its best the serious musical comedy can deal with