No one would undertake the intricate, painful, gargantuan, hysterical task of putting on a musical play unless he had more enthusiasm than most people have about anything. Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times Drama Critic, 1924-1960
It’s a fact. Musical theater is hysterical. Not hysterical like a joke. Hysterical like the people doctors used to call “hysterics,” the ones who were enthusiastically unstable. The musical form in and of itself makes relatively little sense, and the craft is so difficult to pull off successfully that only a lunatic with pathological levels of enthusiasm would participate.
That’s not to say that all enthusiastic people do musical theater. Most enthusiastic people save their enthusiasm for their hobbies, children, and free samples at Whole Foods. Musical theater people, like all artists, eschew all such convention and conclude that it is too sensible to spend their lives getting a real job, and instead must spend every waking hour pursuing what started out as a hobby. Making a living? Overrated. Putting food on the table? A luxury. Seeing your family? Maybe next year.
So, we take our low self-esteems and mount our high-horses and go for a ride. You may ask, why do we stay up there if it’s so dangerous? The same reason the Fiddler on the Roof does: it’s our home. We are all Fiddlers on the Roof trying to scratch out a simple tune without breaking our necks. And it isn’t easy. But when a musical is good and goes as planned, for us, it’s indescribable. In fact, it’s indescribable when it doesn’t go as planned. And that’s what keeps us rolling along.
I am an aspiring musical theater writer and moonlight as a professor, vocal coach and music director. I graduated from Brown University with a BA in music, and hold an MFA in musical theater writing from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. I am currently on the faculty of Brown University and Montclair State University. I have recently performed with stars such as Ben Vereen, Jack Black, Kate Burton, James Naughton and Duncan Sheik. I am also the musical director emeritus of the award winning musical sketch comedy group “The Apple Sisters,” with whom I recently performed alongside Chevy Chase and the cast of “Saturday Night Live.”
As everyone in the arts knows, accolades and performances are the highs of the job, but there are innumerable lows. We work all hours all the time or sometimes not at all, but we do what we love. We get to make our own schedules, be our own bosses, and I personally spend my daily life writing and putting on musicals (or some variation thereof). But why is the creation and execution of a musical so particularly intricate and painful, gargantuan and hysterical?
The answer partially lies in the number of people involved. I liken it to a copy machine: It’s a brilliant device when it works, but when it doesn’t, it’s terribly annoying. If there’s a jam in drawers two and three, and the toner is low, it’s as though your life has fallen apart right in front of you. Same goes for musical theater. Hundreds of people are often involved in the creation, and any one of them could have been the one to put stapled documents through the automatic feeder. But when it works, like a Xerox machine, it’s miraculous.
The musical requires three major elements to work in perfect synergy before anyone even gets hired: the book, music and lyrics. Even if you are a genius and write all three successfully (and the chances of that are about a trillion to one), you still have to find the right director, choreographer, actors, set designer, music director, etc., and all of these people not only have to get along, but create one final product. In elementary school, you were asked to give a presentation with one other person, not the entire school district.
So what else could motivate us but unyielding passion for the art? What else but an earnest dedication to making people laugh, cry or think? What else but a need to be with people and work together to form one common vision? It’s not just a good show or interest in the arts that draws people to the field — it’s a lifestyle, it’s comfort, it’s family. It’s the need to offer society what artists from Mozart to the Beatles to Stephen Sondheim continue to offer today. We have the same feelings and live the same lives that our musical forefathers did. And that is Tradition!