I'd Rather Be Reading about Hadestown, But Oklahoma! is Okay, Too

Living the dream in 2024!

The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built by Jack Viertel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title of the book is a misnomer, because it isn’t actually about any “secret life” of the Broadway musical, nor is it about how they’re built other than the thematic progression of songs throughout a typical musical.

However, since it’s almost entirely the songs that interest me, I was happy as a clam to read this!

I would have loved to have read a more recent publication of this book, because at the time that Viertel wrote this comparison/analysis of Broadway musical songs, the vast majority of my all-time favorite musicals hadn’t yet premiered. Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 first performed on Broadway in 2016 (although it had been around since 2012).

Hadestown didn’t hit Broadway until 2019. I don’t love Dear Evan Hansen, which also premiered on Broadway in 2016, but I love some of its songs and I would have LOVED to read an analysis of them. It’s also too bad that the Broadway revival of Oklahoma! didn’t premiere until 2019, because it’s SO good. And how fun would it have been to be able to try out an analysis of overtly unserious Broadway productions like Beetlejuice and Spongebob!

But even modern musicals that were already around, like Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, Rent, and Spring Awakening, got less discussion than I’d have preferred. Viertel spent a little more time on The Book of Mormon, but nothing compared to his continued reintroduction of Guys and Dolls and Gypsy into the conversation. Like, I get that everyone has their favorite musicals, but come on, Dude--it’s Guys and Dolls. It has, like, two good songs, and one of them isn’t even sung by one of the main characters. Calm down and talk about Fun Home for a minute!

I also would have been interested in reading a discussion of musicals that never made Broadway, or only had very brief runs. Ride the Cyclone only got as far as off-Broadway in 2016, and the Percy Jackson musical had an off-Broadway run in 2014 (and a brief, unsuccessful Broadway stint in 2019), but they’re now both very popular student productions, and I think it would be cool to discuss why. It’s the minimal staging requirements and focus on the young adult experience, obviously, but there’s more to unpack.

I do think the formula of a typical Broadway musical is as interesting as the author does, and I was interested in seeing how various examples of the genre shape up. The analysis is a little Lit Crit 101 at times--like, yeah, Hamilton DOES throw away his shot both literally and figuratively after telling everyone he won’t, just like Eliza feels way more “helpless” while he’s alive than she does after his death (I don’t think Viertel brings up that latter one; that’s just my bonus Lit Crit 101 analysis for you!)--but that’s not a bad thing, because it can be so hard to think critically about the media we consume that even more basic insights can feel novel and inspire us to dig deeper on our own. I did side-eye Viertel’s statement that Hamilton’s I Want rap is “not a conventional song,” though, because yes it is? Red flag, Dude.

I think I do pretty well on my own at analyzing my favorite musicals, but I don’t know much about their production, so although this book wasn’t as heavy on the production side as I thought it would be, there were still numerous interesting tidbits for me to pick up. Now that I know that Wicked, although it’s not a musical that I particularly like, was written by the creator of My So-Called Life, which I LOOOOOVED as a teenager, I actually am probably going to give it another watch, and be a lot more generous with my assessment that time, too, ahem.

My favorite part of the book was honestly just the constant references. I happened to be reading it while playing the role of passenger princess during a road trip, so it was easy to pull up all the songs and musicals referenced and force, I mean treat the rest of the car to them. I hadn’t thought about or listened to “Comedy Tonight” since I was a teenager, and yeah, actually it IS so good! 

I’d never seen or listened to “Gypsy” before, but it’s interesting enough that now I’m very curious to see the current revival with Audra McDonald (that’s another thing that would have been cool for Vietel to dive into analyzing--comparison/contrast of original musicals to their revivals!). 

And then, of course, while I’m already in the car and holding the aux cord I might as well make my family also listen to songs and musicals that weren’t mentioned in the book but should have been. Let’s listen to my favorite songs from Hair! 

The Spongebob song that David Bowie wrote! Josh Groban’s Sweeney Todd revival!

And then the youngest passenger brought up Next to Normal, which is having a Whole Thing right now, so we finished out the drive by finding a podcast that had obligingly captured the West End pro shot and listening to that in its entirety.

Thanks, Pirates!

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