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            The Death of the Show Tune

            In the run-up to the 1991
Broadway hit The Will Rogers Follies , composer Cy Coleman took to doing
the big song--"Never Met a Man I Didn't Like"--at benefit performances all over
town. Just before opening night, he sang it at the Eye, Ear, and Throat
Hospital. "You should have seen him," said his lyricist, Adolph Green. "There
wasn't a dry eye, ear, and throat in the house."

            But where
else would you hear the song? "Years ago, we used to have records of our stuff
on the radio before the show opened," Cy sighs. Not anymore. When did you last
hear a show tune on the air? I don't mean Natalie Cole doing Rodgers and Hart,
but new Broadway numbers--from, say, Big or Victor/Victoria . The
last Broadway song to make the charts was Gloria Gaynor's disco version of "I
Am What I Am" from La Cage Aux Folles , and she had to change a few of
Jerry Herman's notes to pull that off. Before rock, the theater song sat at the
apex of popular music; the most famous songwriters were show writers, and the
pop boys--the Tin Pan Alleymen--longed to cross the tracks, as Irving Berlin
did, and George Gershwin, Jule Styne, Frank Loesser. But Bill Haley and Elvis
painted Broadway into a corner it never quite got out of: Musicals stood aloof
from rock and became, by definition, staid, conservative,
middle-aged--something your parents go see on their wedding anniversary. Never
mind that on Broadway, in 1948, long before "Rock Around the Clock," the score
to As the Girls Go by old-timers Jimmy ("Sunny Side of the Street")
McHugh and Harold ("Time on My Hands") Adamson included a number called "Rock!
Rock! Rock!" with the tempo marking "Groovy."

            Now David Geffen figures he can bridge that 40-year gulf.
Rent , launched at the Democratic Convention and including a guest
appearance by Stevie Wonder on its Act II opener, is supposed to be a cast
album you can play on pop radio stations. As every New York Times reader
knows, Rent is a Pulitzer- and Tony-winning "rock opera" version of
La Bohème , with a dramatis personae of HIV-positive performance artists,
transsexuals, and drug addicts from the East Village, whose cachet was greatly
enhanced by the death on the eve of opening of its young
composer/lyricist/librettist Jonathan Larson. The show makes an interesting
contrast with that other Puccini retread, Miss Saigon . The latter, a
British musical, relocates Madame Butterfly to the most controversial
conflict of our time, paints its story on a big, sweeping canvas and has gone
on to play around the world; the other brings La Bohème home to
Greenwich Village, and thus further reinforces the parochialism of the New York
musical, as it shrivels away to its core audience. I would doubt its potential
on the road or overseas. But Rent won its awards not just for its
subject but also for its score. According to Stephen Sondheim, Jonathan Larson
had managed to do what so many Broadway writers had tried and failed for years
to do: He'd used the language of rock to propel a theater piece. He'd fused
contemporary pop and drama. Rock 'n' roles.

            
Just for the record, there's a bit of Puccini
in Rent . At the end, Roger the songwriter finally finishes his song for
Mimi--"Your Eyes"[LINK TO AUDIO CLIP]--and in it, we also hear a brief snatch
of "Musetta's Waltz." As it's played on an electric guitar, though, it's
reminiscent less of Bohème than of "Don't You Know?," a pop adaptation
of the waltz that was a hit in the '50s for Della Reese [LINK TO AUDIO CLIP]and
which contains one of the laziest filler couplets in lyric-writing history:

            
               I have
fallen in love with youFor the rest of my whole life through ...

            As the
waltz echoes alarmingly through Rent 's finale, you're reminded of a
basic fact: Music is music. If a tune's muscular enough, you can do it as an
operatic waltz, a big pop ballad, an electric guitar solo. Rock, like swing or
disco or bluegrass, is a style and, in the theater, its usefulness depends on
the story you're trying to tell.

            Musicals can't be on the so-called cutting edge, because
they take so many years to get up on stage: By the time your grunge musical
opens, grunge will be out and splurge will be in. That's the problem with
Rent : Only on Broadway could it be mistaken for state-of-the-art rock.
The big driving numbers, like "What You Own," [LINK TO AUDIO] come out sounding
like, say, Blue Öyster Cult, full of the same charmingly overheated
metaphors:

            
               You're
living in AmericaAt the end of the millenniumYou're living in AmericaLeave your
conscience at the tone ...
            

            The
ballads, on the other hand, are overwrought and declarative. The best, "Seasons
of Love," [LINK TO AUDIO CLIP] affects the same ensemble solidarity as "What I
Did for Love" in A Chorus Line . [LINK TO AUDIO CLIP]Both can find no
better use for the pop ballad than as group therapy--one for those suffering
the vicissitudes of life as a chorus gypsy, the other for those "living in the
shadow of AIDS." But the spare, slightly awkward chanted admonition--"measure
in love"--is still a world away from the best pop lyric-writing. Alan Jay
Lerner used to bemoan the fact that writers like Paul Simon never went into the
theater. But, since the advent of the LP and the gatefold sleeve with the
printed lyrics and the college courses that study rock songs for their elusive
allusiveness, pop texts have been freed from the first requirement of a
Broadway lyric: that it be made up of words you can catch when you're sitting
in a theater and they're flying through the air at you. Paul Simon once took me
through one of his songs, "Hearts and Bones," which begins, "One and one-half
wandering Jews ..."[LINK TO AUDIO CLIP]

            
He explained to me that it was "one and
one-half" because the song was about him, and he's Jewish, and his then-wife
Carrie Fisher, is the daughter of Eddie Fisher, who's also Jewish, and Debbie
Reynolds, who's not; hence, one and a half. So far, we'd spent about 10 minutes
decoding just five words, but I felt on top of them and was ready to move on.
Then Simon said:

            
               "But
it's also a reference to the flower.""Pardon?""There's a flower called
Wandering Jew.""There's a flower?""Yes.""Ah."
            

            And I
realized that, had Simon followed Lerner's advice and started writing musicals,
we'd have had to get to the theater at 10:30 in the morning to read up on the
textual footnotes.

            In that sense, despite Geffen's marketing efforts, Larson
is straightforwardly Broadway. The Act I finale, "La Vie Bohème ," [LINK
TO AUDIO CLIP] is a rock gloss on the hoariest of musical comedy staples, the
bravura laundry list. The master was Cole Porter:

            
               You're a
rose!You're Inferno's Dante!You're the noseOn the great Durante!
            

            Next to Porter's marriage of
the erudite and the everyday, Larson's catalog seems somewhat
single-minded:

            
               To
SontagTo SondheimTo anything taboo ...
            

            The
Sondheim reference is apposite. Songs like "Tango: Maureen"[LINK TO AUDIO
CLIP]--glib, brittle dialogue at odds with the exotic tango rhythms--are a
reminder of such early Sondheim works as "Barcelona." [LINK TO AUDIO CLIP] In
Company, Sondheim used the click-buzz of the telephone as a leitmotif for urban
neurosis; in Rent, Larson tries to pull something similar with his "Voice Mail"
numbers, a series of a-cappella answering-machine messages.

            
There are two good songs in Rent .
They're called "White Christmas" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," and
they're briefly quoted in a yuletide scene. But Larson's own title for that
number--"Christmas Bells"--reveals his greatest weakness. "Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer" is a title; so's "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." But
"Christmas Bells" isn't; neither is "You'll See" or "Out Tonight" or "We're
Okay," all titles of songs in Rent . "Without You" is a good title
but it's already been used in My Fair Lady and as a hit for Nilsson and
Mariah Carey. Ira Gershwin used to say:

            
               A title
Is vitalOnce you've itProve it.
            

            A good title usually
indicates a good song idea, a good central lyric thrust, something to resolve.
As pop and theater have drifted apart, it seems that the rock crowd pays more
heed to Gershwin's advice than the musical men. "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go"
(George Michael) or "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car" (Billy Ocean) are
better titles and stronger images than you get in most show tunes. In Rent,
there are few strong song ideas, few resolved lyric thrusts. That's one reason
why it's deficient as drama, but also why it will be hard to play on pop radio.
David Geffen is likely to be disappointed: Rent continues the American
musical's long fade-out to a twilight limbo, caught somewhere between
not-quite-serious music and no-longer-popular pop music.