Midweek Faith Lift
October 16, 2024
What I Have Learned From Musical Theater
Clark Ford, Guest Speaker
As many of you may know, I’ve had a lifelong interest in Musical Theater. I’ve even written a few amateur musicals and put them on right here. Most of those were just staged readings, but nonetheless they were a big deal, involving many rehearsals with a cast and musicians. This got me to thinking about what I have learned from a lifetime of listening to and watching musicals, and from writing, directing, and performing in my own musicals. I’m the kind of person who takes great joy in music and the lyrics of songs, and I have been known to sing parts of songs if the lyrics apply to what is going on, or what I am doing! Of course, I can’t do that in a church service for copyright reasons but the song “Coolest Church” was adapted from a song I wrote for one of my Musicals. And right there, adaptability is a lesson I have learned from Musicals.
But I’d like to talk more about how musicals have impacted my life emotionally and spiritually. Through the music and characters and stories I have heightened my spiritual awareness of Joy, Hope, Peace, and Love. I have learned about the world, and about myself. Of course the written word can move me, but add in music and the experience is over the top for me. Music unlocks my emotions and I feel what the song is about much more than just the words alone can convey. For me, music is a doorway to profound spiritual experience.
We all have our favorite musicals, and songs from musicals, and my list will be different from yours. My taste tends toward the classic shows in the 20th century, and many of the standards from those shows that became popular. But whatever you connect to, I wish for you the experience of joy, excitement, peace, beauty, love, and the hope for humanity that I feel when a musical grabs me and pulls me in. So here’s some of those shows that have pulled me in, and what I have learned from them:
We’ll start with Porgy and Bess. I love the George and Ira Gershwin’s songs and find myself singing them all the time. Summertime “and the living is easy.” I Got Plenty of Nothin – “nothin’s plenty for me;” It Ain’t Necessarily so, “the things that you’re liable to read in the bible…;” the soaring love duet Bess You Is My Woman Now is one of my favorite pieces of all time, and Oh Lord I’m On My Way… “but you’ll be there to take my hand,” as Porgy’s faith in love compels him to travel to New York City to find Bess. Through the character of Porgy, a crippled black man living in Catfish row in South Carolina in the early 20th century, I am inspired to be my best self, to believe in myself, and to believe in love. In I Got Plenty Of Nuthin’, Porgy sings “I ain’t a frettin’ of hell ‘til the time arrives, never worry long as I’m well, never want to strive to be glad to be good what the hell I’m glad I’m alive.” Wow. Me too.
Of all the Rogers and Hammerstein shows, the one that really sticks with me is South Pacific. Fun songs like There Ain’t Nothin Like a Dame, or I’m as Corny as Kansas In August “high as a kite on the 4th of July. If you’ll excuse an expression I use I’m in love with a wonderful guy.” Later, of course, she wanted to Wash that man right out of her hair. But it’s the serious side of South Pacific that is so moving to me. The love song “Some Enchanted Evening,” the sad contemplative song “This Nearly Was Mine,” the beautiful songs Bali Hai and Younger than Springtime, and most importantly, the lesson on racial prejudice, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught, which played into both romances in the show. South Pacific pulls us away from our safe reality in the USA and throws us into WWII in the exotic South Pacific. This was a brand new experience for many of the soldiers and nurses from the U.S., and a new experience for the country itself. It shows how love can lead the way in breaking down our long-held prejudices. Never underestimate love. All you need is love.
An interesting note about Rogers and Hammerstein. Previous to his association with Hammerstein, Richard Rogers worked with Moss Hart as his lyricist for many years. Rogers would write the music, then ask Hart, if he could find him, to write the lyrics. Oscar Hammerstein II was a lyricist who had worked with Jerome Kern on Showboat (among others). When Rogers and Hammerstein got together, Hammerstein wrote the lyrics first, and Rogers then wrote the music to the lyrics. Together they produced many shows, the last of which was The Sound of Music. The last song that Hammerstein wrote before he passed was the beautiful Edelweiss from the Sound of Music. When Hammerstein passed in 1960, the lights of Broadway were dimmed in remembrance. One of Hammerstein’s neighbors was Stephen Sondheim, who he mentored, and who became renowned, writing both music and lyrics of many shows, including Sweeny Todd, Into the Woods, and A Little Night Music. For Sondheim’s first show, however, he took Hammerstein’s advice, and wrote just the lyrics, and that show was West Side Story.
West Side Story with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, is a tour de force of music, lyrics and dance that exploded on the American stage in 1957. Putting these two talents together seems like divine providence to me. The show highlighted the surge of post war II Puerto Rican migration to New York City, and based on Romeo and Juliet, is set amongst the gang wars of the Sharks (Puerto Rican Immigrants) versus the Jets (White Americans). Again love prevails despite ethnic differences with song after song a classic: Tonight, Maria, I Like to Be In America;” “Officer Krumpke You’ve done it again!;” I Feel Pretty, When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying day. Then there’s my favorites, the poignant “There’s a place for us, Somewhere a place for us;” and the gorgeous wedding vows duet One Hand One Heart which inspired me to write my own wedding vows duet for one of my musicals.
The 2013 movie “Saving Mr. Banks” tells the humorous story of how Walt Disney put a full court press on the reluctant author of “Mary Poppins,” Pamela Lyndon Travers,” to sign over the rights for Disney to make the children’s musical and partly animated movie Mary Poppins, in 1964. He did it by playing for her the joyous music that Richard and Robert Sherman had written for the show. Who could resist such tunes as Supercalifragilisticcexpialidocous! “even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious;” A spoonful of sugar “helps the medicine go down;” I Love to Laugh, Chim Chim Cher-ee, Feed the Birds, and Let’s Go Fly a Kite. The music brought the story alive to reach a huge audience worldwide. On the other hand, Travers never did like the animation in the movie. I guess you can’t win them all!
Andrew Lloyd Weber took up the challenge of setting another book, the Bible, to music in his tour de force rock opera Passion Play, Jesus Christ Superstar. I can sing almost every song from this. Although Weber had many other huge musicals – Cats, Evita, and Phantom of the Opera, all with memorable music, Jesus Christ Superstar touches me most deeply. I ran out of gas once singing this music in my car and ignoring the gas gauge! While the music is compelling and dramatic, it is the lyrics by Tim Rice (who also wrote lyrics for the Lion King) that are brilliant, and the core of this show. The story is told from Judas’s perspective. Judas, the 12 disciples, Mary Magdaline, the high priests, Pilot, and even Herod ponder who Jesus really is. From Judas’s cautionary opening number Heaven On Their Minds, Holy week unfolds, with songs like: What’s the Buzz “tell me what’s a happening;” the Plam Sunday song Hosanna, The anointing song Everything’s Alright, Mary Magdaline’s song I Don’t Know How to Love Him, Herod’s song “prove to me that you’re divine, change my water into wine;” The high priests This Jesus Must Die; the title song Jesus Christ, Superstar, and the dramatic Crucifixion. This show asks the question: was Jesus divine? It makes you think, but in the end, the answer is still up to you.
The last two shows I want to talk about are shows about Revolution: Les Miserables set in the Paris Uprising of 1832, and Hamilton, set in the American Revolution.
Les Mis, based on the book by Victor Hugo, is full of aspiration, failure, deceit, desperation, tragedy, redemption, caring, obsession, love, and hope. The songs, with music by Claude-Michael Shonberg, and lyrics by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel are powerful, uplifting, sad, glorious, touching, soaring songs that are truly brilliant: At the End of the Day, I Dreamed a Dream, the satiric Master of the House, the rousing Do You Hear The People Sing and One Day More, the sad On My Own and the heartfelt prayer Bring Him Home are forever etched in my memory. One line, however, stands out as the most meaningful to me, from the Epilogue: “To love another person Is to see the face of God.”
Hamilton is an inspiring show, based on the biography of Alexander Hamilton, and set to hip hop music with absolutely brilliant lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda who played the role of Hamilton on stage for several years. There are so many lyrics, and they go by so fast, I recommend having the lyrics in front of you and listening to the soundtrack before even going to the show. Or even better, listening to the soundtrack over and over like my son and I did as we drove across the U.S. Act I tells the upbeat story of Hamilton’s immigration to the U.S. as a child, and his rise in politics during the Revolutionary war, based on his brilliance as a writer. Act II, however, tells the sad story after the war, of Hamilton’s infidelity to his wife, his mounting political problems, and his tragic death. In the end, however, he is remembered for all the good that he did. The songs and staging of Hamilton are electrifying with a largely non-white cast portraying characters and events in early U.S. history. For me, Hamilton is all about the songs, all 48 of them – there is little or no dialog, just nonstop songs! I developed an appreciation for the verbal power and artistry of hip-hop, and even incorporated some hip-hop into a song I wrote that’s currently playing on some radio stations! Here’s an example of the hip-hop in Hamilton, the lyrics from the opening lines of the show:
“How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore
And a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot
In the Caribbean by providence impoverished
In squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?”
In this little tour of Musicals, I have left out so many wonderful shows, like The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, Annie, Camelot, Wicked, Evita, Oklahoma!, Chicago, Hair, which Richard Rogers hated, Across the Universe, a movie musical of Beatles covers woven into a story set in the 1960s, Little Shop of Horrors, and all the other shows that Alan Menken won best music academy awards for.
I also left out a lot of wonderful songs that stand out on their own. Songs like You’ll Never Walk Alone from Carousel, or Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz, Memory from Cats, I Get A Kick Out Of You from Anything Goes, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes from Roberta, My Funny Valentine from Babes in Arms, and Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered from Pal Joey, both written by Rogers and Hart. The Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha, People from Funny Girl, Send in the Clowns from Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, Old Man River from Kern and Hammerstein’s Showboat, Day by Day from Godspell, Seasons of Love from Rent, and many, many more.
Musicals have opened up my mind and my world largely through their songs, both lyrics and music. The songs have helped me get in touch with my emotions, with my deepest held feelings and beliefs, and with my own spirituality. When something touches me deeply through music it is a spiritual experience for me. I may get goosebumps. I may shed a tear. Everyone responds to music differently, and that is fine. We all learn about the divine in different ways. For me, I love nature, and other people, and ideas, and music. I believe that any experience that we have, of any kind, is an opportunity to learn more about the universe and is an opportunity to connect to the divine. All we need to do is to allow ourselves to see the divine in everything we experience. Music makes that easy for me. It grabs me and says “listen to this!” And so I do. And for that I am very grateful…
