An Iambic Pentameter You Can Dance To: Adding Music to the Bard

Thoughts on Shakespeare: Music and the Bard
The National Post

Tonight Soulpepper opens their production of Twelfth Night: a crucial production since it represents the company's first attempt at Shakespeare. (Even more will be riding on it than was first envisaged, since the intended accompanying production of Romeo and Juliet has sadly been cancelled because Anthony McLean, who plays Romeo, was injured in a car accident.) Unless the director has radically altered the text, which I doubt, this Twelfth Night will contain a great many songs, most of them sung by John Neville in the role of Feste. Neville, in addition to his distinguished classical career, has made several forays into musicals; he didn't have to change his style much. Twelfth Night itself could well be a musical.

In fact, it has been. One of the first and most likeable rock musicals, in the '60s, was a sliced and updated Twelfth Night called Your Own Thing, that being a modern translation of the Shakespearean subtitle, “What You Will”. There have been others, less successful, including one by the composer of The Pajama Game. It was called “Music Is”, as a sort of answer to the question implied in the play's famous first line: "If music be the food of love, play on." You might say that Shakespeare was asking for it. And he got it, again, a few years ago, with a Twelfth Night musical that was actually called “Play On”: a show that used existing Duke Ellington songs that often seemed to have been forced into the action, but once or twice proved startlingly apposite.

Among Shakespeare's mature comedies, Twelfth Night is the only one to have attracted this kind of attention. I don't know of any modern musicals based on Much Ado About Nothing or As You Like It, and those based on A Midsummer Night's Dream or The Merchant of Venice have been calamitous. The later, so-called "bitter comedies" - - All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure -- seem to have escaped altogether; though the low-life scenes of Measure would seem to offer irresistible temptation, while the sexual and political disillusion of Troilus might offer a perfect challenge to Stephen Sondheim. The final, redemptive comedies have also been left alone, unless you count Return to the Forbidden Planet, a stage-spoof of a movie- spoof that has distant ties to The Tempest. Scholars used to refer to this last quartet as "the romances" but they are not what we, conditioned by Hollywood, usually think of as romantic.

But, right at the beginning of Shakespeare's career, there are four comedies that musical-makers have found irresistible, perhaps because the plays themselves are thought to be apprentice-work, ripe for irreverent improvement. (I know of two Shakespeare musicals that got that way because the directors were appalled at the prospect of doing the plays straight.) The best-known of all Shakespeare musicals, currently enjoying a hit revival in New York, is Kiss Me Kate, based on The Taming of the Shrew, a play that inspired Romancin' the One I Love, which had a deservedly brief run in Toronto this year. The second-best is The Boys from Syracuse, whose source, The Comedy of Errors, has inspired at least three subsequent musicals. (One of them, Oh Brother, has a company number that appropriately begins "We love an old story ...") A musical of The Two Gentlemen of Verona was a Tony winner in 1970. This year Kenneth Branagh filmed Love's Labour's Lost as a musical, with a score mainly drawn from Astaire-Rogers movies of the '30s. Eagerly awaited, it sank almost without trace, and in truth it doesn't work. But it has charm; Branagh was on to something.

What exactly?

Shakespearean comedy, and classic American musical comedy, are the two great celebrations of romantic love in the English language. Each is more like the other than either is like anything else, even within their own time. We tend to assume that Shakespeare's comedies are like other Elizabethan comedies, only better. In fact, they're unique. Most of his contemporaries wrote earthy, realistic, satiric farces that reeked of their own contemporary London. Shakespeare's comedies seem, by contrast, to be set in some kind of fairyland, usually Italian (Even 400 years ago Shakespeare was probably being attacked by trendy intellectuals for irrelevance.)

Ben Jonson didn't have the word, but he had the concept). And yet they keep striking us as real, the more acutely because their surfaces are so artificial. They are courtship-plays, leading toward marriage, which is one of the commonest human experiences. Most comedies of course, end with some of the characters paired off but that isn't usually the point of the play. In Shakespeare it is: some plays -- As You Like It, Dream, Much Ado -- are outright wedding celebrations. Love's Labour's ends with marriage postponed, and the maverick nature of this conclusion is explicitly outlined. The Shrew, a really radical piece, marries off its central couple halfway through the play -- a unique occurrence, I think -- and then gets them to work out their relationship.

All this may seem unacceptably idyllic but along the way, doubts get raised. We're dealing with an emotion -- romantic love -- that is evanescent but on which people base their lives. As You Like It, which doesn't have much of a plot (so probably wouldn't make much of a musical), is practically a fantasia on these themes. And so are many musicals, especially the pre-war ones, of which the Astaire- Rogers films are the purest distillation.

They do have plots, farcical ones, but their feelings come out in the dances -- which stand in for sex -- and in the songs, which are, like Shakespearean comedy, bittersweet. They rejoice in the moment --and they preserve it for us, the audience -- but they recognize that it is only a moment. Branagh's Love's Labour's is dogged by the director-star's apparent compulsion to play out his own Astaire fantasy; when he and his buddies sing “I Won't Dance”, you can't help remarking that nobody has asked them to. But there are two uses of Astaire songs that work perfectly. Geraldine McEwan and her fellow-comics pass around “The Way You Look Tonight” with a perfectly-judged sense of their own absurdity that yet leaves the song's magic untouched. (It happens to be my personal favourite, and it must mean a lot to Branagh too; he also used it in Peter's Friends.) At the end, as the men resign themselves to their long-distance engagements, Branagh sings “They Can't Take That Away From Me”; he is hardly the greatest singer but it seems the perfect musical expression of what his character -- and Shakespeare's --is feeling.

I suspect that he was influenced by a recent Royal Shakespeare Company production of Two Gentlemen that wasn't a musical, but that interspersed the scenes with Cole Porter and Irving Berlin songs, performed as commentary. Apparently this worked very well; the songs fitted the mood, even the action, but weren't required to fit the characters. This year's open-air production of Much Ado, set in the 1940s, managed at one point to interpolate Rodgers and Hart's “My Romance”. It fitted; in fact it was magic. (Much Ado, with its sparring hero and heroine, foredoomed to marry, is the American musical incarnate: prototypical Fred-and-Ginger.) When Porter wrote his score for Kiss Me Kate, he honoured his predecessor by turning scraps of lyric in the original into full- blown numbers. He was taking the advice that he places in the mouths of the show's two gangsters: "Brush up your Shakespeare, start quoting him now." The idea of play-within-a-play is implicit in all musicals and in most Shakespeare. In the Shrew, it's an introductory framework; in Kate, it's the whole action. The current Broadway production has its weaknesses, but it's very good at bringing out the parallels between the actor-protagonists' on-and-off-stage lives. In that sense it's more Shakespearean than Shakespeare, as it is in tilting the action toward romance. Alan Jay Lerner did the same when he turned Shaw's Pygmalion into My Fair Lady. When he stopped being Shavian, he became Shakespearean. "Falling in love with love," wrote Lorenz Hart in The Boys from Syracuse, "is falling for make-believe." That's a very Shakespearean sentiment, though perhaps more suited to the more pensive Twelfth Night than to The Comedy of Errors which it's supposed to be musicalizing. (But then, both plays are about twins.) The character who sings it is already married. But if she wasn't, she'd go ahead and get hitched anyway. They all do it. (Or “Cosi Fan Tutte”, as they say in another musical.)