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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that takes you deep inside the history of the Broadway musical, with a special emphasis on the immigrant Jewish, queer, and black artists who invented it. I'm David Armstrong, and this is the third and final segment of my conversation with Albert Evans, in which we explore the double songs of Broadway, which, as you will hear, have an incredibly long and action-packed history, stretching from the earliest decades of the Broadway musical right up to shows that are on the boards today. On this episode, we explore how this show-stopping song form made its way from the Golden Age into the modern era of Broadway via the work of such songwriters as Jerry Herman, Leonard Bernstein, Bach and Harnick, Kander and Ebb, Maltby and Shire, Stephen Schwartz, Stephen Sondheim, Marvin Hamlisch, Alan Menken, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and more.

If you missed the first two episodes in this series, you may want to catch up with those before listening to this one, although it's not really necessary. As always, I want to send my heartfelt thanks to the patrons of Broadway Nation, whose generous support helps me to continue researching and exploring this rich history, and produce this new season of podcast. If you, too, would like to become a patron, please listen for the information at the end of the episode. Now, here we go! This is now going to bring us to three songs of the Golden Age of Broadway, one of them from off-Broadway, but still during this period, that I think deserve extra credits, that get the gold star for extra effort, added value, because they are using more than two songs to do this trick with. I think all of them are remarkable, and they do it in different ways and to different degrees.

[2:08] Albert Evans: Let's start first with Fiddler on the Roof. Bach and Harnick do this in the opening number of Fiddler on the Roof, "Tradition," one of the most famous songs in the whole musical theater canon. And they do it in the middle section of the song, where each of the groups, the mothers, the fathers, the sons, and the daughters, introduce themselves, each with a different tune. So we hear them each separately. So first, we hear the fathers, who day and night must scramble for a living.

[3:02] David Armstrong: Exactly. And then the sons have their section, and the mothers, now it's only eight bars of music that they have to pull this off with. But still, they do it very effectively to create this community and to create the conflicting values in the community, to a certain extent, in this section when all of the groups sing at the same time and sing their melodies.

[5:50] Albert Evans: One thing that this does really well is that there is a clash. They're not perfectly harmonious with each other, but I think that that is deliberate. I think that expresses the vitality of this community.

[6:00] David Armstrong: And also the inherent conflict. I think you're absolutely right. It's, unlike many of these other double songs, it doesn't go together perfectly. It is sort of clashing with one another to a great extent. You feel some tension when it's happening. And, of course, the story is going to be about the tension between the children and the parents, between the generations, is what the entire story of Fiddler on the Roof is going to be about. And I do think that's interesting that we get a sense of that tension right here in this moment, which is really celebrating the whole community. It's also demonstrating, and not just in this, that there are tensions within the community and in the world outside of the community.

[6:44] Albert Evans: So that's 1964. Just two years before that, in 1960, we have the Off-Broadway version of this, which I think is one of your favorites.

[6:52] David Armstrong: I know it is. I have a lot of affection for this as well, because when I was in college, I was in a production of Little Mary Sunshine, which is the show we're talking about. And here, Rick Busoyan, the very talented composer, lyricist, and book writer, I believe.

[7:08] Albert Evans: Yeah, he did it all.

[7:09] David Armstrong: He did it all. One of the few people who could pull that off with a very effective show created a triple song where they do playing croquet. The young ladies from Eastchester Finishing School are playing croquet. Then they try something even more daring, which is swinging. And then the forest rangers enter, and they sing, "How Do You Do?" And somehow, we hear all three of these parts go together quite satisfyingly. And this, of course, is a spoof of both of the operettas and the musical comedies of the 1920s. So the forest rangers are the most polite forest rangers you've ever seen, and the girls are the most innocent. Oh, let's go swing on those swings. Do we dare?

[7:54] Albert Evans: So all of the songs are waltzes, which would seem that would make this very hard to do, but somehow he creates three songs that you hear all three of them, even though they're all in waltz time. He doesn't have the advantage of contrasting rhythms in this case. And that's sort of the miraculous thing. When they all three go together, you have half of the girls singing, playing croquet, half singing, swinging, swinging. And so you would think they would just get jumbled up, but there's something about the way he wrote it. He left room. He must have written the music first, I think, instead of the lyrics. Of course, it helps that the forest rangers are singing in a different register than the ladies.

[10:29] ♪ Musical number: "Playing Croquet/Swinging/How Do You Do?" — performed by the cast of Little Mary Sunshine ♪

[12:17] David Armstrong: So that's the beginning of the decade. Now we've jumped to the end of the decade, 1969, with an unsuccessful show, but one that the score of is revered in many ways. And this is, of course, Dear World, which starred Angela Lansbury. Here, I think this might win the prize of the composer who gets the gold star. And now we have another composer-lyricist, which maybe is an advantage in that you can sort of think of this on all levels at the same time. It's like three-level chess in a way. As you're writing, thinking in the music and the lyrics, and it's all coming together simultaneously, you're able to work this out. And here, this is the tea party sequence that we're talking about, where the madwoman of Shio, which is, of course, the central character in the show, meets with the other madwomen at a tea party, and all these women come together.

Each have their own sections, very extended sections, which is why I think this might win the gold star. These are not just 16 bars or 8 bars where he has to sustain this. He's sustaining this over very long sequences, which somehow still miraculously all go together. I think it's one of Jerry Herman's very best numbers.

[13:26] Albert Evans: And the real challenge, I think, is they sort of all have the same sort of quaver-y old lady voices.

[13:34] Albert Evans: Although I remember this one, and I remember that one.

[13:38] David Armstrong: Except for Angela Lansbury, who gets to belt.

[13:41] Albert Evans: Yeah, she gets to belt.

[13:42] David Armstrong: But even she has that very sort of civilized voice.

[13:45] Albert Evans: Yeah, yeah.

[13:46] David Armstrong: And of course, they each get to do their part by themselves, and then they all go on top of each other. So you do know what they're talking about. But it is just complete madness, but it's so charming.

[21:20] David Armstrong: Now this jumps us into the modern era, as I call it. This technique doesn't go away and in fact is embraced by the cutting edge younger songwriters in many cases, the sort of new generation who's coming on board in the late 1960s and early 70s who also want to do this technique, sometimes in direct reference to the Silver Age, to Irving Berlin. And in fact, the first example of this is from 1971. This is from Godspell, the giant off-Broadway hit, which will eventually go to Broadway, but runs for years off-Broadway, has a tremendous effect on the culture. It's hard for people to understand now, I think, the impact that Godspell had at the time, how controversial it was, how embraced it was, how day by day dominated the charts, even with what I think is a really terrible recording of the original cast singing it.

But somehow it became a giant hit and put Stephen Schwartz, of course, on the map, you know, very shortly after college, he creates this show and becomes a major player in the Broadway world, which had to have been off-putting to some of the more traditional, more the long-standing people, because who's this kid? I think he's 23 or 24 years old at the time. But we're going to hear Stephen Schwartz now talk about, in an interview that was done a few years ago, where he talked about why he wanted to emulate Irving Berlin in creating the song, Yes, It's All for the Best for Godspell.

[22:57] Stephen Schwartz: A lot of the Godspell score is basically resetting of Episcopal hymns, which is one of the reasons I was able to write it so quickly, because I didn't have to write very many lyrics. The lyrics already existed and lyrics are what, at least for me, take a lot of time. Music happens pretty quickly. And I had met with the director, John Michael, and we would go through, well, we'll do this here and we'll do this song here and this will be for this character and this will be for that character. This is kind of what we're trying to accomplish in the song. We're just trying to define the assignment. And then I would have the lyrics of this hymn and I'd put them up on the piano and I'd sit there and look at them and just start to play.

And that's how most of it got written. And then there were a couple of things, most specifically All for the Best, that I said, you know, if we're telling the story and the major relationship is between these two characters of Jesus and Judas, if you were doing a traditional musical where nobody knew the story when they walked in and nobody had any investment in these characters, they'd have to do a number together. So you establish their friendship. So when the friendship changes or dissolves or evolves at the end and Judas betrays Jesus, there's some investment you've made in that relationship. So we found a spot and I wrote All for the Best as a sort of Irving Berlin number. I basically took the idea from something I've always admired, like the Irving Berlin song, You're Just in Love in Call Me Madam, where someone sings, you know, I hear music and there's no one there.

And then Ethel Merman sings, you don't need analyzing. And then magically they go together and they sing them at the same time, which I just always thought was the coolest thing ever. So I basically just stole that idea and did it for Jesus and Judas.

[25:22] David Armstrong: And that would not be the last time Stephen Schwartz by any means would use this technique. He will do it again in his second smash hit Broadway musical, The Magic Show, with the song Two's Company, and very much sort of again using the Berlin technique of two different types of people who want two different kinds of experiences to happen. One using sort of a very jazzy, almost sort of bebop kind of feel.

[25:50] Albert Evans: Yeah, sort of what Lambert, Hendrix, and Ross had started doing in the 50s and 60s.

[25:55] David Armstrong: Right, he's definitely emulating that with like Cloudburst is their most famous song, right?

[26:00] Albert Evans: Yeah, and they would take instrumental jazz melodies that originally didn't have lyrics and they would put lyrics to them, that was sort of their main gimmick. And they did it brilliantly.

[26:11] David Armstrong: And of course, the Manhattan Transfer would emulate that later. And Stephen Schwartz is here emulating that, this particular song.

[28:21] David Armstrong: We'll come back to Stephen Schwartz at the end of the episode because he will again use this technique in his most recent shows. But in that same year as Stephen Schwartz is doing this in Godspell, the other Stephen, Stephen Sondheim, will also use this technique. Don't go away, Albert and I will be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break.

[29:03] David Armstrong: Hi, this is David Armstrong, and I'm thrilled to announce a new and exciting initiative. Broadway Nation is teaming up with Like Minds Travel to create unique Broadway and Broadway history-related travel experiences designed especially for intrepid lovers of musical theater. Yes, musical theater happens around the world, and our first adventure will take us to two historic and legendary capitals of musical theater, Vienna and Budapest. This coming spring from May 16 to 27, we will experience the many wonders of these spectacular cities, including world-class performances of six musicals and operettas, both classic and new. You can find the full itinerary at likemindstravel.com, but here's just a brief preview of what we have planned.

Nine nights of accommodations in four-star hotels, three productions at the acclaimed Vienna Volksoper, including a new production of Hello, Dolly! and the rare opportunities to see The White Horse Inn, the 1936 Broadway hit that even during the Depression became an international sensation, and Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The Seven Deadly Sins. We'll also see Maria Theresia the Musical at Vienna's Rönecker Theater. This epic new musical is billed as a vivid portrait of power, passion, and historical change, and it tells the story of one of the most influential monarchs of the 18th century. We'll then travel to Budapest to see two productions at the Budapest Operetta and Erkel Theaters. Now, these renowned companies have not yet released their spring schedules, but based on their repertoire, the possibilities are very exciting.

And of course, we'll also have time to take in the many wonders of these amazing destinations. You can find a detailed itinerary and pricing at likemindstravel.com. That's L-I-K-E-M-I-N-D-S travel.com. I can't wait to take you to Europe on a musical theater adventure. Come along!

[31:12] David Armstrong: The other Stephen, Stephen Sondheim, will also use this technique. And in reference probably to Irving Berlin, this is for the show Follies, where many of the songs are emulating the songs from the silver age of Broadway, from the Great American Songbook. The song we're talking about now is You're Gonna Love Tomorrow. What's unique about this, it is being written as two duets that go against each other, not just two solos that go together. And I don't know that there's another example of that. I don't know, at least one where each of the duet couples, they're having conversations. They're not completely on the same page. You may do this, I may, okay. They're having a sort of witty repartee between them.

[32:00] Albert Evans: Yeah, so you have four different points of view with only two couples. It's not like we're agreed over here in this couple and so are we. They're still jockeying with each other. Even though it's really still two melodies that go together that have to link up with one another, have to mesh with one another.

[32:17] David Armstrong: Yeah, they're not singing different melodies. They do do harmony though, so occasionally you'll have four-part harmony. So it's a little more complicated game in a certain sense and done very effectively and very much is exactly following the trope that Irving Berlin set out. It's just now amplified with two more people on the stage. And that may be the only time when Stephen Sondheim actually does a traditional double song. Can you think of another one? Am I wrong about that?

[32:46] Albert Evans: No, I think that's correct. He will create versions of this technique. And this is something you and I talked about in preparation for this episode. And I don't mean this in a very pejorative way, but I'm sort of calling fake-out versions of the double song. And this is usually when they're trying to do more than double. And a great example of that would be Now, Later, Soon from A Little Night Music, which fakes us out in that it has three different parts and then he makes it feel like the three parts are all going to go together at the end, but they don't really.

[33:20] David Armstrong: No, when they do seem to come all together, he's actually just taking phrases and ideas and words from the other songs and working them all in counterpoint.

[33:32] Albert Evans: And layering them over the top of Soon. So Anne sings Soon and then she repeats Soon and the other two sections get layered over it and worked around it, which in some ways might be more composerly in a way.

[33:50] David Armstrong: Yeah, it's brilliant. I think it's better than if they just all sang what they sang before.

[34:02] ♪ Musical number: "Now, Later, Soon" — performed by the cast of A Little Night Music ♪

[34:50] David Armstrong: We still get that sort of effect, the stunt aspect of it. We feel like that's what he did. It's only when you go back and investigate it, you realize, oh, he didn't really do that.

[35:01] Albert Evans: No.

[35:01] David Armstrong: He's a fake. And he sort of does that same technique, that sort of same fake-out technique in Pacific Overtures with Please Hello and also in Sweeney Todd with the Kiss Me Quartet. Again, he makes us feel that these songs are, and I guess this is just actual real counterpoint, not a double song or a triple song, but still, we're hearing words and some melodic phrases that we have heard already.

[35:28] Albert Evans: Right, and it's quite captivating and quite masterful, but not exactly what we're talking about. It's sort of an adjacent category. As we continue in the modern era, Kander and Ebb take this up. The song I like very much, but most people won't know very well, from 70, Girls, 70, which is the song Home, which is Mildred Natwick and the cast sing. It's a song we used to sing in college all the time because this album was recently out when I was in college. It was a new sort of exciting show tune that was fun to sing in a classroom setting because everybody got to sing in counterpoint with one another. It was effectively done as a group vocal.

[36:08] David Armstrong: So that's 1971. 1975, Marvin Hamlisch will do this to great effect and quite famously in the finale to A Chorus Line in One, one singular sensation, which has a very memorable countermelody as well. The women enter with one tune and then the men enter with a different section, and then eventually both of those parts will go together. As Maltby and Shire, Richard Maltby, the lyricist, will make clear in their song, which also has a similar title, it's called One Step, where they have a very memorable middle section to the song which talks about this dynamic.

[38:15] David Armstrong: Anything else you want to say about those two songs, Albert?

[38:18] Albert Evans: I don't quite put one in a double song category. I think there is a countermelody, but I don't think you would ever sing that countermelody as a song.

[38:27] David Armstrong: But they do sing it on its own in the show.

[38:30] Albert Evans: Yeah, but they're just prepping us for this. But I think no one would be doing the dishes thing. She walks into a room.

[38:42] David Armstrong: That's interesting.

[38:44] Albert Evans: It's a great ending to the show.

[38:46] David Armstrong: It's very interesting because it does fit our criteria in that in the show they present each thing individually before they go together. But you're right, it wouldn't stand alone by itself if you just sang that part of the song. Whereas Light a Rose, if you just sang that part of it, you'd be perfectly satisfied. And if you just sang the one part of one, you'd go, oh, that's a tune, that's a song.

[39:12] Albert Evans: Right.

[39:10] David Armstrong: But that's just me. Opinions may differ. A couple of other examples of this in the modern era done very effectively, I think, and this sort of will meld into our final subject. But in Little Shop of Horrors in 1982, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman used this technique right in the second opening number of the show. They used this very effectively again to define characters and to differentiate the world. Here we have the general Skid Row song that happens, and then we have Seymour come forward with his own middle section of the song. And the last part of that middle section becomes a theme for he and Audrey to sing in counterpoint to the main theme of the song, and sort of like putting spotlights on them as we're the main characters and we're different from the rest of this world.

[40:43] David Armstrong: It's great playwriting. It's very, very effective. And again, as you said, that song sets up the exposition of the show so brilliantly, we really know everything we need to know to go into the story. I like it when that happens. And then one that surprised me was from the show *Spring Awakening* in 2011, which has a very literal double song, two solo songs that then go together with contrasting points of view. And this is the sequence called "Don't Do Sadness / Blue Wind." I think people might be surprised to realize how close this is to what Irving Berlin was doing. He's taking this idea and putting it into this modern pop rock context. They're both very moody. They both take place in the same musical world, but they're not the same song.

Right. Again, I think this fits our criteria and your criteria, especially Albert, is you could sing each of these divorced from the show and divorced from each other, and it would feel like a perfectly satisfying self-contained song.

[42:28] David Armstrong: So we're going to now move into our final category, which is sort of a spin on this idea, because most of what we've talked about prior to this has been solos, a solo or the barbershop quartet. I still count that as two elements, each singing their own individual song that then go together. Now we're talking about using this technique to create musical excitement in a production number, in a group number, what are often the finales to the first act or the finales to the show or the opening number in some cases. I guess you could put "Skid Row" in this category to a certain extent. But these are now composers who are drawing on this idea to create really dynamic, complex musical impact, especially at the climax of a finale-like sequence.

[43:31] David Armstrong: I think the grandfather of this idea is the "Tonight Quintet" from *West Side Story*, written, of course, by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, where they reintroduce songs that we've heard before in the show, plus new things that are written to go with those songs, and then it builds to a really dramatic climax where many of those pieces overlap and are sung together. I'm always surprised when I revisit this how short it is, because in my mind, it has such impact in the show, but it's actually not a very long sequence.

[44:43] Albert Evans: No, it's not. In fact, it's the perfect length, because it's so impactful because it's short, and then suddenly, bam! It's over, and it just leaves you kind of a little bit shaken.

[44:57] David Armstrong: Yeah, it's so thrilling, and it's not actually the finale to the first act, although it feels like it is, and then it prepares us into what actually happens that night. We go from "tonight," and then they answer it right in front of us, which is great, obviously, and we've talked about this in my book and in other cases, clearly inspired the actual first act finale of *Les Misérables*, where we are all on tenterhooks about what's going to happen tomorrow rather than tonight. And this is another case where very effectively, Bob Lille and Schoenberg use this technique that, again, they're clearly inspired by *West Side Story* and what Bernstein does to create this really thrilling and much more extended sequence than even the "Tonight Quintet."

[45:48] Albert Evans: We see this same technique used by Lin-Manuel Miranda in *In the Heights*, especially in the sequence "96,000," and you and I have looked at this because we use this song to teach with, Albert, and here we have more than two songs that eventually overlap, and some of it is fulfilling all the values of the double song, and some of it is using the Sondheim technique of sort of using it as counterpoint but not literal double songs. We get all that happening in both *Les Mis* and *In the Heights*.

[46:22] Albert Evans: Yeah, and it's sections that are the different players reminding us of what kind of music they sing, and even, like, specifically a song that they sang, but it's not like just a total, let's just copy that over here.

[46:36] David Armstrong: And yet sometimes it does that, too.

[46:38] Albert Evans: Yeah, it does that, too. It just has so many parts, and again, I think it's meant to just knock us back on our heels.

[46:46] David Armstrong: And now we come back to Stephen Schwartz, who does this at least twice in *Wicked*, with both the song "What Is This Feeling," which has a double song aspect to it that builds to this, and again, these are in ensemble production numbers, that creates a tremendous amount of excitement when it kicks in, and it kicks in only for a short amount of times, but it's sort of like a boost.

[47:38] Albert Evans: I feel like Schwartz uses it in both this song and in "One Short Day" to raise the stakes, the musical stakes, the musical excitement of these songs by layering this on top and using the stunt, which he clearly loves. We heard him talk about how much he loves this stunt. He's now using it again for dramatic and musical purposes to create excitement, and of course, he worked directly with Bernstein, so he's learned this firsthand in some ways and has drawn on it all the way up to *Wicked*.

[48:17] David Armstrong: So, Albert, thank you again for joining me to talk about Broadway's double songs. It's an interesting aspect, I think, of Broadway history, and I was surprised to see how long-lasting it was and how ubiquitous it is.

[48:33] Albert Evans: Yeah, it's really interesting how, besides the double songs, how many of the other elements of early musicals have evolved and that we're still using them and going back to them, rediscovering them.

[48:47] Albert Evans: And of course, that's something that always fascinates me. In fact, in the last sentence of my book, I talk about connecting the dots from the earliest days of the Broadway musical, and in this case, the pre-Broadway musical, Gilbert & Sullivan, all the way up to today, because I see it as one sort of continuous continuum, if that's not redundant, just one writer being inspired by and using the techniques and building on the techniques of these great artists of the past. And I find that, for some reason, very satisfying to think about and to explore the idea that everything's connected.

[49:26] David Armstrong: And as we heard in the tea party, everything that was is. And I do think that that's true. And the longer you have your fake pearls, the more real they become. We learned that, too.

[49:37] Albert Evans: Exactly. And as long as we remember these musicals, the better they become, I think, as well.

[49:43] David Armstrong: Well, it's interesting because I think when we were first discovering musicals, I don't think there was such a feeling of there's a heritage there, that there's a continuum. But I think because so many of the methods have been reinvented, once we got actually past the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, that sort of well-made play-type show, the old Broadway tricks came back.

[50:08] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[50:09] David Armstrong: And people rediscovered them, and a certain type of performative, right-to-the-audience quality came back.

[50:16] Albert Evans: And I'm always amazed at how they revised them and reacted to them and reinvented them and rejected them. And yet, they're still doing what they're doing because of the work from the people of the past.

[50:28] David Armstrong: Yeah. And it's all about reaching the audience directly, reaching a live audience, what will get their attention. The things that we can find in the past that did that back in the 20s or the Silver Age, they can be reinvented and made modern.

[50:45] Albert Evans: And nothing seems to be more audience-satisfying and more effective and a better gimmick than one of these double songs.

[50:53] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[51:40] ♪ Musical number: "Home" — performed by the cast of *Wicked* ♪

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