Share the Stage, ‘Glee’ — TV Feels a Song Coming On

I’ve recently discovered Glee. I know, where have I been, right? It’s practically passé already. I don’t watch TV anymore but wait around to check TV box sets out of the public library, so I’m part of the great swath of society that’s behind the curve on TV hipness. Please, don’t tell me how Lost ends.

For these even further behind than I, Glee is a snarky, fast-moving, musical TV series about a high school glee club. Every episode has several musical numbers, usually over-edited in the post-MTV style (partly to disguise amateur dancers?) but always energetic and fun. Since these numbers are presented in the context of performance with a backing band in the room, they are “realistic”. In other words, they’re set in what we call our real world, not a world where people spontaneously burst into song in the street.

But wait a minute. As the series continues, lines of reality become blurred. Some numbers are presented as taking place partly or entirely inside a character’s head. For example, the third episode in season one features Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley) participating in a fundraising car-wash when she breaks a windshield. This breaking really happens, but the event triggers a fully choreographed number in which she sings “Break Your Windows”. That’s understood as imaginary because the person she’s talking to never notices it.

Without quite crossing the line, this flirts with the conventions of the integrated musical (e.g., Singin’ in the Rain or Oklahoma), which are set in an alternate universe of musicality. A similar example is in the ninth episode, when wheelchair-bound Artie Abrams (Kevin McHale) sings “Dancing with Myself” while imagining himself in various locales. This prefigures his even more spectacular imagining of “Safety Dance” later in the season.

The extras on the Season One DVD include the typical making-of blather. Gary Newman, chairman of 20th Century Fox, is quoted saying “The idea of a musical on television has rarely been done and almost never successfully.” Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly chimes in, “When you’re dealing with a musical on television, there’s not a long rich history. This is not a cop show. There’s not a long rich history of these things working.”

Both men are correct, success-wise. That’s why the clearest precursor to Glee that most people can think of is Fame, an ’80s series based on the film of the same name. That was also set at a high school, New York’s School for the Performing Arts. Like Glee, the numbers were realistically presented as rehearsals or performances, in this case with eye-catching choreography by Debbie Allen. It’s worth noting that one episode (“Not in Kansas Anymore”) evoked Hollywood’s tradition of the spontaneous musical for a plot in which a girl imagines herself as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and this event is explained as a dream.

Although many viewers probably can’t go farther than Glee and Fame in imagining TV musicals, the history of this genre bears some examination, and that’s the subject of today’s class. Come with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear as we explore the long, rich and strange history of TV’s forgotten musicals.

A Little Variety

As a series genre, it’s true that musicals haven’t been like cop shows or westerns. However, the musical variety show was once one of the tube’s staple offerings. Before the genre finally expired, it seemed that everyone who had a top 10 hit got their own show, at least a four-week summer series. Many shows ran for years built around such stars as Jackie Gleason, Carol Burnett, Andy Williams, Dean Martin, Sonny & Cher, and on and on. All these shows had musical skits in addition to the solo songs and comedy sketches. Ed Sullivan even liked to stage scenes from currently popular Broadway shows starring the original cast.

The recent popularity of American Idol and the swarm of song and dance contests in its wake testifies to the vacuum of this genre’s absence as felt by the public. Where traditional variety shows were usually centered on a certain star (the myth of celebrity), today’s model centers on the myths of competition and success.

Actually, the second ever #1 series on national American TV, according to the Nielsen ratings, was such a competition, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts of the 1951-52 season. The #2 series that season, which had been #1 the season before, was Texaco Star Theatre or The Milton Berle Show. For a couple of years in the ’50s, Berle’s format was loose enough that sometimes the episode was devoted to an original musical, such as Gore Vidal’s satirical State of Confusion (18 October 1955). Indeed, it was common into the ’60s to see one-shot musicals on TV, either as specials or as part of anthology series (another staple of early TV), and these musicals included both Broadway adaptations and TV originals.

Two examples have recently been issued on DVD by the Archive of American Television. Ethel Merman re-created her Broadway hit Anything Goes in a loose truncation of Cole Porter’s show, throwing in a few famous songs that weren’t even in the original. It aired on NBC’s Colgate Comedy Hour on 28 February 1954. (The same year, Merman starred in a CBS production of Porter’s Panama Hattie, another of her hit shows.) This still fresh gem co-stars an entirely at ease Frank Sinatra and a delightful Bert Lahr, who provides the highlight: a knockout duet with Merman on “Friendship”. This live broadcast survived because Merman kept a kinescope (filmed off a monitor during broadcast). The episode’s producer was songwriter Jule Styne, who would star Merman in Gypsy, co-written with Stephen Sondheim.

DVD: Evening Primrose

Film: Evening Primrose

Director: Paul Bogart

Cast: Anthony Perkins, Dorothy Stickney

Distributor: Entertainment One

Release date: 2010-10-26

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/b/barrett-eveningprimrose-cvr.jpgThat’s a good segue to the other DVD, Sondheim’s Evening Primrose, an original TV musical made for ABC Stage 67. It stars Anthony Perkins as a frustrated poet who escapes from the hectic world by hiding in a department store overnight. He discovers that many others have had the same idea, and there’s an aged autocracy of refugees who have lived in the store for decades. He falls in love with Charmian Carr–yes, this is the other musical project of Little Miss “16 Going on 17” from The Sound of Music, and she’s great on a haunting ballad called “I Remember Snow”. This is a weird story of yearning and loss, adapted by James Goldman from a story by John Collier. John Houseman produced it. Sadly, although broadcast in color, it survives only in this black and white kinescope.

For the record, producer Hubbell Robinson’s ABC Stage 67 (1966-67) was the last gasp of network TV’s general anthology format, which would soon be essentially replaced by the rise in TV movies. This series broadcast several original musicals, including Richard (Damn Yankees) Adler’s Olympus 7-0000, with Donald O’Connor as Greek god Hermes helping a football team; Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof) adapting Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost with Michael Redgrave and Peter Noone (Herman’s Hermits); Burt Bacharach & Hal David’s On the Flip Side, with Joanie Summers as an angel who helps Rick Nelson; and Jule Styne, Betty Comden & Adolph Greene’s I’m Getting Married with Anne Bancroft and Dick Shawn.

Sound amazing? It reveals something about this cultural and televisual moment that the series aired a salute to the songs of Rodgers & Hart as performed by Bobby Darin, The Supremes, Petula Clark, The Mamas and the Papas, and Count Basie (where’s the tape of that?!), but the network refused to allow the series to air Bob Dylan’s own documentary about his electric European tour, Eat the Document, with appearances by John Lennon and Johnny Cash. Today, both episodes sound too hip for the room. Or too old for the room (ouch).

Have we already leaped to the death of the anthology? Too soon. A brief stroll through the glory days of musical comedy broadcasts should begin with NBC, where an hour-long series called Musical Comedy Time (1950-51) showed items like an Anything Goes with Martha Raye. In 1951, the network first aired Gian-Carlo Menotti’s Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, composed for TV. (A new version was taped in 1963.) In 1952 began a series of specials called NBC Opera Theatre with such productions as Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd and Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti.

Then came Max Liebman Presents (1954-56), a monthly series of specials on Saturdays and Sundays. (Liebman had been the producer of Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.) The Sunday shows were usually revues while the Saturday shows were musicals, including Lady in the Dark, Babes in Toyland, A Connecticut Yankee, and The Merry Widow. NBC was a pioneer in color broadcasting, and at least one of these, Satins and Spurs with Betty Hutton, was in color.

Another NBC project was Fred Coe’s monthly Producers’ Showcase, which broadcast the acclaimed Peter Pan starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard. It first aired 7 March 1955, was restaged 9 January 1956, and finally an oft-rerun color taping was made in 1960. Other productions included a musical version of Our Town (19 September 1955) with Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra; and something called The Lord Don’t Play Favorites (17 September 1956) with Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Kay Starr and Dick Haymes.

Other NBC musicals, according to Alex McNeil’s Total Television, included Svengali and the Blonde (30 July 1955) with Carol Channing and Basil Rathbone, One Touch of Venus (27 August 1955), Marco Polo (14 April 1956) co-written by Neil Simon, Mr. Broadway (11 May 1957) with Mickey Rooney as George M. Cohan, Pinocchio (13 October 1957) also with Rooney, The Pied Piper of Hamelin (26 November 1957) with Van Johnson, Annie Get Your Gun (the following day!) with Mary Martin and John Raitt, and Roberta (19 September 1958) with Bob Hope and Anna Maria Alberghetti.

CBS got into the act during 1955-56 with monthly colors specials called Ford Star Jubilee, including Bing Crosby and Julie Andrews in High Tor (10 March 1956). Later CBS items include Wonderful Town (30 November 1958) with Rosalind Russell reprising her Broadway role, The Gift of the Magi (9 December 1958) with Gordon MacRae, Meet Me in St. Louis (26 April 1959) with Jane Powell and Tab Hunter, and The Bells of St. Mary’s (27 October 1959) with Claudette Colbert and Robert Preston.

Another CBS project was DuPont Show of the Month (1957-61), which aired Aladdin (21 February 1958), an original TV musical by none other than Cole Porter, with a book by S.J. Perelman. It starred Cyril Ritchard, who always played Captain Hook to Mary Martin’s Peter Pan, and co-starred Sal Mineo, Basil Rathbone and Anna Maria Alberghetti.

One of the CBS’ greatests coups was Cinderella, a wonderful Rodgers & Hammerstein production written for TV. First it was broadcast live with Julie Andrews in 1957. Then came a taped color production with Lesley Ann Warren in 1965, repeated many times. Disney made yet a third version with Brandy in 1997. All are on DVD.

We’re barely scratching the surface of these musical broadcasts. The authority on this subject seems to be John Kenrick’s website Musicals101.com, which has a lengthy history of TV musicals going back to the pre-coaxial days of 1944 when something called The Boys from Boise aired 28 September on the DuMont Network. This may lead you to conclude that there truly is a long, rich history that’s been forgotten, since these mostly live productions are either vanished or, when we’re lucky, in black and white kinescopes and tapes at Chicago’s Museum of Broadcast Communications, or Los Angeles and New York’s Museum of TV and Radio.

Musical Sitcomedy

I mentioned the #1 programs of the 1950-51 and 1951-52 seasons. Godfrey’s show dropped to #2 for 1952-53 because #1 was a show you might have heard of, I Love Lucy. You may not be used to thinking of it as a musical. A staple of the show was performances by Desi Arnaz, whose character ran a nightclub. This is less clear if you watched this series on its endless syndicated reruns, where those numbers were often chopped out to make room for more commercials. The parts that got left in were those where Lucy inveigled herself into the proceedings, and these were legion.

As much as everyone recalls the chocolate-eating and grape-stomping and Vitameatavegamin, I fondly recall musical moments such as Lucy’s dream where Fred and Ethel play a dragon, and the Gypsy operetta where the sets are repossessed, and Lucy and Ethel singing an acrimonious duet of “Friendship”, and the wonderful Albuquerque episode where Ethel regales her home town with “Shortnin’ Bread” amid background antics. Most of all, there’s an exhilarating scene at the start of their Hollywood arc where the four stars cross into the world of the spontanous musical for perhaps the only time: they launch into “California Here I Come” while driving, backed by invisible orchestra. I believe the exhilaration comes as much from breaking the genre barrier as from the sentiment itself.

We can’t just say “We’re bursting into song now.” We have to say “If only we believed in bursting into song, this is how we’d do it, only of course we’re not really doing it, even though we are.” It’s the postmodern curse.

This point causes us to consider the degree to which some sitcoms relied upon music. The shows starring Jack Benny and George Burns & Gracie Allen were fluid combinations of sitcom and musical variety, and many other shows were about people who worked in show biz for some reason. Even Ozzie & Harriet Nelson found that their son Ricky was interested in becoming a pop star, which led to several examples of performance on that long-running series. Indeed, it sparked a ripple of other young sitcom players trying their luck on their own shows.

Another convention was the musical guest who happens to drop by for no particular reason, such as when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs would show up on The Beverly Hillbillies and the show would bust into a hoedown and a hootenanny. Still another sitcom convention is “putting on a show”. Perhaps it’s not as frequent as “the visiting relative” but it’s ahead of “the bump on the head causes amnesia” and probably ties with “the evil twin”.

For example, in an earlier installment of Canon Fodder I reviewed a late ’60s offering called The Mothers in Law, a Desi Arnaz production with some of Lucy’s writers. (‘The Mothers-In-Law’: Just for Good Measure, We’ll Give Everyone the Intelligence of a Radish, 31 August 2010.) Plots commonly had the characters putting on a charity fundraiser or some such scheme. These were excuses for the actors simply to indulge in pure performance, so that the show was at least a semi-musical. Arnaz even dropped by a few times, so we had both “the musical guest” and “putting on a show”. For that matter, Ozzie Nelson dropped by for such a combo.

At the risk of introducing a tangent, it wasn’t unusual for jazzy crime shows about private eyes to incorporate musical performance by way of characters who worked in nightclubs. Peter Gunn, Mr. Lucky, Johnny Staccato and 77 Sunset Strip fall into this category. Nobody has ever really thought of them as musical hybrids, but like the sitcoms, they all subscribed to the theory that the plot could stop for a song in the name of entertainment and atmosphere.

Aside from this incidental injection of music into generally non-musical plots, I’m aware of at least three sitcoms that were outright musicals, each of a different type.

The forgotten That’s Life (1968-69) was a one-hour musical comedy that followed the romance and marriage of a young couple played by Robert Morse (fresh from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, now on Mad Men) and E.J. Peaker. The first episode had George Burns, Tony Randall and The Turtles. Later guests included Louis Armstrong, Ethel Merman, Liza Minnelli, Nancy Wilson, Robert Goulet, Paul Lynde, Mel Tormé, Flip Wilson, Mahalia Jackson, Sid Caesar, Betty White, Shelley Winters, the Muppets, Phil Silvers, Goldie Hawn, Agnes Moorhead, Lesley Uggams, Rodney Dangerfield, Phyllis Diller, and Little Anthony and the Imperials. I’ve been curious to see this thing for decades and have just about given up hope.

A show that has stayed in the public memory, though it only lasted two years, was The Monkees (1966-68), starring the “Pre-Fab Four” in a series that, while conceived as a calculated riff on the Beatles movies, was also its own groundbreaking formal curiosity. As in the Beatles films, the surreal, off-the-cuff action halted periodically for performances known for their highly-edited, gag-oriented, expressively visual nature.

In between the two styles lies The Partridge Family (1970-74), a good example of a sitcom with musical performance built into it in a natural, realistic way. It was on during the wrong era, however, for the hit sitcoms of the early ’70s were about social relevance, and had no time for music aside from the theme songs presented as mini-numbers or music videos. Still, with David Cassidy selling hit records, the little girls understood.

Midway through the decade, Happy Days (inspired by the film American Graffiti) became a hit with emphasis on nostalgic pop songs used as window dressing. It wasn’t a musical, but like most sitcoms used “the musical guest” and “putting on a show”. This series and Laverne & Shirley took a step back from relevance and angst toward the tradition of the good-time sitcom, where musical interludes are more welcome. The nostalgic context underlined this.

In England, Dennis Potter virtually invented his own genre of postmodern-nostalgia with serials such as Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, whose characters imagined themselves into elaborately movie-like numbers. Potter is an important harbinger of the tendency in Glee to incorporate elements signalled as “imaginary” into its “real” numbers.

In the 1980s, an episode of Taxi about the characters’ fantasies ended with Marilu Henner leading the cast in a flashy Broadway-style number. That was another positioning of the musical number as self-consciously “imaginary”, which in itself signals a lack of belief in the old-fashioned alternative reality of the musical, or rather an attempt to recapture that innocence by mediating it through our “reality”. In other words, he continued laboriously, we can’t just say “We’re bursting into song now.” We have to say “If only we believed in bursting into song, this is how we’d do it, only of course we’re not really doing it, even though we are.” It’s the postmodern curse.

More recently, The Drew Carey Show (1995-2004) felt the spirit come upon it with no need for apology. It celebrated the classic musical by staging a spontaneous number in the finale of each season. That reminds us that The Simpsons has been known to burst into song. Somehow it doesn’t feel strange in a cartoon, and yet they’re still pretty self-conscious about it, as when Milhouse declares that they should express their feelings Broadway-style. The show’s winks and nods range from a re-imagining of “Kids” (from Bye Bye Birdie) to a Bollywood number for the character Apu.

Other cartoon shows burst into song, from South Park to Family Guy, because it still feels natural and acceptable for something as openly unreal as animation to erupt into music. Perhaps this is because everyone who grew up watching cartoons and kids’ shows had the musical world injected via cathode ray into their veins. Kids’ entertainment from The Singing Lady to Captain Kangaroo to Sesame Street to The Muppet Show depended on the conventions of the musical to allow their characters to express themselves Broadway-style. Perhaps this leads some to believe not only that musicals are “unrealistic” but actually somehow childish, something to be outgrown.

Melo-Dramas

The aforementioned The Monkees has often been credited as a pre-cursor to MTV. There were many precursors, including the musical variety shows we’ve already mentioned. Shows like Sullivan’s indulged in increasingly psychedelic visual effects as TV moved into the ’60s and ’70s, as did the plethora of musical specials that still dotted the TV landscape. After those programs became as scarce as the dodo on network TV in the ’80s, MTV kept the musical format alive, conditioning the post-rock generation to accept visual narratives with music. These little narratives were their own context and not part of a larger narrative; still, music videos are frankly musicals.

MTV cannot be overlooked as an influence upon stressing a new sense of music in TV drama, not through actual numbers but through the foregrounding of pop songs. Miami Vice, one of those what-you-call iconic shows of the ’80s, had its high concept summarized as “MTV cops”. Today, every hospital drama and cop show that wants to end on a poignant note suddenly plays some alternative singer-songwriter over the final scene. Frankly, it’s one of the more irritating TV conventions of the last 20 years.

Since music videos are a kind of advertising film, it’s appropriate to emphasize the most common element on commercial TV: the commercials. Many of these are musicals. This has always been true, and their evolution as musicals shows the evolution of the musical’s place in the culture. The earliest examples are about people unapologetically shouting out their jingles and send-ups. “Oh, we’re the men of Texaco. We work from Maine to Mexico” was how it went in Milton Berle’s day. This strain never died. It’s been heard in everything from “Plop plop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is” to songs about cat chow.

We can see the postmodern wink of embarrassment creeping into Stan Freberg’s classic 1970 commercial when housewife Ann Miller suddenly pulls off her skirt and starts tap-tap-tapping as the walls of her kitchen pull away, leading to her husband’s punchline, “Why do you have to make such a big production out of everything?” Even as old-style conventions were being laughed at, the new conventions of the Flower Power era were being co-opted in musical ads aimed at the young and hip. Madison Avenue wanted to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony; it wanted to buy the world a Coke and keep it company. It was the real thing.

More recently, the link between the music video and the TV commercial has been cemented with dazzling commercials for cars and perfume and wireless services, and any number of websites are now devoted to answering viewers’ questions about “What was that song in that commercial?” Commercials for Target have been especially savvy and eclectic. TV commercials are my primary evidence that the musical never died in popular culture, just as they’re also evidence that silent cinema never died. But that’s another topic.

A variety of highlights can be noted in the evolution of TV drama over the last 30 years. Moonlighting, which blew like a comet across the Nielsen ratings and the public consciousness, evoked a retro sense of style and romance in various ways, including an indulgence in musical moments. This was a show that got away with having Bruce Willis lead the crowd in a rousing rendition of “Good Loving” during an episode based on The Taming of the Shrew, or breaking into a dance choreographed by Stanley Donen in “Big Man on Mulberry Street”. Notice how the revisiting of passé conventions can seem fresh and subversive.

Twin Peaks (another comet) emphasized music as part of its texture, especially when nothing else was going on and especially in the otherwordly performances of Julee Cruise, who showed up in a few episodes singing ethereal originals by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti. David E. Kelley’s Ally McBeal regularly featured nightclub performances by Vonda Shepard. One episode of Kelley’s Chicago Hope, “Brain Salad Surgery”, was a musical. The explanation: it’s a hallucination. Fans of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer will never forget the favorite “Once More With Feeling”, which is entirely sung. The explanation: it’s a curse!

Then there was Steven Bochco’s infamously ambitious Cop Rock (1990), an honest-to-Murgatroyd police musical that felt exactly like warmed over Hill Street Blues with musical interruptions. The premiere had a simple, outstanding ballad written by Randy Newman, but most of the series made it plain that the directors were more comfortable with cop drama than choreography. Fortunately, Bochco hit upon a more popular formula with warmed-over Hill Street plus nudity for NYPD Blue. (Digression: Wasn’t that groundbreaking hit supposed to trigger a wave of partial nudity and “B.S.” profanity all over commercial network TV? Why didn’t that happen?)

We’ve already mentioned Fame, the most successful and long-running musical series before Glee. It has more in common with Glee than does Disney’s phenomenally popular High School Musical franchise, because the latter whole-heartedly commits itself to the classic spontanous form rather than the rationalized performance-oriented form of musical drama. However, without the example of its popularity in the new millennium, it’s unlikely that Fox would have taken a chance on Glee.

And that’s where we came in, folks. We hope you liked our show. We know you’re rooting for us, but now we have to go-o-o-o-o….