Now, I know this is stretching a point rather, but as this is a book blog I thought I might write about book-writers. Not the writers of books we read in English lessons, though; the book-writers I have in mind are writers less well-known than the other writers with whom they work, the writers of the music and the writers of the lyrics.
Yes, I’m talking about scripts for musicals, known as libretti to the cognoscenti and to the rest of us as the ‘books’.
You may know, for instance (although you may not) that the music and lyrics for Into the Woods and Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street were written by the great Stephen Sondheim but did you know that the book for the former was written by James Lapine and the latter by Hugh Wheeler? And did you know that Sondheim regularly says in interview that first and foremost in the composition of a good show is the book?
Most composers of musicals agree. I have been reliably informed that the three most important things in writing a musical are the book, the book and the book.
We all probably know, or roughly know, how songs work: a matter of the right words set to appropriate music – sheer simplicity, one might think – but what is involved in writing a book? It’s just the dialogue, right? Wrong! In the afore-mentioned Sweeney Todd, for instance, there is hardly any dialogue but Wheeler, is still credited as the book-writer. So what did he do?
Well, for a start he worked with an existing play, by Christopher Bond. Most musicals, in fact, are adaptations of existing plays, novels, short stories or films. Even less for the book-writer to do, then? No!
Musicals are their own genre, so what works in a play is not always going to work in a musical.
The decision is made by the book-writer about which scenes, which characters, which lines from the source material (or, in the case of an original story, from the author’s imagination) will best advance the story and lead fluently to those all-important songs. He or she is the architect of the show. The arc of the narrative, the development (or lack of it) of the characters, the dramatic structure and the tone of the piece are all decided by the book-writer before even a note has been written. She or he is also the structural engineer. Wheeler will have done all this.
Thirdly, Sondheim acknowledges that in replacing with songs the dialogue supplied by the book-writer he will often lift (a few) actual words from the dialogue, assuming there is any. Someone I know who has spent his life writing these things moans that all his best lines have been stolen by lyricists, who are then given the credit. It’s not on record (as it were) which lines or phrases sung by Sweeney, Mrs Lovett and their fellow characters may have originally been Wheeler’s, but inevitably some of them will have been. The composition of musicals is collaborative work, though the apportioning of any subsequent glory is not.
Alan Menken, composer of Little Shop of Horrors, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Sister Act among others, writes: ‘Book writers are fond of mordantly observing that if a musical is a huge success, the book is rarely acknowledged, but if it’s a catastrophic failure, the book is almost always to blame. While it’s true that audiences rarely leave a musical humming the story, woe betide the show that lacks an engrossing, artfully structured one.’
Think about those architectural and engineering analogies: no matter how fancy the cupolas, the gables or the lintels, if the structure isn’t right the whole darn thing falls down.
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