BWW Special Report: PIPPIN's Motown Magic Returns to Broadway

As an undergraduate theater major in the early 1970s, I heard music everywhere. It seemed to pour out of every office and workspace around the department. (And in the LP era, if you wanted more than the radio, this meant schlepping a twenty pound record player and a dozen or so albums from your home to the campus, sometimes requiring back-and-forth trips from the car. If you go to that much trouble, you want to keep the music playing.) In the hushed costume shop with its quietly industrious all female staff, Broadway ruled, with Stephen Sondheim's recent Company and Follies in heavy rotation. It was "men only" in the scene shop where I listened to male balladeers like James Taylor and Gordon Lightfoot while unhappily working off assigned crew hours. Jazz classes (my favorites) in the dance department were conducted to the pre-disco sounds of Isaac Hayes and the Temptations. And late night cast parties were never complete without spins of Bette Midler's first two albums.

However, one album appeared among everyone's stack of LPs, and appealed to butch crew members, arty costume designers, self-serious actors, chorus dancers, male, female, gay, straight, confused, or closeted. Pippin, with a score by twenty-four year old Stephen Schwartz, told the story of the son of Charlemagne, King of France in the late 8^th century, and his quest to "find himself," the saying went forty years ago. It was an odd subject for a musical, but Pippin nevertheless became an instant hit when it opened October 23, 1972 at the Imperial Theater on Broadway, and the original cast album with its distinctive magenta jacket and commedia dell'arte figures appeared soon after on Motown Records. Motown called itself "The Sound of Young America," so Pippin's appearance on the label that was home to The Supremes, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder made it seem cool and current. For a generation of musical theater geeks, Pippin, which returns to Broadway for the first time this season in a new production first presented at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the ne plus ultra of cast recordings-marking the crossroads between the pop sounds that we listened to when we weren't listening to cast albums and more traditional Broadway songwriting.

Pippin's cast album quickly became the new must-have at any gathering around the theater department, and when I began teaching jazz dance classes myself, its opening number, "Magic to Do," with its insinuating piano vamp, accompanied my floor warm-ups. Schwartz, who had studied composition and classical piano, was strongly influenced by contemporary music, from Motown to current singer-songwriters like Laura Nyro, James Taylor, and Carole King, but his score reflected a broader stylistic palette. He also had a keen understanding of the contemporary music and recording scene. R&B ("Magic to Do") and calypso ("Simple Joys") alternated with Gilbert and Sullivan (the rapid-fire patter of Charlemagne's "War is a Science") and vaudeville sing-a-long ("No Time at All" for Pippin's randy grandmother). Wistful ballads "With You" and "Love Song" gave way to slow-building anthems like "Morning Glow" and the finale theme, "Think About the Sun." The album, co-produced by Schwartz and Phil Ramone, brought high gloss theatricality to the score yet sounded like a pop album. Songs faded rather than end with a traditional "button" as performed in the theater, and the addition of studio vocalists gave the ensemble singing a heft it lacked at the Imperial Theater.

Motown was a major backer of Pippin, which gave it the opportunity to not only record and release the cast album, but also publish the score through their Jobete Music Company. When I moved to New York after graduation, I joined the ranks of young dancers toting dog-eared copies of the vocal selections to auditions, sixteen bars of "Corner of the Sky," which for a time was the default audition song for male dancers. Schwartz's kinship with the Motown sound made his score a natural for the label's stable of artists. In a throwback to the once-standard practice of record labels pairing their contractees with songs from shows whose original cast album they were releasing, several Motown stars and groups recorded selections from Pippin. Michael Jackson released an uptempo "Corner of the Sky" and joined his brothers for a Jackson 5 reworking of "Morning Glow." The post-Diana Ross Supremes turned "I Guess I'll Miss the Man" into a full-voiced torch song. Ross herself got with the program, making "Corner of the Sky" a staple in her club act for the next few years. The oddest Motown association with Pippin was "No Time at All," rerecorded and released as a single by the show's originator, Irene Ryan, previously best known as Granny from the popular television series, The Beverly Hillbillies, making her the oldest singer on the Motown roster.

It is easy to underestimate the confusion that reigned after Hair arrived in 1968 and began to change the rules for what a Broadway musical might sound like. Rock had already eroded the dominance of traditional theater music as personified by Broadway songwriters like Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and Jerry Herman. Hair's pulsating and eclectic score by Galt MacDermot, topical and often profane lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, and youthful themes of sex, drugs, and anti-war protests made other 1968 musicals like Hallelujah, Baby! (Styne, Comden, and Green), Golden Rainbow (Walter Marks), and The Happy Time (John Kander and Fred Ebb) seem out of touch. New York Times chief theater critic Clive Barnes declared rock the new sound of Broadway musicals, and Hair "the first Broadway musical for some time to have the authentic voice of today rather than the day before yesterday."

Broadway began to offer new sounds for a new generation, including Galt MacDermot's stew of pop, rock, calypso, and soul for Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971, with lyrics by John Guare), his only post-Hair success; the rhythm and blues-inflected Purlie (1970) by Gary Geld and Peter Udell; and the urban jazz/fusion song cycle of Melvin Van Peebles's Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1971). However, all too often the results resembled Applause (1970) in which awkward rock rhythms were pasted onto a conventional Broadway score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams.

A few notable hybrids had come along, including the songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, whose hit records for Dionne Warwick included "Walk on By," and "I Say a Little Prayer." Promises, Promises (1969), their adaptation of the 1960 Billy Wilder film, The Apartment, brought contemporary pop syncopations and recording studio techniques to Broadway, including a sound environment that utilized unseen vocalists and a greater reliance on amplification both on and off stage. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice created a new model for musical theater when their chart-topping 1969 concept album, Jesus Christ Superstar was transferred to the Broadway stage in 1971. It would take the better part of a decade for the team to refine the rock-concept-album-to-musical-theater model with Evita (1978) and for Jesus Christ Superstar to gain traction as a popular and venerable arena rock attraction. While Sondheim's score for Company (1970) had a glittering modern sensibility, especially in Jonathan Tunick's arrangements, its story of well-dressed and upwardly mobile 30- and 40-something New Yorkers marked it as strictly adult contemporary.

It was at this intersection of pop/rock and theater that Stephen Schwartz would prove so valuable to the Broadway musical of this period. His scores for Godspell and Pippin were written in a pop idiom that marked them as contemporary and accessible to younger audiences but not threatening to older theatergoers. Moreover, they would prove to be ever-so-gently innovative. In The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical, musicologist Mark N. Grant writes that Stephen Schwartz, not Galt MacDermot or Andrew Lloyd Webber, was "the first composer to bring into the Broadway musical the notated backphrasing of melodic rhythm that was characteristic of recorded Motown music, but he superimposed it on the non-Motown eight eighth-notes groove." By formalizing this songwriting approach and the accompanying singing style it demands, Grant calls Schwartz "an unheralded Broadway revolutionary; his unconscious influence on young musical writers of the 1990s like Jonathan Larson is just as evident as that of Sondheim."

During Pippin's development, millions of dollars were being devoted to producing the Broadway progeny of the Hair team. It opened exactly between the premieres of Dude (music by MacDermot and lyrics by Ragni) and Via Galactica (music by MacDermot and lyrics by Christopher Gore). Like Pippin, they embraced similar themes of virtuous yet disaffected young men searching for meaning and rebelling against authority (Via Galactica did it in a futuristic setting played on trampolines, Dude in a theater transformed into a dirt heap). Unlike Pippin, neither show had a director who could harness its basic material into an articulate statement, theatrically presented. In contrast, director-choreographer Bob Fosse brought a hip, theatrical irreverence and pervasive sensuality that undercut the earnestness of Pippin's story. Fosse trumped Broadway's other "youth musicals" by using his knowledge and understanding of a whole history of show business tropes to stage a story with contemporary themes and a pop-rock score. It was a case of current words and music enriched by old-fashioned theatrical craftsmanship.

Pippin has long been a popular title among amateur and school groups, and is produced with regularity in professional theaters. Its episodic and presentational structure makes it an attractive show for directors to attempt different conceptual interpretations. A 2009 co-production by Los Angeles' Center Theater Group and Deaf West Theater featured a mixed cast of hearing and signing actors. Casting two actors as the title character (one hearing-impaired and signing, the other speaking and singing) was, as Charles Isherwood noted in his New York Times review, "a trenchant embodiment of the character's inability to settle on a fixed self, to determine who he really wants to be." In 2011, London's Menier Chocolate Factory presented the show as a videogame similar to Second Life, the virtual reality world, with The Players reconceived as avatars. A recent production by the Kansas City (Missouri) Repertory Theatre presented the show in a rock concert format with staging reminiscent of the wild, head-banging energy of punk bands.

Since it closed in 1977, Pippin has been performed everywhere except on Broadway while other, less successful musicals have been revived more than once. With Stephen Schwartz's blockbuster Wicked (2003) continuing to play to capacity audiences, the time seems right for its return. But can Pippin escape the era in which it was conceived and produced? Will its soft-rock score with the earnest imagery of its lyrics ("Rivers belong where they can ramble/Eagles belong where they can fly/I've got to be where my spirit can run free/Gotta find my corner of the sky") seem quaint today? How will its self-absorbed, privileged young prince connect with audiences who have experienced the sexual turmoil and suicides of the teenagers of Spring Awakening or the diminished economic prospects of the 21^st century young Americans in American Idiot? Schwartz's equally beloved Godspell could not sustain a run when it was revived on Broadway in 2011, so what will Pippin's chances be in 2013?

Its fate rests in the directorial vision of Diane Paulus, who recently re-imagined two legendary musical theater properties in non-profit settings (Hair at The Public Theater and her controversial re-envisioning of The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess at A.R.T., where she is artistic director). Both shows transferred to Broadway, winning the Tony Award for Best Revival and playing successful runs. Paulus' A.R.T. Pippin incorporated circus acts and trapeze artists from Les 7 Doigts de la Main (7 Fingers of the Hand), a Montreal-based street circus troupe, and original Fosse choreography recreated by Chet Walker, himself a former Fosse dancer.

Interestingly, the Pippin/Motown connection continues this Broadway season with Motown the subject of its own musical. It will be fascinating to see if the continuing popularity of the Motown songbook and Schwartz's score will result in hits all over again. That musical theater artists of all stripes continue to revisit Pippin attests to the universality of its themes, the continuing affection for its songs, and the thrilling theatricality of Bob Fosse's original production. Clearly, there is still magic to do-for those of us who were fans of the original score as well as new audiences fortunate to discover Pippin for the first time.