'Musical Theatre For Dummies'

 by Kirk Woodward

[On 16 July 2023, my friend Kirk sent me an email from his family beach vacation down south and told me his daughter, who’s taught theater in the New York City school system and directed it in New York and in her New Jersey home area, had brought Musical Theatre For Dummies with her.  Kirk read the book, which had just been released, and pronounced it “to my surprise . . . remarkably well done.”

 

[In my reply, I tacked on the question of whether the book might be worth a post on Rick On Theater.  Kirk confirmed that it was.  His report on Musical Theatre For Dummies arrived in my inbox on 19 July, before he even got back from the beach.

 

[I had had the idea of writing my own report, from the perspective of a musical-theater devotee who cut his theatrical teeth on Broadway musicals (see my bio-post “A Broadway Baby” [22 September 2010]), to go with Kirk’s article from the point of view of a musical actor, director, and librettist-composer. 

 

[So I held back Kirk’s report so I could read the book and write my own assessment.  My idea was to publish both posts either simultaneously or one right after the other.  Unfortunately, I kept having to put the book down because things kept coming up to interrupt my reading—until I just couldn’t put my friend off any longer.  So now, at long last, here’s Kirk Woodward’s report on Musical Theatre For Dummies.]

 

My daughter Erin, a performer and educator, brought with her to the beach the book Musical Theatre For Dummies (2023), one of the “Dummies” series of books published by John Wiley & Sons, and I read the book during our vacation.  

 

The “For Dummies” series began in 1991 and has maintained enormous popularity. Because there are several related series of the books, it’s hard to say exactly how many have been published, but I have seen a figure of 339 books for the “For Dummies” series itself.  

 

A list of series titles is extremely entertaining, ranging from C++ for Dummies (the series began with computer instructional books) to The Origin of Tolkien’s Middle-earth For Dummies (by Greg Harvey; 2003), with many stops in between. 

 

When I first glanced at Musical Theatre For Dummies my immediate reaction was dismissive. I’ve done theater work for years, I’ve directed a number of musicals, and I feel I have a pretty good background in musical theater. I couldn’t imagine that a general audience book would have much to offer me. 

 

I was (not for the first time) wrong. Musical Theatre For Dummies is a fine source book on the subject. It covers the field thoroughly, and it has taught me a great many things I hadn’t known before. 

 

The “For Dummies” books, in line with their instructional purpose, share a number of features, starting with the typography, which is easy to read, well spaced, and easily followed through its section headings, which are set off from the text and bolded. Icons help emphasize different kinds of information, for example, “tips,” points that are given additional emphasis. 

 

The writing style is slangy and informal, but well focused on the topic at hand. If it’s useful to repeat something at several places in the book, it’s repeated. An introduction tells the reader how to read the book, from several angles; the text itself gives a comfortable feeling of being in good hands.  

 

(The only criticism of the book I’d offer, and it’s extremely minor, is a tendency to use an excessive number of exclamation marks!)  

 

The author of Musical Theatre For Dummies is Seth Rudetsky (b. 1967), who has a remarkably wide and appropriate background for the book. He trained as a musician and played in a number of orchestras for Broadway shows, eventually also becoming a conductor. He has acted, and he co-wrote the off-Broadway musical Disaster! (2013), which received mostly favorable reviews. (Disaster is featured in the 8 July 2016 posting on Rick On Theater called “‘Anatomy of a Broadway Flop’” by Michael Paulson from the New York Times of 23 June 2016.)

 

He also hosts Seth Speaks, a regular show on SIRIUSXM Satellite Radio, as well as a series of live discussions with people in theater. The latter have been the source for the numerous comments on musicals spread liberally through Musical Theatre For Dummies, adding a great deal of interest to the book, since the stories reflect real experiences in the field. 

 

After a useful introduction, the book is divided into four of what it calls “Parts.” The first, “Getting Started with Musical Theatre,” thoroughly lays out what the genre is and isn’t, gives a concise and up-to-date history of the musical, describes its parts, describes where musicals are performed (meaning physical types of theaters, and also countries around the world where musicals are performed), and what attending a musical is like for an audience member. 

 

The second “Part,” The People Who Make Musical Theater Happen,” goes into detail about the people who write musicals (“book” or script writers, composers, lyricists), the people who flesh them out (such as directors, designers, builders), the people who perform them (such as leads, ensemble players, understudies), and the people who support the shows (such as spotlight operators, hair supervisors, and conductors and musicians). 

 

The third “Part,” “The Blood, Sweat, and Tears of Theatre Life,” tracks the process of developing a musical, the details of actors’ lives as the show progresses, the skills required of a performer in a musical, and the details of maintaining a career in musical theater. 

 

The fourth “Part” is characteristic of the “For Dummies” series, “The Part of Tens,” a sort of wrap up of the book’s subject that organizes its materials in lists. In the case of Musical Theatre For Dummies these include “Ten (Plus) Songs You Didn’t Realize Came from Musical Theatre” and “Ten Celebs Who Started in Musical Theatre.” One can see in those chapter titles both the light touch of the book (typical of the “Dummies” series) and the kind of comprehensiveness it aims at. 

 

In each of these sections there were things I didn’t know, often because they come from personal stories. Here is the sort of thing I mean, a story about the actor Chip Zien (b. 1947) when the show Into the Woods (1987, book by James Lapine, score by Stephen Sondheim) was in pre-production and holding auditions. The producer Ira Weitzman  

 

called to tell him he was being considered for the role of the Baker but added that if anyone called and asked him to audition, he should say no! Weitzman felt the creative team didn’t know what they wanted, and if Zien came in, they would find a reason why he wasn’t right. If he didn’t come in, they would just offer it to him. Well, Zien was asked to come in and audition, and he said he wasn’t able to make it. Cut to: They offered him the role! Weitzman knew what he was talking about. 

 

That story is one that perhaps wouldn’t have wide circulation, and there are many of them. The book however also contains a great deal of public content that I didn’t know.  

 

Sometimes books about musicals emphasize what’s often called the “Golden Age” of musicals (which Rudetsky defines generally as shows written between 1940 and 1960). That happens to be the period I’m most familiar with, but Rudetsky shines the spotlight on more recent shows as well, so I now have a wider perspective on the field as it is today. 

 

There’s a thin line, I’d say, between clarification and trivia, and I find plenty of both in Musical Theatre For Dummies. Here’s a sample: 

 

Waitress (2016) is notable not only because it was a big success of the decade, but also because composer/lyricist Sara Barielles wound up taking over the leading lady role, thereby being one of the few creators to star in their own show. Yes, Comden and Green did it in the ’40s in On the Town [1944], but it hasn’t been done that much since. (Most notable, Sting took on a role for a limited time in his musical The Last Ship [2014], Peter Allen starred in Legs Diamond [1988], John Cameron Mitchell starred in Hedwig and the Angry Inch [2014], and of course, Lin Manuel-Miranda has starred in two of his musicals [In the Heights, 2008; Hamilton, 2015].) 

 

That’s not a particularly consequential piece of musical theater history, it’s a sort of throwaway, but it shows the depth of information in the book and it certainly might help one win a trivia contest. 

 

For another example, I was fascinated to find the answer to a question I never thought to ask: how are orchestra members of Broadway shows supposed to dress? Here’s Rudeksky’s answer (he was, you’ll remember, a “pit musician” for a number of shows): 

 

Because the audience can often see into the pit, the musicians are told to wear black so they don’t distract from the stage. 

 

However, not all black outfits are deemed acceptable. Each orchestra pit has their own requirement. I could wear a black T-shirt in many shows I played in the orchestra for, but at The Phantom of the Opera, my black shirt had to have a collar. #Fancy 

 

On the flip side was The Full Monty. The score had a pop feel and because the music wasn’t highfalutin, we were allowed to wear whatever we wanted. I’d be in that pit in a tank top and shorts! I loved coming right off the street in whatever I was wearing and planting it in the pit. 

 

Again, not consequential, but informative. But as repeatedly happens in the book, Rudeksky continues by adding a detail that might easily be overlooked: “For your information, one of the things I don’t love about playing in a pit is having to change into a black outfit.” Where would orchestra members change their clothes? They wouldn’t have their own dressing rooms in the theater!  

 

This kind of detail put an end to the skepticism about the book I’d had before I’d opened it, but if it hadn’t, the following would have. This paragraph appears in a section about acting schools and training: 

 

Just make sure you don’t go to the kind of acting teacher who thinks they have to break you down to build you back up again. And avoid the know-it-all Svengali who won’t allow discussions to happen. It’s best to remember: if you’re feeling bad about yourself after a few classes, this isn’t the right teacher for you.

 

I have said exactly the same things to every acting class I’ve ever taught, and they are crucially excellent, important, even vital pieces of advice. Acting teachers come in all types. Some are helpful; not all are right for a particular person; some are fakes, crooks, or worse. In case of doubt, get out. 

 

I could continue to cite examples of things I’ve learned from this book – the difference, for example, between the Outer Critics Circle Awards and the Drama Desk Awards (the Outer Critics write for newspapers outside New York, as well as for electronic platforms, the Drama Desk is more traditional New York “theatre critics, editors, journalists, and broadcasters”). 

 

Or the box seats one sees in older theaters – is there something particularly wonderful about them for a contemporary audience? 

 

Today, box seats may still seem to exude power and privilege, but on a practical level, they usually aren’t constructed at the best angle to experience a performance compared to orchestra seats. Basically, one half of the stage is blocked so you miss a lot of the action, but at least your amazing outfit gets to be admired, right? 

 

It’s difficult to stop giving examples from this enjoyable, easy to read book. I’ve learned a great deal from Musical Theatre For Dummies and urge anyone to read it who wants to fill in gaps in their theatrical knowledge, to enjoy the company of a friendly theatrical companion, or to satisfy a completist urge.  It offers all three, quite a bargain at the price. 

 

[I have a number of posts on ROT that touch on different aspects of musical theater.  Some are by other authors, including Kirk, and there a quite a few from Allegro, the magazine of the American Federation of Musicians’ Local 802, the union that represents most of the pit orchestra musicians that play the Broadway shows. 

 

[Several are my own posts, and the most pertinent here is “A Broadway Baby,” an autobiographical narrative outlining my introduction to the love of theater.  As I allude above, my life as a theatergoer began with musicals.

 

[My theater life really began with musical theater.  Actually, I think my first experience with the musical stage was opera: my parents took me to a performance of Gian Carlo Menotti’s one-act Amahl and the Night Visitors.  I must have been about 8 or 9; Amahl is a Christmas story, so it would have been at Christmastime, which is my birthday.  I remember the performance, but I have no recollection of who produced it or where it was presented.  (I do remember that after the show, I got the autograph of the young singer who played Amahl—the first of only two autographs I ever collected.)

 

[I saw a number of kinds of theater in my early days, including Shakespeare (a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the outdoor Carter Barron Amphitheatre in Rock Creek Park—I’m a Washingtonian), but what I first fell in love with was Gilbert and Sullivan, including performances by the world-renowned D’Oyly Carte Opera Company.

 

[Soon, however, I was seeing Broadway musicals at the National Theatre—either shows on the way to Broadway because Washington was on the try-out circuit, or on their post-première National Tours.  In “A Broadway Baby,” I wrote of this time in my life:

 

I grew up loving what used to be called musical comedy. . . .  I literally grew up on that music—and when I was little, I knew (and could actually sing) all the words to all the songs.  I’d actually come out of the theater singing the score.  [M]y first Broadway experiences, when I came to visit my grandparents [in New York City], were musicals.  Fiorello! was my very first show on Broadway; I saw My Fair Lady a little later, but it still had the original cast. . . .  Those great performances I saw as a boy have become enduring: Harold Hill is always Robert Preston, Maria von Trapp is always Mary Martin—not [Julie] Andrews, by the way; besides Guenevere and Liza Doolittle, she's always Cinderella (from the original 1957 television broadcast)—Fiorello is always Tom Bosley, Don Quixote is always Richard Kiley, Pseudolus and Hysterium are always Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford, J. Pierrepont Finch and Bud Frump are always Robert Morse and Charles Nelson Reilly, Fagin is always Clive Revill, Fanny Brice is always Barbra Streisand, Charity Hope Valentine is always Gwen Verdon; and, of course, Mrs. Lovett will always be Angela Lansbury.

 

[For years, I kept a mental list of the best individual performances I’d seen.  It included both non-musical and musical performances, but the musical ones included Zero Mostel in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (which I saw at the National where it premièred in 1962), Gwen Verdon in Sweet Charity (1966), Ben Vereen in Pippin (1972), and Virginia Capers in Raisin (1973). 

 

[I also had favorite actors whose overall stage work I just liked a lot, even if they didn’t fit on my List of Great Performances.  I first saw Jerry Orbach in Carnival! (1961) with Anna Maria Alberghetti and he became a special favorite of mine.  Also in that cast was another favorite: Kaye Ballard, who sang the maddest love song on any Broadway stage: “Always Always You.”  Her character was a magician’s assistant and she sang of her devotion to him while in a box into which Marco the Magnificent was thrusting swords!  An image like that tends to stick with you.  

 

[Other favorites included Kay Medford, Stubby Kaye, and Howard da Silva—I tended to go for the character actors, it seems.  They all had personalities that shone through in all their appearances and there are lines I can still hear them saying, like Kay Medford: “Don’t worry about the coat.  Three mink stoles you’ll have when the train pulls out.”  (That’s from 1960’s Bye Bye Birdie in which she played Albert Peterson’s (Dick Van Dyke) mother, Mae.  She was lying across railroad tracks at the time.)

 

[Now, a couple of comments about some of what Kirk reports above.  In a piece of advice Rudetsky offers to acting students, he rightly warns them that “if you’re feeling bad about yourself after a few classes, this isn’t the right teacher for you.”  Kirk says he’s told students the same thing in every class he’s taught.  So have I.  I’ve heard some scary stories from students on various studios and conservatories, though I’ve been fortunate not to have experienced any myself.

 

[But I’d add an additional admonition.  Running into a “Svengali,” as Rudentsky labels them, who makes a student “feel bad” isn’t the only bad omen that should make a student look for another teacher.  This, I did experience myself—twice, when I just starting out.

 

[I’d gotten out of the army in February 1974; I’d been overseas and returned to the States with the idea of training for the stage.  I’d been accepted at a well-known conservatory in New York City for the fall term.  After taking some time off, I decided to come to New York for the summer and take some classes—my first professional training experiences—at a famous studio, on the recommendation of my former college director and his actress wife.

 

[I didn’t know any of the faculty at the studio, of course, though many had names I recognized and some I’d even seen on stage or in films.  I picked classes that seemed like good starting places, and chose teachers that fit the schedule I was forming—but it was all pigs in a poke.  I lucked out, it turned out, and most of the teachers I chose remained mentors, teachers, and guides for years after. 

 

[But one teacher, whom I actually liked, turned out to be a problem.  He wasn’t threatening or controlling, and not only did I enjoy the work I did in his class—it was acting technique—but he obviously liked what my scene partner and I did because he kept inviting us to repeat our work in his other class.  I was immensely complimented.  (He even started to recommend some auditions for Off-Off-Broadway shows he thought I ought to go to, though I hadn’t planned on auditioning yet.  My practical experience at that point was only college and amateur productions.)

 

[The problem was that I had no idea what the teacher was trying to impart to us.  What were we suppose to be learning from the exercises and scene adjustments he was giving us.  They were fun to do, but I was at a loss about what his point was.  (He was a working actor with film credits and a current gig on Broadway in a comedy in which I went to see him.  He had one of those parts that has a single, boffo scene in the middle of the play that actually steals the show, and he was terrific!)

 

[I never confronted the teacher about my confusion.  I never considered that I had the right to, or that it was even possible.  I’m not even sure I’d have had the words with which to ask the questions.  I was a rank amateur not just in the business, but in the training aspect of the business.

 

[I left the studio at the end of the summer session to start at the conservatory.  Many of my studio teachers, particularly my scene study teacher, who would become a guide and mentor, advised me not to make the switch.  I stuck with my plan, however, because I didn’t see any reason not to, and that college director had recommended me to the conservatory, to whose board he’d been appointed (and whose director had been a grad school classmate), and it to me.

 

[Well, the school turned out to be a bad fit for a couple of reasons.  One was, after a summer at the studio, I’d apparently learned too much, about the art, but also how to study the art.  The school was also geared to a junior college level student, so my classmates were almost all 19- and 20-year-olds, while I was 28, a college graduate, and a veteran of five years in the army.  (I’d been a military intelligence officer having just returned from a 2½-year tour in West Berlin as a counterintelligence Special Agent.  None of that, though, had been the topic of any conversations.)  I was older than some of the teachers.

 

[Nonetheless, I applied myself to the work, using what I’d been learning over the summer as a guide for how to comport myself in the classes and rehearsals.  Things seemed to be going along nicely in all respects, except that I began to see the same problem that I had with the acting tech teacher at the studio developing with one of the class’s instructors at the conservatory—I couldn’t see what he was getting at.

 

[The man was a well-known actor, veteran of many film and TV roles and several stage performances.  I approached him after class one day and asked if we could talk.  He agreed and we set a tentative appointment.  The next day, however, I was summoned to the director’s office.  I had no idea of the reason, but when I got there, the director told me that I was being asked to leave the school at the end of the term.  I asked why, and the answer he gave me was that I asked too many questions.  He said I didn’t take enough on faith.  I was flabbergasted.

 

[He didn’t mention the teacher with whom I’d asked to talk, and he wasn’t in the room.  I hadn’t had any problem of any degree with anyone else at the school, so I assumed he was the reason for the dismissal.  He must have taken my request to talk as some sort of challenge, though I hadn’t made, or even implied, any.

 

[So, my addendum to Rudetsky’s and Kirk’s advice about suitable acting teachers is, in addition to being made to feel uncomfortable, also consider being made to feel confused.  I went back to the studio and then followed my scene study teacher to a new MFA program at Rutgers that was just starting up where she’d be heading the acting program.

 

[One last comment, one that’s somewhat less dramatic.  Rudetsky states that box seats in theaters aren’t constructed at the best angle to experience a performance.  He’s absolutely right.  Except, in my experience, in one instance. 

 

[My mother was coming to New York for a visit in the spring of 1999.  I don’t remember what day she was arriving, but she’d be here for Sunday, 9 May, which was Mother’s Day.  Her birthday had been the previous 7 April, and I hadn’t gotten to Washington to be with her that year, and she’d been a widow for three years after looking after my father’s final years with Alzheimer’s.  I wanted to do something special for her visit.

 

[A new restaurant had opened on Restaurant Row in the Theatre District in 1997.  It was called FireBird, a Russian-themed restaurant decorated like an upper-class mansion of 1912 and a menu to match.  I made a dinner reservation—without telling Mom where—and bought tickets for The Lion King at that day’s matinee—also a secret.

 

[Both my parents were theater buffs.  Mom’s family had seen Carousel on its second night (which happened to be her younger sister’s 18th birthday) and on one of their early dates, Dad had taken my mom to Oklahoma!  When I revealed where we were going, Mom asked, “Isn’t than a children’s show?”  I explained that I wanted her to see the costumes, masks, and puppets Julie Taymor had designed for the stage version of the Disney animated movie.

 

[The show had been running for a year-and-a-half already and tickets were scarce.  All I could get for that night were box seats down near the stage on the house-right side.  Ordinarily, as Rudetsky warned, these would be terrible seats for a show.  But, as it turned out—for our purposes—they were the best seats in the house.  So much of Lion King is performed in the aisles and around the auditorium, and even in the boxes, that from seats in the house, a theatergoer would miss a lot of the spectacle.  We got a bird’s-eye view of all of Taymor’s creations!

 

[Mom quickly forgot the kiddie-show narrative, and we reveled in the visual spectacle at our feet.  For months, Mom didn’t stop talking to her friends about this marvelous theater experience.  The next year, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington housed an exhibit of Taymor’s work, Julie Taymor: Playing With Fire (16 November 2000-4 February 2001), and Mom insisted that a group of her friends accompany her to the show to experience this fantastic artist’s work.]