The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built by Jack Viertel Page A

sky. And, of course, when his shot comes, he doesn’t throw it away—with catastrophic consequences. Howard Ashman, who wrote the lyric for the composer Alan Menken’s music, was a young man at the time—but one with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of musical comedy mechanics. He combined the opening number and I Want into one song, but his interlude for Seymour appropriately trumps the rest of the number and sets up the character and the arc of the show: Seymour’s journey out of skid row and what he’ll pay to escape.
    The source material, Roger Corman’s grade-Z horror film Little Shop of Horrors , is a mad rewrite of the Faust legend, in which Seymour sells his soul to the devil (in this case a giant man-eating Venus flytrap from outer space) to achieve his escape from the living hell of skid row. The original was a low-budget bit of cheesy nonsense, but that’s part of what made it so ripe for musical adaptation: it had a unique bargain-basement tone, its own voice, and a cast-iron set of bones: Faust. Ashman and Menken used the fact that the film dated from the early ’60s to inform the score, which became a series of early rock-and-roll pastiches. The show opened off Broadway in 1982 and set the world on fire in a small way.
    Seymour’s beloved, Audrey, also has a sensational I Want, and in some senses it’s also a lift—in this case from Eliza Doolittle, who seems a remote musical theater cousin. Audrey, as poor, chilly, and hungry as Eliza, is under the thumb of a sadistic dentist whom she’s dating, while Seymour loves her from afar—or at least from across the flower shop. Ashman and Menken update “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” by changing almost everything about it—the tone, the locale, the era—but leaving the desire the same. It’s the early ’60s in America, so Audrey expresses her pathetic I Want in a cockeyed paean to the lower-middle-class American dream in a song called “Somewhere That’s Green.” Eliza craves a room somewhere far away from the cold night air. So does Audrey—in Levittown:
    A matchbox of our own
    A fence of real chain link,
    A grill out on the patio
    Disposal in the sink
    A washer and a dryer and an ironing machine
    In a tract house that we share
    Somewhere that’s green.
    She’s swallowed what she’s read in magazines and seen on TV. She’s Eliza in ’60s cartoon drag, and like Eliza, she’s turned to an unlikely hero—Seymour. There’s not much chance he’ll ever provide any of this. And then the plant intervenes, and off we go.
    Other than Stephen Sondheim, Ashman was probably the greatest potential link between the Golden Age and the New Age, but where Sondheim’s career took him to an expansion of the serious musical plays of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Ashman’s impulses emulated the lighter, musical comedy men who provided merriment and disposable entertainment in the R&H era. He was a pop culture type. If Sondheim seems to be a descendant of Carousel , Ashman comes from the line of Kiss Me, Kate and The Pajama Game . After the off-Broadway triumph of Little Shop and a failed attempt to convert the film Smile into a musical (composed by Marvin Hamlisch), Ashman and Menken decamped for Hollywood and Disney Studios. Once there, they performed the great service of resurrecting the animated features unit, by writing the film that brought greatness back to G-rated Disney cartoons— The Little Mermaid .
    Disney had not turned out a distinguished full-length animated feature in decades, and hadn’t done a fairy tale in thirty years. Ashman and Menken applied the principles of the classic musical theater piece—complete with a typical I Want called “Part of Your World,” the requisite comic production number (“Under the Sea”), a romantic ballad (“Kiss the Girl”), and the rest. The film was a classic ’50s Broadway show reconceived in ’80s animation. They next turned to Beauty and the Beast , which also followed a classic model, and was also a