The Words Between the Songs
Or: What the Bookwriter Actually Does, and Why Nobody Notices When He Does It Well
Nobody goes to a musical for the dialogue. I have known this for a hundred years and it has never once stopped me from writing the best dialogue I could manage. The audience comes for the songs. They remember the songs. They hum the songs on the way home. Ask anyone what they recall of Oh, Kay! and they will say "Someone to Watch Over Me." They will not say "that rather good scene in Act Two where the bootlegger explains the situation to the Duke." The bootlegger's explanation is what makes the song land. But nobody remembers the runway. They remember the flight.
This is the bookwriter's lot, and I accepted it early. If you want glory, write lyrics. If you want immortality, write music. If you want to do the work that holds the whole thing together and receive no credit whatsoever, write the book. It is the theatrical equivalent of being a plumber. Nobody calls for the plumber when the taps are working. They only call when something leaks.
What the Book Does
The book of a musical is the connective tissue. It is the thing between the songs — the scenes, the dialogue, the stage directions, the machinery that moves characters from one musical number to the next. It provides the situation from which the song arises and the ground on which the song lands.
A good book does three things:
It gets out of the way. The audience did not buy a ticket to hear people talk. They bought a ticket to hear people sing. The book's first obligation is to move swiftly, efficiently, and entertainingly toward the next song. Every scene that runs long is a scene that delays the music, and the audience — whether they know it or not — is impatient. Get to the song. Get to the song. Get to the song.
I learned this at the Princess Theatre with Guy Bolton and Jerry Kern. Those shows — Oh, Boy!, Oh, Lady! Lady!!, Leave It to Jane — were small. Two hundred and ninety-nine seats. An orchestra of eleven. No chorus line to dazzle the eye. What we had was story, character, and songs that grew from both. The book had to be lean because there was nothing else to hide behind. No spectacle, no scenery changes, no second act ballet. If the scene wasn't earning its place, it had to go.
Guy taught me this. He was the most ruthless cutter I ever worked with. He would write a scene, admire it, perform it aloud to himself with different voices — and then cut it in half. "Plum," he would say, "the audience is ahead of us. They already know what's going to happen. Our job is to not bore them while it happens."
It makes the songs inevitable. The best moment in any musical is the moment just before a character sings — the instant when speech is no longer sufficient, when the emotion or the situation or the comedy has built to a point where only music will do. That moment is the book's gift to the score. The book creates the pressure; the song releases it.
If a character sings without pressure, the song floats. It may be beautiful, but it doesn't land. The audience enjoys it and forgets it. But if the book has done its work — if the scene before the song has created a situation so taut, so funny, so desperate, so alive that the character must sing — then the song doesn't just arrive. It detonates.
I think of it as winding a clock. The book winds the spring tighter and tighter — complication upon complication, misunderstanding upon misunderstanding, the lovers further and further apart — and the song is the moment you let the spring go. The energy of the release is proportional to the tension you've built. No tension, no release. No book, no song.
It provides the comedy that the songs can't. Songs are wonderful instruments for expressing emotion — love, longing, joy, defiance. They are surprisingly poor instruments for being funny. A funny song is the hardest thing to write in the musical theater, because comedy depends on surprise and music depends on pattern, and the two are natural enemies.
The book is where the comedy lives. The dialogue, the physical business, the situation comedy that arises from characters who want different things being stuck in the same room. This is my territory — I have been writing people stuck in rooms for the better part of a century, and I can tell you that the formula never changes. Put two people in a room. Give them opposing objectives. Add an aunt.
The aunt is optional, but I recommend it.
The Princess Theatre Revolution
When Guy Bolton, Jerry Kern, and I began working together at the Princess Theatre in 1915, the American musical was in a state of considerable disorder. The reigning form was the Ruritanian operetta — European settings, improbable plots, songs that had nothing to do with the characters singing them. A soprano would appear, sing about moonlight, and disappear. Nobody asked why she was singing about moonlight. Nobody asked why she was there at all. She was there because she was a soprano and sopranos sing about moonlight. That was the extent of the dramatic logic.
We decided — and I say "we" but it was mostly Guy, who was the structural genius, with Kern providing the musical genius and me providing the jokes — that a musical ought to behave like a play. Real people in recognizable situations, singing songs that arose naturally from character and story. American settings. American idiom. If a girl sang a love song, it was because she was in love, and we knew why, and we knew with whom, and we knew what was stopping her from getting what she wanted.
This sounds obvious now. In 1915 it was revolutionary. Or rather — it felt like common sense to us and looked like revolution to everyone else, which is how most revolutions work. You do the sensible thing and the world acts as though you've detonated a bomb.
The Princess shows ran for years. Oh, Boy! played 463 performances — enormous for its time. We had five shows running simultaneously on Broadway in 1917. The critics called it the beginning of the modern musical. Alan Jay Lerner, decades later, said we had "inaugurated the form." All we thought we were doing was telling a story clearly and getting to the songs on time.
Dialogue as Music
Here is a thing that most bookwriters do not understand, or understand but cannot execute: dialogue in a musical has a rhythm. Not the rhythm of ordinary speech — the rhythm of the score. The book must breathe with the music. If the score is in waltz time, the dialogue should have a lilt. If the score is staccato, the dialogue should snap. The audience may not hear this consciously, but they feel it. A book that fights the score exhausts the audience. A book that dances with the score carries them.
I worked with George Gershwin on Oh, Kay! George's music was quick, light, syncopated — it had the rhythm of a clever person thinking out loud. The dialogue had to match. If I wrote a scene with long, winding sentences and philosophical reflections, the audience would feel the shift — the gears grinding as the evening moved from speech to song and back. So I wrote short. Quick exchanges. Setups and payoffs that arrived before you expected them. Not because I was being clever — because George's music demanded it.
Jerome Kern was different. Kern's music breathed. It took its time. The melodies unfolded like a letter being opened slowly. The dialogue for a Kern show could afford to linger — not dawdle, never dawdle, but pause. Let a moment land. Let a silence do the work. Kern gave you room that Gershwin didn't, and the book had to know the difference.
The bookwriter who does not listen to the composer is a bookwriter who will be rewritten. I have been rewritten. Everyone has been rewritten. Anything Goes was rewritten so thoroughly that I sometimes wonder if I wrote it at all, and then I remember that I did, and then the SS Morro Castle catches fire and the whole book goes overboard with it. But that is another story, and a sadder one.
The Hardest Lesson
The hardest lesson for a bookwriter is this: your best work is invisible.
When the book is working — when the scenes move, when the comedy lands, when the songs feel inevitable — nobody notices the book. They notice the songs. They notice the performances. They notice the costumes and the lights and the choreography. The book is the foundation, and nobody admires a foundation. They admire the building.
When the book is not working, everybody notices. The evening drags. The songs feel arbitrary. The comedy falls flat. The audience shifts in their seats. The critics write: "The book is the problem." They are always right, and the bookwriter is always the first to know, because the bookwriter has been sitting in the back of the theater watching the audience not laugh at the joke in Act Two that he knew wasn't right but couldn't fix in time.
This is the bookwriter's life. Invisible when you succeed. Conspicuous when you fail. I have had both experiences many times, and I can tell you with confidence that invisibility is greatly to be preferred.
What I Know
After a lifetime of this work — the Princess shows, the Ziegfeld years, Oh, Kay!, Anything Goes, and ninety-six novels that taught me everything about plot construction that the theater didn't — I know a few things:
Get to the dialogue as soon as possible. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start of a story, and nothing puts the audience off more than a long scene without a laugh or a song.
Write the scene that leads to the song, not the scene that explains the song. The audience does not need to be told what they are about to hear. They need to be made to want to hear it.
The funniest line in a musical is always the one that comes right after the saddest song. The audience has been held at emotional attention. Their guard is down. They are ready to laugh at anything, because laughing is relief. Give them the relief. It's a kindness.
Never let a character explain what just happened. The audience saw it. They were there. Explaining it insults them and bores them simultaneously, which is a remarkable achievement but not a desirable one.
And finally — the most important thing I know about writing the book of a musical: the book is not the story. The story is told by the whole evening — book, music, lyrics, design, direction, performance. The book is the skeleton. Without it, nothing stands. But nobody wants to look at a skeleton. They want to look at the living, breathing, singing thing.
Build the skeleton. Get out of the way. Let the show live.
P.G. Wodehouse wrote the books and lyrics for Oh, Boy! (1917), Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918), Leave It to Jane (1917), Oh, Kay! (1926), Rosalie (1928), Anything Goes (1934), and a dozen others. He also wrote ninety-six novels, which is quite a lot. He went by Plum.