all the sounds of the earth are like music

and an old weepin' willer is just laughin' at me

Well, the cleaning isn’t quite finished…

I jinxed myself by promising I’d share photographic evidence of my beautifully cleaned and organized apartment this week. In the midst of all the cleaning a few days ago, my bathroom sink decided to stop draining entirely, derailing the entire process.

And if you’re sitting there saying, “How can a broken sink in one room bring your entire cleaning and organizing process to a grinding halt?”, you must tell me sometime what it’s like to be neurotypical, it sounds fascinating…

In all seriousness, it’s getting done, just in fits and starts. I’ll keep you posted.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from Oklahoma! (1943) and suspensions in musical theatre songs

I saw this on Reddit earlier this week and lost my mind laughing because my first thought was “RUN”:

I know there’s a bit of distance between “I like musicals” and “I took on a mortgage’s worth of debt learning how to write musicals”, but it’s a slippery slope!

I know it probably seems like I run hot and cold on musical theatre, but I actually don’t. When I’m mad about it, it’s the rage of a wounded romantic, not a skeptic. If I didn’t love the art form on a bone-deep level, I wouldn’t rail out like I do sometimes. I wouldn’t still be doing it, still be constantly thinking about it, still believe in it. I am, I am, I do.

This week has brought me back to myself on this front, in the form of a couple of surprises. First was the unexpected thrill I got from finally getting to see a production of Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry’s Parade, a show I have loved in album form since 1999 but have never had the chance to see performed. Michael Arden’s revival production that’s touring at the moment (and currently at the Ahmanson) is just gorgeous. I honestly can’t remember the last time I got to see a show where the sonic experience was as rich as this one was — that many voices singing! It’s thrilling. (Also the timeliness of the show is unsettling, but it never really stopped being timely, did it?) This is the kind of thing that made me want so badly to be a writer of musicals: big stories, big scores, ambition and intelligence and heart.

For reasons I mostly can’t get into right this second, I’ve also unexpectedly spent a good chunk of this week thinking about “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from Oklahoma!

Here is my current favorite version of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’”: Arthur Darvill and the cast of Sexy Oklahoma!¹ the West End production of the Daniel Fish revival of Oklahoma! from 2023. Take a listen and go on this journey with me:

Oklahoma! is acknowledged as the first example of the modern musical. Before Oklahoma!, musicals were light entertainments that were flimsy excuses to throw a bunch of songs on stage. With Oklahoma!, that all changed. The lights rose on an old woman churning butter — not a bunch of leggy chorus girls — and the show that ensued was one where the songs served the story and not vice versa. I can’t describe the revolution this started much better than Brooks Atkinson did in his tribute to the just-passed Richard Rodgers in the New York Times on January 1, 1980:

Improvisations from sunshot air above the warm earth. What a phrase!

Some of my grad school classmates used to make fun of how passionate I got about this song in particular, and how each musical decision Rodgers made in it was smarter and more astonishing than the last. I used to refer to the suspension in the first line of the chorus — the chord that hangs and then resolves over the course of the word “morning” — as the “blood in the water”; the thing that tells you without words exactly the story you’re about to experience. It’s tension, it’s violence, it’s longing, and it’s not easy and pleasant the way any other pop song in 1943 would have been. It twangs.

There are other musical moments peppered throughout Oklahoma! that do this, too. The B-section of “People Will Say We’re In Love” goes to this whiplash-inducing place where the chords turn minor — with another suspension, helloooo — doing a thing that feels dangerous before it rounds back to the cute, seemingly safe major key place where it started. Listen for it around 2:05 here — it’s the chord that resolves on the phrase “collecting things”:

I LOVE SUSPENSIONS!!!! I use ‘em a lot in my own work — hopefully as thoughtfully as Rodgers did. Here’s my favorite thing I’ve ever done with them — “Almost Forgotten” from The Fitzgeralds of St. Paul (here sung by the magnificent Tiffany Topol). In this moment in the show, Zelda Fitzgerald is seeing her husband Scott for the first time in months as he visits her in the mental hospital where she’s being treated. It’s a delicate, devastating moment fraught with so much confused longing — an ache I wanted to make palpable. On the word “forgotten” and throughout the accompaniment, the suspensions pull at your ear. It’s a visceral sensation.

(Fun fact about this demo: the piano part was played on Richard Rodgers’s own piano, which currently lives in the meeting space at the Dramatists Guild’s offices in midtown Manhattan! How’s that for coming full circle?)

Anyway, for fun, I’ll close out this week with another favorite example of suspensions in a musical, because I can: the guitar line in “Pinball Wizard” from The Who’s Tommy:

what I did this week

I celebrated the Fourth of July like any other red-blooded patriotic American: at a sold-out screening of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure at Vidiots. Perfect movie, no notes.

what’s next?

Well, for starters, I’m not making any promises about finishing my apartment cleaning/organizing project. (Hope springs eternal, however…)

We’re recording an episode of Muppeturgy later this week, though, which seems like a good opportunity to point you in the direction of our most recent episode about the Marty Feldman episode of The Muppet Show, featuring special guest J.D. Hansel. We ended up having a really thought-provoking conversation about “Muppet values” amidst all the shenanigans that I really appreciated.

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

She’s just not a fan of the A/C.

1. Listen, in New York in 2019 we all called this production Sexy Oklahoma!. Is there anything sexier than being given free chili and cornbread at intermission? I think not!!!