Get out all your theatre programs, all your CDs and cassettes, all your ancient LPs. Then search among their credits for the women who've written books, lyrics, or music for American musicals. While you unearth those names, you'll stumble over dozens of famous men-Kander and Ebb, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, the Gershwins, Leonard Bernstein, Cole Porter, Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, Frank Loesser, among so many others. As Jean Banks at Broadcast Music Inc. said when she recently undertook this exercise of searching for the women musical-makers, "It's tough. There are so few."
Or pick up Dwight Blocker Bowers' "American Musical Theater: Shows, Songs, and Stars," where you'll find 68 songwriters enumerated. Browse through the list long enough and you'll turn up four women: Dorothy Donnelly (Sigmund Romberg's partner on eight shows), Dorothy Fields ("Seesaw," "Sweet Charity," "Redhead," and other luscious lyrics), Carolyn Leigh ("Little Me," "Wildcat," "Peter Pan"), and Betty Comden-the only survivor.
What's wrong with this picture? Women write plays. Women write pop songs, country, rhythm and blues, and classical music. Where are the women who make musicals?
Back Stage asked exemplars of this genre about the dearth of others in their field and how they would advise women aspiring to such a career. Most have a new work premiering in the next year or two.
Informed of our quest for women musical-writers, lyricist Lynn Ahrens jokes, "Oh, yeah, all two of us." Librettist-lyricist Marsha Norman assumes, "And you can interview all of us in a single afternoon." Composers Carol Hall and Lucy Simon could name only five women composers who have ever had a show on Broadway. Eventually we located two others, one of whom, Helen ("Inner City") Miller, finds the idea of publicity so embarrassing she declines to talk. How many men, we wonder, would so shun the limelight?
Although Dorothy Fields' father admonished her, "Ladies don't write lyrics," more women collaborate in the musical theatre as lyricists and/or librettists than as composers. Talks with women composers therefore turned up some especially varied routes to that career.
Learn to Orchestrate
Jeanine Tesori started studying piano at five, but opted for pre-med at Barnard. Since Barnard, the women's college, offered no music major, when she switched to music she had to study at Columbia. While associate-conducting for Broadway shows and doing keyboard jobs, Tesori attended the Lehman Engle Workshop at BMI, which has jump-started so many careers. There she met Brian Crawley, with whom she began collaborating on "Violet."
Tesori speculates that so few women compose musicals because they're "taught only to interpret, not to create" music. "There's some risk-taking involved. Music is part science, so it also stems from how few women go into the sciences." She advises, "Nothing replaces studying the craft, and perseverance, and courage. See all kinds of work, learn to orchestrate, learn what different arrangers do. There are certain finite qualities of music, certain combinations of instruments. Study constantly. Put your own projects together and find people who will make them happen."
Care About the Journey
Lucy Simon grew up in a musical family. She, Carly, and Joanna "sang three-part harmony as soon as we could carry tunes. When we were eight, 10, and 12, everybody in the building on West 11th Street came and we sang oratorios. After a career as a singer-songwriter and writing and recording children's albums, she began composing a musical based on "Little House on the Prairie." Although unproduced, this show prompted Marsha Norman and Heidi Ettinger (then Landesman) to approach her to compose "The Secret Garden" because producer Marty Bell and Lucy's sister Joanna both recommended her. As an audition, she wrote "I Hear Someone Crying," which sold them on her for their project.
"Theatre used to be an Old Boys' Club," remarks Simon. "That's changed some, yet look how few women composers have been to Broadway. Women have to fight their way in. We're also perceived as being soft, whereas traditional musicals are perceived as tougher. Producers do what's safe."
"Do the best work you're capable of," Simon counsels. "Reach down into the center of who you are. The journey is so difficult; unless you enjoy it, don't start. Care about the journey, not about the product. Figure out how to make a living while you do what you love. If you can, collaborate with somebody who has already been there."
I'd Smile Less
Composer Carol Hall earned a living writing for Electra Records, wrote for "Sesame Street," and contributed the largest number of songs to "Free to Be...You and Me." She took an early BMI workshop, where she found herself one of two women in the group. Then Peter Masterson, an old friend from Texas, suggested she acquire the rights to a Playboy article by Larry King. The Actors Studio supplied Masterson with a room, where the trio developed "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." Friends of theirs sent over Stevie Phillips, a woman who had just been hired by Universal to find stage properties, and soon Universal produced the long-running Broadway hit.
Why have only a half-dozen or so women made it that far? "Broadway is more accepting of women who write words," states Hall. "People are willing to accept that women can talk. It has to do with music's abstraction, like mathematics. But in country, rock, and pop music, there's no discrepancy."
Hall believes that another factor disadvantages women: "We always want everybody to get along. We find it difficult when people fight tooth and nail for their turf. Women suffer from their instincts to make peace. I regret sometimes not holding my ground. If I had it to do over, I would be aggressive in a way which would have horrified my southern grandmother. I'd smile less."
Syncopate
Elizabeth Swados left Bennington at 19 to accompany a director to La MaMa in New York. The previous winter he had required actors in a college show to do headstands and shoulder stands. To avoid those she composed a score for him instead. "The work at La MaMa was so consuming I couldn't commute to Bennington. My mentor there came down to New York a lot and gave me notes on my work at La MaMa. Eventually they awarded me a degree."
During the early '70s at La MaMa, Swados heard music from throughout the world. There Swados saw she "could apply a new kind of theatre music to mainstream theatre. I learned new techniques, like non-linear structure for the book, adaptation of text into something not musical comedy, diversity of characters, movement that wasn't necessarily choreography. I took all that into the mainstream with "Runaways' and "Doonesbury.' It came out of great passion for the old musicals but a feeling that the techniques of the old musicals were not applicable to our time."
Swados attributes the trouble some men have with women's musicals to the medium's expressive nature. "It requires composers to wear their hearts on their sleeves and be passionate, and for a long time the male art world was frightened of women exposing themselves in that way. Women conductors weren't allowed to wave the phallic wand around and tell musicians what to do. Change is occurring at the rate of an iceberg moving. The whole tradition of men revising in hotel rooms full of cigar smoke was a guy thing.
"It's hard being taken seriously, having access to producers and production companies, getting financial backing. Nobody would ever say there was discrimination, but I've been around for nearly 30 years, and I've seen it. Certainly more women now are involved in workshops and development programs. But we're not seeing fully the effects of that change because the old guys are still there."
"Do it yourself," she suggests, "and make your own companies. I teach at two colleges, write screenplays for Hollywood, do concerts. I do those day jobs, so I can do the theatre I love. Don't give it up just because it doesn't pay the rent. Don't get bitter. Don't get angry. Syncopate."
Retain Control
Micki Grant began writing poetry at eight and playing violin at nine, but she came to New York as an actress. Here, she and Vinnette Carroll began collaborating on "Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope" and "Bury the Dead." The former won a Grammy; the latter was revived first as "Step Lively, Boy" and then as "The Boogie Woogie Rumble of a Dream Deferred." Grant also contributed to "Working" and "Eubie," but of her four shows which began Broadway transfers, "Don't Bother Me" and "You're Arm's Too Short to Box With God" succeeded, "Alice" closed out of town, and "It's So Nice to Be Civilized" proved a smash hit Off-Broadway for AMAS, but failed on Broadway.
"Equity kept extending it at AMAS," recalls Grant, "and a producer came in to move it without practically any backers' auditions. But what arrived on Broadway was a different show. I had written book, music, and lyrics, but I used to walk into the theatre and hear lines I'd never heard before and characters I didn't know anything about. The director got rid of the main character. It became a work by committee. He would not have done that to a man's show.
"Once an arranger who had asked me to be there was talking to me, and the producer blasted me for no reason in front of the cast, then turned to his son and said, "That's called producing.' I needed somebody in my corner to help. When the show opened the critics tore the new book to pieces. I had wanted to remove my name, but they wouldn't because I was a selling point. Later when they did my own book in Baltimore, it was called the best thing all season. I felt revalidated."
Grant believes women rarely succeed in her field because "producers don't think women do it as well as men because it's a male province. We work harder to get attention. Women are doing good work, but the right person must see it and tell the world about it. It's harder for women than for men to get started. It's harder for women to succeed, although a woman teamed with a man has it easier. Women must take care to retain control," she cautions. "And they should find their own projects and affiliate themselves with groups geared to helping women writers and composers."
Just Write
Polly Pen became a professional actress at eight or nine and wrote her first musical in junior high. Not until "Goblin Market" did she show anything to anybody. Very few women had entered the field, "so it didn't occur to me I might do that. Then Doug Abel, artistic director of Vineyard Theatre, kept pressuring me to play for him the show I was working on. He had to drag it out of me. I was scared. I've been fortunate in not having to struggle to get produced.
"Broadway began as an Old Boys' Club. I had all the equipment to write musicals, yet I didn't think of it. It surprises me it took me so long to do it, and even then it was dragged out of me by a kind producer. Yet I came along at a time when things were opening up for women. The National Endowment for the Arts was trying to expand the representation of its grants." Pen expresses consternation at the lack of women critics in the top positions and the impact that can have on women writing for the theatre. "Some critics may dismiss me as writing women's shows. The largest percentage of our audience is women, yet our critics largely aren't." Pen advises women, "Just write. Have something to say. Concentrate on the work. Keep working!"
Listen and Learn
Kirsten Childs, a performer who wrote lyrics for her brother's music, decided to see if she could do it all herself. She earned her MFA at New York University's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program and turned songs into a performance piece and then into the musical "The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin"-winner of the Jonathan Larson Grant, Richard Rodgers Development Award, Kleban Award, Richard Rodgers Production Award, and a Rockefeller Grant. Despite this success, Childs still lists herself on her resume as "librettist-lyricist," without adding "composer."
"Getting exposure is difficult," says Childs. "Because musicals are a gamble, producers bet on a sure thing, so often it's hard to get somebody to take a chance on you. Commercial success is more difficult for women and people of color. There's so much heartbreak working in this field. You have to love it. Then you ride through the adversity and pester people to hear your work because you really believe in it."
"You must want to do this from the bottom of your soul," advises Childs. "You need staying power. Believe in your piece. Be ruthless about doing what you need to do to realize your vision. Bob Fosse told me, "You can do very well if you listen and learn.' "
Persistence and Patience
A woman of a different generation, Mary Rodgers, recalls launching her career in the 1950s. She worked for Marshall Barer, writing children's songs at Little Golden Records. "I was writing the words, which I find loathsome, only so I could write the music. Then Marshall invited me to Tamiment, a Poconos resort, where we wrote revues. For a long time Marshall had wanted to create a musical from "The Princess and the Pea," so we wrote "Once Upon a Mattress" in a one-hour version. We invited everybody we knew from New York, found producers and George Abbott to direct and Carol Burnett to star, enlarged the show, and opened on Broadway in May 1959.
"It was daunting in the early '50s when you were a woman and a single mother. Oscar Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, and my father encouraged me. And when you're Richard Rodgers' daughter, doors will open for you. At least I didn't have to make my way with no contacts. But nobody was interested. People didn't expect women to write music. I was a music major at Wellesley, but they didn't even teach composition there because women didn't do that.
"The hardest thing has been balancing family and writing. In the '60s you had to go on the road. With "Hot Spot,' starring Judy Holiday, I left a four-month-old baby and three other children in the care of a nurse. You don't do that with a great sense of comfort, but if you're passionate enough, you do it." Eventually Rodgers turned to writing children's books and sold five screenplays. About her position as chairman of the board of the Juilliard School, she says, "I've had the most pleasurable years of my life helping incredibly dedicated and talented young people. But Steve Sondheim wouldn't dream of spending his life that way."
About the paucity of women composing successful musicals, Rodgers comments, "More are doing it than before. Women are not having five children any more. But it's a pushy business. Women still hit the glass ceiling. There are many women in the classical field, but theatre is collaborative. You can't do a play by yourself. You have to find collaborators and producers. And you can't let yourself get walked over.
"Get thoroughly educated," she advises. "Jeanine Tesori knows how to orchestrate. I knew nothing like that. Be brave and persistent. You can't get defeated easily. Success is 35% talent and 65% persistence and patience. Hang in there long enough and eventually you'll get there. Attend the ASCAP and BMI workshops; you might meet a collaborator. Hang out. Make contacts. If you're lucky, you'll find a terrific mentor. Find somebody experienced who can advise and help you."
Know Your Craft
Nancy Ford describes how she and Gretchen Cryer went to college at Indiana's DePauw University, which "had an annual student-written musical. Three teams competed to write these shows. We would do a backer's audition, exactly as we would later in New York. That gave us the experience and also the courage to do it professionally. We needed to know somebody would like our work."
Ford and Cryer had four shows on from 1967 to '78. In February '78 "Shelter" ran for a month on Broadway. "I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road" took up a long period. They have written two musicals about dolls and stories called the American Girl Collection for the company's performance space in Chicago, where young women hear "an anthem about being brave and strong and the best I can be. Now we hope to get on our Eleanor and Franklin [Roosevelt] show."
Ford confides that she has "come to think being a woman and an older woman does not help getting on a show. I've come to the reluctant conclusion we probably have to be a whole lot better than a young man. Gretchen and I might have done better if we had had a male partner. We might have gotten work on faster and had more respect." She advises women, "Know your craft. Have a lot of confidence and persevere. Always write music about something for which you have a personal passion."
Their small numbers suggest musical composers especially have rarely overcome the odds, but women wordsmiths haven't trod a much easier road. Marsha Norman, acclaimed for " 'night Mother" among other plays, explains she had originally aimed at writing musicals but took years to break into the field. "It was love of music that brought me to theatre. I played my way through college on a music scholarship. I grew up at the piano and thought I'd teach piano. I kept telling my agents, "I want to do a musical.' Finally Heidi [Landesman/Ettinger] listened to a musical I wrote about the Shakers and suggested we work on "The Secret Garden.' I find it odd that people still don't think of me as a person who makes musicals, even though "The Secret Garden' is one of the most performed musicals in America. When people need work on musical books, they don't call me, despite the fact that's what my Tony is for. I think after "Wuthering Heights' that will change.
"Men dominate musicals because traditionally they have created musicals. Women have found it hard to establish themselves and be taken seriously. Producers like to talk to men about musicals because men say, "This is how it ought to be done, and here's the vision." Whereas women will talk about how this might be. Women have a more exploratory approach. Men have a more forceful, individual approach. Producers gravitate towards that. It inspires conventional confidence, which is obviously misplaced given the number of musical failures. With musicals, really the more people in the room the better. More women are not working in musicals because they have not been working in musicals. If next year we all have a new piece, women will have a presence the way they have in pop music.
"Musicals are team sports, like soccer and basketball, and football. Women are not perceived as team players. Directors, who are almost all men, work with people they already know and trust. They would not hire a woman for their basketball team. We generally play sports in genders. Producers tend to go with a guy when they choose teams. The women who work a lot associate themselves with a man-Betty with Adolph, Lynn [Ahrens] with Steve [Flaherty]. It's hunting behavior, hunting in packs.
"To succeed in musical theatre, you have to win the men's trust. Develop good relationships with directors. Artistic directors and theatre owners ask directors what they want to do next. You need a champion, whether it's an institution or a person."
Keep Revising
Betty Comden has written for musical theatre longer than any other woman still so employed. She and Adolph Green wrote satirical songs for their nightclub act, so their friend Leonard Bernstein selected them for "On the Town." In 1944 Dorothy Fields and other women still were succeeding, so Comden had role models and producers knew women could write clever lyrics. Having a male partner helped.
Comden suggests, "To write anything, know as much as possible about everything. The more you know, the better equipped you are. A lyricist/librettist must know music, understand it and where words fall in a line, which accents will ensure the emphasis makes the songs' words sound like speech. You must be able to take rejection. Believe in what you're doing; don't guess what the audience will go for. Write what you think is right. But keep revising, rewriting, perfecting, whether you're still in the writing process or in performance."
Get Your Work Seen
A lyricist since the age of three, Lynn Ahrens wrote both words and music for television and for advertising spots until she enrolled in the BMI Workshop. It changed her life. There she met Stephen Flaherty. Previously both composed and created the words, but they've specialized since. Off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons got the two their first grant, gave them their first commission, and produced their first three shows, for which Ahrens wrote both book and lyrics.
Ahrens also refers to musicals' heritage as "an Old Boys' Club" which excluded both women and minorities, but notes, "the NYU group and the BMI group now have at least 50% women. Some will certainly be heard from, but women have had to work to make inroads. There are not enough women in the field. I saw a sign in somebody's office paraphrasing Ethel Barrymore: "A woman has to dress like a boy, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a horse.'
"Women bring a certain sensibility to a collaboration. In "Ragtime,' I wrote for the Mother, "Each day the maids trudge up the hill. The hired help arrives. I never stopped to think they might have lives beyond our lives.' That's not in Doctorow. I created, "She was nothing to them, she was a woman, nothing and no one to them, so they beat her and beat her and beat her.' Sections like that aren't in the novel. Most of "Ragtime' 's lyrics are mine. I don't think a man would have written those lyrics."
Ahrens advises, "See every bit of theatre you can, take as many courses as you can, write as much as you can. Get your work seen in workshops. You have to be tough, stick-to-it-ive, intuitive. You need a thick skin to take very harsh criticism. You need to have faith in yourself and also to love writing in this form."
Write Every Single Day
Susan Birkenhead came to writing lyrics through acting after discovering "auditions scared me to death." She went into the BMI workshop a composer, but emerged a lyricist. Then "I got a call from Mary Rodgers, who said she'd be one of the composers for a new musical going to Broadway. She never even got out the question. I said, "Yes.' That was "Working.' Within a few months, Jule Styne phoned, and I started working with him on a musical version of "Treasure Island.' We also wrote two songs which Sinatra recorded." Later director George C. Wolfe insisted the producers for "Jelly's Last Jam" ask her to write new lyrics for Jelly Roll Morton's music.
"Traditionally it's a man's field," Birkenhead reasons, "so women haven't thought of doing it before. In the last few years, women have begun to fight their way in. My BMI workshop in '77-'78 was male. Because there are fewer women in the pot, fewer make it.
"Don't be afraid," she counsels. "Believe in yourself and develop your talent. Have tenacity and resilience, because you'll get kicked in the teeth. Reach out to established writers. Join a workshop, where you'll exchange information and find collaborators and colleagues. Get a project together and do it. Write every single day, no matter what. Rewrite and rewrite. The best people keep picking away to get it right."
Other musical writers-Wendy Kesselman, Alison Hubbard, Sarah Schlesinger, Donna DeNovelli-have echoed these messages about perseverance, perfectionism, and patience, and talked glowingly of the young women beating at the door. Most women Back Stage spoke to believe the discrepancy between the numbers of men and women will diminish. They urge you to find another source of income. Achieving recognition takes years of studying, completing projects, learning from them, mounting them yourself if necessary, and moving on to the next one. To make it, you cannot give up.
