IS IT LOVE OR JUST MUSICAL THEATER? by Judy Fowler

 

Did you grow up listening to the lyrics from Broadway musicals?

"I'd do anything for you, dear, anything." In this still photo from Oliver, two down-and-out young people act out what they think love is. Poor dears. 

In "Climb Every Mountain," from The Sound of Music,  a giddy, failed novice named Maria gets some advice. "Find a dream that will need all the love you can give every day of your life for as long as you live." And hurry up about it!

These songs stirred me when I first heard them while I lay on my stomach on my parents' new wall-to-wall carpeting. I was seven. As the soundtrack played on our new hi-fi, and with few liner notes to tell me what the play was about between songs, I accepted the music and lyrics as realistic. Captain Von Trapp was smug and cold to Maria. He repelled her. A duet about Edelweiss ends in passionate love, and they drop everything.

 I listened to the cast album of My Fair Lady. Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison's English accents threw me a little—why can't the English learn to speak? Their characters disdain each other until the last five minutes when he admits he's grown accustomed to her face. Cue Eliza's return.

After that, The Music Man. "May I have your attention, please?" charming con artist Harold Hill sings to Marian, a piano teacher and librarian whose life is on hold until she finds a quiet man who'll "occasionally ponder what makes Shakespeare and Beethoven great." In Act One, she rejects his advances. His passion overpowers her reserve, and two hours later, she leaves her books to run away and have a happily ever after with the fraudster.    

The chorus member and the Chorus Line. Pippin and his "corner of the sky." I became an emotional magnet for their anxieties, partings, and amped-up happiness when "love" arrived after two hours. When someone tells Anna in The King and I that "he'll always need your love," she decides not to get on the boat back home. Even if the king is a tyrant, how could she leave the guy who danced her around a ballroom barefooted in "Shall We Dance?" How could I? 

 The two-act Broadway musical created a groove in my young brain that elevated romance, fantasy, and any distortion of reality delicious enough to win a Tony Award. Even when it went fast and ended badly, love won out. Maybe I got addicted. I started auditioning for school musicals.

"You're getting too warm," my mother said. "You'll have to watch that."

 "Listen to more Shostakovich, less Funny Girl," a college friend suggested. But it was too late. I wanted flowery words.

As soon as I was old enough, I left the safety of my mother's Camelot to run away with mesmerizing, aggravating partners who needed my help to find their corner of the sky whose love I had to have to climb every mountain. These relationships never worked out. 

Fifty years after I tore the shrink wrap off The Sound of Music, I realized my mother was right. I'd fallen too young for the two-act obsession. Sudden, ill-fitting relationships, including the one between Hamilton and the Schuyler sisters, aren't supposed to have happy endings. Broadway raised me to mistake limerence--an intense crush-- for love.

Wikipedia defines limerence as "an infatuation based on the uncertainty that the person you desire also wants you." Researchers have considered that the desire to "be in love" may be due to the roller-coaster it brings on chemically. Lowered serotonin due to OCD-like intrusive thoughts alternating with dopamine highs that reward our brain circuits are a combination designed to defeat calmer pairings.

Broadway should offer young people a remedial third act to listen to (sold separately on Spotify). In Act Three, the music man fleeces some people out of their hard-earned money to get money for Marian's supper. She brings up, for the hundredth time, all the steady jobs he'd be good at. He leaves with a headache when she sings a plaintive tune about the library career she threw away for their fugitive lifestyle. He leaves her in the lurch, or she hitches a ride back to Iowa on the Wells Fargo wagon and meets a friendly, boring banker reading Hamlet.

 In My Fair Lady's Act Three, Eliza Doolittle will leave the challenging but obnoxious professor again (the second time never works out). She opens a posh flower shop in Mayfair and eventually settles into a pleasant relationship with someone who gardens. She avoids the professor at parties. 

And there's no way go-getter Kevin in Book of Mormon sticks around very long with the fantasist Arnold or the guerilla chieftain after he wins a free cruise to Orlando, where the nightlife suits him better.  

Unfortunately, that Broadway brain groove runs deep. In my late '60s, a devilishly charming fellow of similar age asked if he could read me his poetry. I'd learned about limerence by then and had no contact with him for a year. Then I dropped my guard, and we ran away to the circus until the show closed two years later. 

But I climb, I climb. A year ago, I entered what I thought would be a dull relationship with someone who falls asleep over Shakespeare but who makes us dinner and ponders what makes me tick. This could be Act Three material.

Broadway knows about—but won't win Tonys with—Act Threes. Take, for example, the real-life Maria von Trapp, the inspiration for Maria in The Sound of Music. She ended her climb in Stowe, Vermont, where she and her musical family opened a successful hotel she managed into her eighties. 

My Act Three might end well, too.