Lyrical Cure

So there I was at a Tony nominees’ photo shoot, where I saw a short, swarthy man wearing a wide-brimmed black hat. It’s David Yazbek, I decided, so I immediately went up to him and started gushing about how much I love the score to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. I blathered on and on, saying many of the things that I wrote in my recent column about the cast recording: That it’s a disc that makes me want to listen to absolutely nothing else. That not only are the lyrics funny, but the music is as well. That Yazbek is a natively theatrical songwriter. That he writes enticing vamps. That “Nothing Is Too Wonderful to Be True” deserves to be a standard.

It was a condensed version of what I wrote in that column, with the omissions carefully chosen, for I had also taken Yazbek to task for making some mistakes as a lyricist. While I was with him face-to-face, gushing and lauding, I kept wondering, “Should I bring up the bad stuff too?” Well, I didn’t. Let’s face it: I don’t have, as Yazbek wrote for the final moments of his show, “the guts, the nerve, the nuts.” It’s easy for a critic to attack someone’s work in print and a completely different ballgame when he’s standing face-to-face with that person.

I’d written that column on a Tuesday, met Yazbek the very next day, and
revisited Dirty Rotten Scoundrels that Wednesday night. On Friday,
my column broke, complete with my objections as addressed personally to Yazbek:

1) Avoid false accents. I don’t like your trying to rhyme “fence” with “confi-dence.”

2) Strive for perfect rhymes. I’ll cut you some slack on “castle” and “asshole”
because the character André has a continental accent and might therefore say those words in such a way that they would rhyme. (Not that Gregory Jbara does this successfully.) But I cringe at your trying to rhyme “abattoir” with “samovar,” “perceived” with “naive.”

3) Don’t try to top your best joke. In “Great Big Stuff,” you have a really
terrific one at the expense of Broadway (literally and figuratively), and it can’t be
one-upped by a quick reference to a disease.

4) Keep your characters in character. While Freddy would certainly say, “I
wanna mansion with a moat,” he definitely would not then add, “Around which I
can float.” Freddy is the sort of guy who would end sentences with prepositions. I know you did this for a quick rhyme, but if you’d stayed with it a bit longer, I’m sure you would have found a better solution.

I did end the column by admitting that my objections were nit-picks, but then I picked on David for his own picking: “The last time you were at the Tonys, when the camera panned to you during the announcement of the Best Score nominations, you purposely picked your nose… My fear is that, when you win this year and go to the stage to accept your award, you’ll try to trump your nose-picking by scratching yourself in a place where we’d rather not see you put your hand.”

To my surprise, I got an e-mail from Yazbek that said, “I’m still laughing at your review of our cast album and I’m writing to thank you for it. I never respond to press but I need to get back to you on a few things:

1) You’re right about ‘fence’ and ‘confidence.’ I was tired.

2) Re ‘castle’ and ‘asshole’ — I checked it out by calling a French friend and asking him ‘What does a king live in?’ His response rhymed with ‘asshole.’ I don’t get what you mean about abattoir/samovar, but if you’re just listening, not reading along, the ‘d’ in ‘perceived’ blends with the ‘t’ in the next word, ‘to.’ It ends up rhyming nicely with ‘naive to.’ I don’t like false rhymes and I don’t think this is one.

3) I agree about saving your best joke for last. The ‘gout’ joke is last in order to serve the choreography. A victim of collaboration.

4) I think ‘around which I will float’ is funny.

5) I’m a Big Broadway Composer® now. If I need to scratch my ass at the Tonys, I’ll hire someone to do it for me.

To which I wrote back: David, always keep in mind that you are the creative person, and I’m just a critic. If I had your talent, I’d be doing what you do, and I never lose sight of that. But:

1) I can understand that working on a show could make you quite tired. But now that you’ve opened and time is less at a premium, why not go back and try to fix it? After Camelot opened to bad reviews, Alan Jay Lerner continued to work on it. Hey, for that matter, after Hello, Dolly! opened to great reviews, Gower Champion returned to make a big change — which was for the better. You can, too.

2) I really wasn’t criticizing “castle” and “asshole.” I rather like it because (as I said) it was written for a guy with a Continental accent. So we’re in agreement there. But as for “abattoir” and “samovar”? Remember, I’m a stickler for perfect rhymes. Many times, when people say they “can’t understand the lyrics,” it’s really the lyricist’s fault that they can’t; if he’d rhymed correctly, they’d hear and understand them better. To show what I mean in this case, I’m going to have to create two non-words. “Abattoir” rhymes with “sabbatoir,” and “samovar” rhymes with “amovar.” It’s not enough that the last
syllables of two multiple-syllable words rhyme. In this case, the first syllable — the one on which the stress falls — is the one you have to take into consideration, not the final two. But I swear, David, when I saw the show on Wednesday night, I did finally hear that “naive to” rhyme with “perceived to,” partly because I saw it on Sherie Rene Scott’s lips thanks to my fourth row seat on the aisle. But I don’t think it comes across as well on the album, and that’s why I missed it there.

3) So that‘s why you went with “gout!” See the things we never get to know when we’re just in the audience?

4) Listen, you’ve got to please yourself and not me, so if you think “around which I will float” is funny, then go with it. But, to me, it still sounds awfully rarefied for this character.

5) Please understand that I do believe you are one of the potential greats in musical theater. I want you to have that success, and you will have it if you work hard to write the best possible scores you can. But I should have told you these objections when I came over to you on Wednesday at the Tony photo shoot. Yes, I’m the heavy-set gray-haired guy who came up to you and gushed about your score. I want you to know that so you can mark me as the wuss I was to only apple-polish during our brief conversation. Maybe I should be punished by being the guy who’s conscripted to scratch your behind while you’re delivering your acceptance speech. And I shouldn’t be remunerated. But, all kidding aside — and if this is a question you care to ignore, I’ll still listen to your album from now till kingdom come — here’s what I’d love to know: When looking back on your previous on-camera appearance at the Tonys, if you had to do it again, would you pick your nose?

He didn’t write back.

********************

[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]