A Secret Kind of Secret

I was a little surprised to see a certain listing on the back of the cast album of the The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Track 12 is routinely listed as “My Unfortunate Erection” (Chip’s Lament). It’s young Master Tolentino’s sad tale of seeing Miss Marigold Coneybear in the audience, and because of his flustered lust for her, he winds up misspelling a word and is boinged out of the bee.

There’s a departure here. Usually a musical theater song that has a hidden sexual agenda obfuscates its title. And in the theater, Spelling Bee does. Neither its program for its off-Broadway run at Second Stage nor the Playbill for its current engagement at Circle-in-the-Square lists the titles for any of its songs. But the cast album tells it like it is.

Obfuscated song titles are fascinating, aren’t they? I suspect that the most famous of all is “Dance:Ten; Looks:Three” from A Chorus Line. Of course, the logical title of the Hamlisch-Kleban song is “Tits and Ass.” Indeed, that’s the way it was originally listed in the program when the show debuted off-Broadway at the Newman Theatre on Lafayette Street. But by the time that Pamela Blair got around to singing those naughty words, few in the audience were laughing to the degree that the creators expected. They soon figured out that being upfront in the program gave away the song’s joke. So they changed the title to “Dance: Ten; Looks: One” — until they realized that Blair was too good a looker to be ranked that low. So they upped her a couple of points.

Obfuscated song titles often involve sexual jokes. In Over Here, the Andrews Sisters musical of 1974, Patty Andrews sang of “The Good Time Girl,” though the name of the song should be “The V.D. Polka” The song, by the way, was written by the Sherman Brothers, who usually write family fare for Disney, but here took a surprising stroll down Lascivious Lane. In Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party, a fascinating Weillish vamp and verse introduces what the program and cast album calls “An Old-Fashioned Love Story.” No; “A Good-Natured Old-Fashioned Lesbian Love Story” is what it really should be called. If you don’t know this song — especially as deliciously rendered by Alix Korey — do get the album this second, and hear Madeline True fill you in on her mating ritual modus operandi. How well it brings back to me that moment at Manhattan Theatre Club when I knew from the first A-section that I’d be clapping my hands off in a few minutes.

True, neither “Gooch’s Song” in Mame, — which could be known as “What Do I Do Now?” — nor “Herod’s Song in Jesus Christ Superstar — which we think of as “King of the Jews” — has a sexual agenda. But that’s not true of “Jack’s Song” (Naked Boys Singing), whose logical moniker is “I Beat My Meat,” or “The Butler’s Song” (So Long, 174th Street), a/k/a “He’s Screwing Dolores Del Rio.” (As Roxie Hart says in Chicago, “I hope this ain’t too crude.”) Then there’s “Sensitive Song” from the upcoming musical Cops, by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin (Mrs. O’Keefe). The tune has already been heard a few times around town, but given that it’s from a yet-to-be-produced show, I’ll keep its secret. But trust me: Its logical title is hardly sensitive.

“A Patriotic Finale” is the title that When Pigs Fly lyricist Mark Waldrop chose for his first-act ender, one of the more clever songs of recent years. It’s sung by the all-gay cast about the many contributions that homosexuals have made to mankind. The irony is that the logical title of the song — “You Need Us in the U.S.A.” — wouldn’t have given away the song’s big jokes: “You can’t take the ‘color’ out of Colorado. You can’t take the ‘Mary’ out of Maryland. You can’t take the ‘sissi’ out of Mississippi.” But Waldrop obviously wasn’t taking any chances.

For his ill-fated 1966 musical Breakfast at Tiffany’s, composer-lyricist Bob Merrill wrote “Lament for 10 Men” which was about the “Dirty Old Men” (the song’s logical title) whom Holly Golightly meets nightly. What’s interesting is that a quarter-century later, when Sugar was being readied for London (under its source title, Some Like It Hot) lyricist Merrill and composer Jule Styne decided to recycle this song for Osgood Fielding, Jr. But this time they didn’t try to obfuscate. The song was identified as “Dirty Old Men” both in the program and on the cast album.

Obfuscated song titles aren’t always used to keep a good dirty joke away from us. The biggest secret that Kander and Ebb wanted to maintain in Cabaret was the existence of a pineapple. “A Pineapple” is, in fact, the logical name of the quasi-love song that Herr Schultz and Fraulein Schneider sing. But to keep the cat — um, fruit — in the bag, they called it “It Couldn’t Please Me More.” If you only know Cabaret from the movie version, you don’t know this lyric, though you did hear the melody. Sally Bowles danced to it when visiting Cliff’s room.

Other songs that are hardly salacious, but merely want to pleasantly surprise us, occur in Parade, in which “Confession to a Park Avenue Mother” should be “I’m in Love with a West Side Girl”; Lucky Stiff, in which “At Times Like These” is really about “A Dog”, and Bar-Mitzvah Boy, in which “Rita’s Request” is actually that somebody “Kill Me.” Here’s why: Her son suddenly bolted just before he was supposed to become a man in front of all their friends — leaving her with “117 portions of chopped liver. 117 stuffed chicken croquets. French beans. Cole slaw. And fresh fruit of your own choice.”

The 1959 musical The Nervous Set has a song simply called “New York.” As innocent as that sounds, it too is an obfuscation, for it should be called “We’re So Sick of Hearing Songs About New York.” Little did lyricist Fran Landesman know that in the ensuing years, many more Big Apple songs would be coming: “Little Old New York” (Tenderloin), “Move Over, New York” (Bajour), “N.Y.C.” (Annie), and the best of them all: Kander and Ebb’s “The Theme from New York, New York — which is not to be confused with “In New York, the Only Sin Is Being Timid” from Onward, Victoria. (I’m not making that up. That was the opening number of that one-performance failure.)

Then there’s an obfuscated song title you might not know from Kander and Ebb’s 70-Girls-70, even if you know the score inside out. “Folk Song” was dropped somewhere along the show’s journey to Broadway. It started with one of the older women in the cast saying, “Good evening. Y’know, we were afraid, y’know, because all of us are over 60, y’know, that the show wouldn’t have any youthful views expressed in it, y’know. But fortunately, one of our cast members has a nephew — y’know, a yippie — who wrote the following song just for us.”

And then without further ado, the kid came forward and sang: “You. Old. Bastards! You. Old. Bastards! Old! Old! Old! Old! Bastards! Bastards! We got something to tell you. Old! Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!” And it pretty much goes on like that for a few minutes. How well I remember how uncontrollably I laughed when I first heard the song lo those many years ago. I do have to admit that as each year passes, I don’t think that “Folk Song” is nearly as funny.

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