Your Own Thing, the off-Broadway version of Twelfth Night that won the New York Drama Critics' Award for best musical last year, is never equal to Hair, even when Hair is at its worst. The score (by Hal Hester and Danny Apolinar) makes every concession to Broadway and very few to rock. The music is all pre-Beatles rock-and-roll; some of the songs are just waiting for Leslie Gore and Connie Francis.
And the lyrics (except those from Shakespeare) are sufficiently self-conscious to be repulsive. The title song actually advises us to Do your own thing/ Find you own dream/ Dig your own soul/ Or dig your own hole and die." This is nothing compared to "The Middle Years," a paean to middle-age that is a trifle too reminiscent of Birdie's "Kids" and The Girl Who Came to Supper's (a 1963 flop) "How do Do do, Middle Age." If nothing else, Your Own Thing shows exactly how big a sell-out Hair could have been.
But in this scale of artistic integrity it is the names of Burt Bacharach and Hall David that must be put on top. Every song in their score for Promises, Promises, musically and lyrically, is faithful to the style established by the rest of their work--a kind of song-writing pretty much alien to both Broadway convention and acid-rock.
Bacharach (music) and David (lyrics) comprise something of a unique niche in popular music, one that indeed defies categorization. They wrote a large collection of songs before Promises--such as "Reach Out for Me," "What the World Needs Now is Love," "The Look of Love," "I Say a Little Prayer,"' "Message to Michael"--most of which were initially sung by Dionne Warwick. These compositions owe something to rock, something to soul and something to Gilbrerto. But it is rock without the acid, soul without the traditional soul beat and orchestrations, Gilberto without the relaxing rhythms.
Whatever they are (and I'll try to explain in a moment), Bacharach-David songs deserve a special and honored place in the rock schene, even though they fulfill a much different artistic calling than that of the hard rock tradition that gave birth to Hair.
Promises, Promises, which is based on the film The Apartment, is essentially the story a rather strange and depressing love triangle. It is about people who cannot cope with themselves or each other--and within this framework, Bacharach and David have written some songs that are gripping in a most unusual way.
Central to the songs of this team is the faithfulness of the lyrics to the gut essentials of emotion and the accompanying faithfulness of the music to the erratic course the relentlessly frank lyrics take. And thrown in with all this are the rhythmic patterns, which fluctuate wildly as the words shifts (often suddenly) between hope and despair.
When Jill O'Hara, a girl with a voice that is a strange cross between country-western twanginess and Dionne Warwick inflection, sings about "Knowing When to Leave" a lover, music and rhythm change as the character's thoughts move form a detached statement of principle ("Knowing when to leave won't ever let you reach the point of no return/ Fly") to an upbeat assertion of hope ("Foolish as it seems/ I still have my dreams") to an angry stream of abuse ("Keep your eyes on the door/ Never let it get out of sight/ Just be prepared when the time has come/ For you to run away.")
In a Bacharach song, anything can happen. Listening to the original cast album (United Artists), one is consistently caught off guard by lyrics that defy normal rhyme schemes and music that is sensitive to the slightest lyrical change of heart.
Only when the score is called upon to express uninteresting sentiments does the score fall flat. For instance, a plot song ("Our Littlt Secret") which tells about a clandestine illicit arrangement between two characters, though done in the Bacharach-David manner, remains mundane because the subject matter is emotionally barren.
But most of the time, Promises, Promises is about love (and its ups and downs), and the songs run deep. Just before a suicide attempt, Miss O'Hara sings an anguished ballad (that has also been recorded by Dionne Warwick) in which she tells of the difficult man she loves. As the lyrics and music move from the barest hope ("However you are/ Deep down whatever you are/ Whoever you are/ I love you.") to a kind of understated terror ("From moment to moment/ You're two different people/ Someone I know as the man I love/ Or the man I wish I never knew"), the orchestration is underlined with a trickling piano that gives the song a unity despite its diverse expressions.
The orchestrations (credited to Harold Wheeler, but heavily influenced by Bacharach's own brand of arranging) in Promises, Promises are an essential part of the Bacharach score. And, in line with this, the composer has seen to it that his show is the first to use recording-studio electronics in a Broadway theatre. In the auditorium, one hears half sound straight from the stage and orchestra, and half sound that has been sent through an amplification-echo chamber system. There are also four female vocalists in the orchestra pit, who blend their harmonic flights of wordless sound into the instrumentation--and the whole thing is controlled from the back of the theatre with an eleven-channel stereo console.
Yet, for all the rock tendencies and electronic shaping, it is the emotional realism--the soul--of the Bacharach-David songs that makes them important to the future of commercial music, Broadway and elsewhere.
And the success of Promises and the rest of the latest batch of "rock" musicals certifies the fact that the paths of Broadway and true rock culture will continue to meet in the future. While some of the established critics will dissent--John Wilson of the Times found Promises all beat and no melody--the trend seems to be towards a modernization of the American musical. What remains to be seen is whether the New York musical theatre will receive enough potent doses of pop/rock to bring it down squarely on the side of the cultural revolution.