An Open Book: Explaining What Musical Librettists Do

By Marc Acito
Playbill​.com February 19, 2012

Veteran musical book writers Marsha Norman, Harvey Fierstein and Douglas Carter Beane spill the beans on the pro­fession that gets “all of the blame and none of the praise.”

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Quick: Who wrote Godspell? Porgy and Bess? Mamma Mia!?

If your answers are “Stephen Schwartz,” “the Gershwins” and “those guys from ABBA with the extra letters in their names,” you’re two-thirds correct. Because in addition to the com­poser and the lyricist, there’s the mis­un­der­stood middle child of musical theatre, the clunkily-monikered “book writer” or “librettist.”

The job description itself is bound to confuse, par­tic­u­larly in the case of Pulitzer Prize – winning play­wright Marsha Norman, who adapted the novels The Secret Garden and The Color Purple into musicals. “Whenever I say I wrote the book,” Norman says, “they think that I’m claiming I’m Frances Hodgson Burnett or Alice Walker. So I say I wrote the musical book.”

Tony Award – winning play­wright and actor Harvey Fierstein tried (and dis­carded) the titles “librettist” and “author” when he wrote the musicals La Cage aux Folles, A Catered Affair and Disney’s upcoming Newsies. “Nobody really knows what the book is,” he says. “If the show’s a hit, the com­poser gets the credit; if the show’s a flop, it’s the book’s fault.”

“You’re going to get all of the blame and none of the praise,” echoes Norman. “But you’ll still get a third of the money.”

So what do book writers do, exactly?

While the­atre­goers under­stand that a play­wright creates the entire story of a play, many think that book writers just write the dia­logue between the songs. But more often, the book writer first decides where the songs go and what they will be about, acting as the struc­tural engineer of the whole piece.

“Think of a musical as a string of pearls,” says Norman. “If you don’t have a string, you can’t put the pearls around your neck.”

Fierstein puts it another way: “A musical has all these moving parts, but the book is the chassis,” pro­viding both the framework and the running gear for the show to operate.

So with Newsies, it was Fierstein who took the char­acter of Denton, a male reporter in the film, and gave him a sex change to become Catherine, the love interest.

However, once a com­poser and lyricist create the songs, the book writer’s role changes. “At first, the book writer dic­tates what happens,” Fierstein says, “but then you become sub­servient. The music is the hardest to change, so you have to adapt the scenes to the songs.”

Even a theatre legend like Stephen Sondheim finds the task of book writing daunting. “I’ve often been asked why don’t I write my own librettos, because often the songs seem to be libretto-like songs,” he said in the Roundabout Theatre Company docu-revue Sondheim on Sondheim. “I think play­writing is too dif­ficult and I don’t ever think I could write a play.”

Unlike a play, though, “the book shouldn’t stand out and wave at you,” says Fierstein.

Veteran book writer Peter Stone, writer of 12 Broadway musicals including 1776 and Titanic, once advised play­wright Douglas Carter Beane, “The book is like lighting — if you notice it, it’s bad.”

The exception to that rule seems to be musicals that deliver big laughs, like Beane’s books for Xanadu, Sister Act and this season’s Lysistrata Jones. Beane is influ­enced by the frothy books of vintage comedy writers like George S. Kaufman and Comden & Green, saying, “I go back to them the way evan­gel­icals go back to Leviticus.”

Yet he, too, feels the need to serve the songs: “Writing the book is so tight, it’s like writing haiku.” When Beane rewrote Sister Act, director Jerry Zaks was so deter­mined to get to the music faster he asked Beane to change the words “do not” in the dia­logue to “don’t.”

And no matter how funny the jokes are, no one walks out of a theatre humming the dia­logue. Likewise, you won’t find anyone at the inter­mission of Wicked, having just heard Elphaba wail “Defying Gravity,” say, “That Winnie Holzman did a great job deciding to end the act there!”

That’s because book writers craft the story around key emotional/musical moments. “When you can no longer talk about it, you have to sing,” says Marsha Norman. “It’s the moment in con­ver­sation when you say ‘but….’ The songs rep­resent the inside of your brain: the things you think are the songs, the things you say are the book.”

“Musicals amplify emo­tions,” says Fierstein. When Fierstein wrote La Cage aux Folles, leg­endary book writer Arthur Laurents (West Side Story, Gypsy) taught him his number one rule of musi­cal­izing a story: “Does it sing?”

Similarly, Norman teaches her play­writing stu­dents at Juilliard that audi­ences respond to musicals emo­tionally rather than intel­lec­tually. “People listen to music with cavemen ears: Is it a bird song or the call of a lion?” Norman says. “The audience at a musical is dancing in their hearts.”

So when your heart dances to the music of Godspell, Porgy and Bess and Mamma Mia!, try to remember that it was the book writers John-Michael Tebelak, DuBose Heyward (and Suzan-Lori Parks for the recent Broadway revival) and Catherine Johnson who pulled you onto the dance floor.

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