3.  The Production Song

Certain songs lend themselves more readily to effective staging, and these are called “production songs.”  For instance:  “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” could be—­and often was—­put on with a real band.  The principal character could sing the first verse and the chorus alone.  Then the chorus girls could come out in regimentals, each one “playing” some instrument—­the music faked by the orchestra or produced by “zobos”—­and when they were all on the stage, the chorus could be played again with rousing effect.  During the second verse, sung as a solo, the girls could act out the lines.  Then with the repetitioin of the chorus, they could produce funny characteristic effects on the instruments.  And then they could all exit—­waiting for the audience to bring them back for the novelties the audience would expect to be introduced in an encore.

This is often the way a “popular song” is “plugged” in cabarets, musical comedies, burlesque, and in vaudeville.  It is made so attractive that it is repeated again and again—­and so drummed into the ears of the audience that they go out whistling it.  Ned Wayburn demonstrated this in his vaudeville act “Staging an Act.”  He took a commonplace melody and built it up into a production—­then the audience liked it.  George Cohan did precisely the same thing in his “Hello, Broadway”; taking a silly lyric and a melody, he told the audience he was going to make ’em like it; and he did—­by “producing it.”

But not every “popular song” lends itself to production treatment.  For instance, how would you go about producing “When it Strikes Home”?  How would you stage “When I Lost You”?  Or—­to show you that serious songs are not the only ones that may not be producible—­ how would you put on “Oh, How that German Could Love”?  Of course you could bring the chorus on in couples and have them sing such a sentimental song to each other—­but that would not, in the fullest sense, be producing it.

Just as not every “popular song” can be produced, so not every production song can be made popular.  You have never whistled that song produced in “Staging an Act,” nor have you ever whistled Cohan’s song from “Hello, Broadway.”  If they ever had any names I have forgotten them, but the audience liked them immensely at the time.

As many production songs are good only for stage purposes, and therefore are not a source of much financial profit to their writers, there is no need for me to describe their special differences and the way to go about writing them.  Furthermore, their elements are precisely the same as those of any other song—­with the exception that each chorus is fitted with different catch lines in the place of the regular punch lines, and there may be any number of different verses. [1] Now having your “big” idea, and having built it up with your musical elements carefully spaced to allow for costume changes, perhaps having made your comedy rise out of the monologue and the two-act to good plot advantage, and having developed your story to its climax in the last part of your act, you assemble all your people, join the loose plot ends and bring your musical comedy to a close with a rousing ensemble finish.