Peter  Stone  (1930-­‐2003)  and  the  book  of  the  American  musical    Brian  Dawson                    

The  ‘Power  of  Music’:  the  34th  National  Conference  of  the  Musicological  Society  of  Australia,  in  conjunction  with  the  2nd  International  Conference  on  Music  and  Emotion  

Perth,  Western  Australia  

 

1  December  2011        

 

Introduction  

When in 1989 Peter Stone wrote of the musical book as ‘the lumber and nails

and blueprint of a musical’ (Stone 2003 2), he trumpeted the significance of

this neglected element in the construction of the American musical theatre;

and he did so with the succinctness of a skilled writer, the commonsense

pragmatism of a long-standing and specialist practitioner, and the persuasive

force of a political creature. It is these qualities, together with his

achievements as a writer of ‘books’ for the musical theatre in the second half

of the twentieth-century, which make Peter Stone a key figure in the history

and development of the American musical stage.

If we are to comprehend the importance of Stone we must firstly have an

understanding of the ‘musical book’ or ‘book of a musical’ of which he is such

a firm advocate.

The  musical  book  

The text books tell us that ‘the book’ is ‘the script exclusive of the lyrics,’

(Kennedy 2003) and ‘the spoken dialogue of a musical comedy or musical

play’ (Hartnoll 1996). From this we might reasonably assume that it is merely

the play of a musical. But such definitions do nothing to inform us of the

function and the form of ‘the book’ – indeed, they reinforce the long-held

privileging of the score (the music and the lyrics) which has dominated both

the practice of and the scholarship surrounding musical theatre: consider the

 

following examples where the composers and/or lyricists surely are more

celebrated than the generally unknown book-writers:

• West Side Story (1957) Bernstein and Sondheim, with book-writer

Arthur Laurents excluded

• The Sound of Music (1959) a Rodgers and Hammerstein classic,

overlooking the central contribution of Howard Lindsay and Russell

Crouse;

• The Phantom of the Opera (1986) asserting the dominance of

composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber, his collaborators always credited and

handsomely paid but largely ignored, Charles Hart (lyrics) and Richard

Stilgoe (co-writer with Lloyd Webber on the book, and additional lyrics).

But the book is much, much more than just the dialogue or the jokes, or so

Stone would have us believe. He has written that it is ‘a good deal different

from a straight play. Its not just a play with songs stuck into it’ (Stone 2003 2).

For Stone, the musical book is, in a word, ‘construction’ (ibid), and my thesis

is largely given to exploring how this expanded concept of a book as an

organizing structure tells us something of the intersection of music and theatre

in the American musical theatre.

But this mini-presentation is not the place for an elaboration on my thesis.

Rather, in the seven-minutes allotted to me, I hope to establish the

credentials of Peter Stone in order to lend credibility to his claims.

 

Peter  Stone  

Peter Stone was one of few writers able to maintain a living by writing books

for the American musical theatre. Born in Los Angeles in 1930, the son of

movie producer John Stone and screenwriter Hilda Hess, his early success in

television and film led to Emmy and Oscar Awards in the 60s, before

Broadway gained his full attention. With the Tony Award success in 1969 of

the musical 1776 he became the first writer to hold all three prestigious

awards. (see Fig. 1)

Fig 1, the Awards conferred on Peter Stone.

He continued to be successful on Broadway, gaining two more Tony Awards

for Woman of the Year in 1981 and Titanic in 1997. In total, he contributed

musical books for more than 11 shows, including adaptations of Annie Get

Your Gun and Finian’s Rainbow for more modern times as well as the

uncredited writing for Grand Hotel in a role referred to as ‘book-doctoring’.

(see Fig. 2) Since his death from pulmonary fibrosis in 2003 at the age of 73

his influence has continued with two unfinished projects brought to fruition;

Curtains!, a show he had been working on with the legendary team of Kander

and Ebb, opened on Broadway in 2007, completed and reshaped by Rupert

 

Holmes; and in 2011 his uncompleted Death Takes a Holiday, music

composed by Maury Yeston, opened off-Broadway with Stone credited as co-

author of the book along with Thomas Meehan. In addition to these

achievements as a writer, Stone held for fourteen years the important position

of President to the Dramatists Guild of America, serving in that role from 1985

to 1999

Fig 2, Selected works of Peter Stone; photograph of Stone with leading lady of Charade,

Audrey Hepburn.

Much of this biographical information has long been available through brief

articles, but to unearth further details required access to source documents, in

this case the personal papers, the private archives, of the man himself.

Archival  Research  

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B.

Cullman Center at the Lincoln Center is preeminent amongst American

cultural institutions interested in the documentation of that nation’s theatrical

 

culture, especially Broadway. In May of 2011 it launched the second-largest of

its theatrical collections, the Peter Stone Papers. Contained in 209 boxes

measuring 85.74 linear metres, the collection is out-ranked only by the vast

private archives of legendary, and still active, Broadway producer and director

Hal Prince. The collection had been donated by Stone’s widow, Mary, back in

2007, and the story of its public release is a lengthy one – and one in which I

can say I played a small role. Nevertheless, the papers were finally processed

and a catalogue record released to public view on Wednesday 27 April 2011

(see Fig. 3), and two days later I became the first scholar to handle them in

the Katharine Cornell-Guthrie McClintic Special Collections Reading Room.

As I worked through the files and folders there emerged the qualities of Stone

I mentioned earlier of a skilled writer, a specialist practitioner, and a political

creature.

Fig. 3 In April 2011, the New York Public Library released its catalogue and finding aid to the

Peter Stone Papers.

Writer  

That Stone should become a skilled writer can be traced, initially, to his blood

line: his father, John Stone (1888-1961), was a man of some influence in

Hollywood, firstly as a screenwriter in the 1920s and then as a producer at

 

20th Century Fox in the 30s and 40s; and his mother, Hilda Stone (1905-1992,

later Hilda Marton) wrote several screenplays. These facts, however, are

widely known; it was the deeper circumstances of Stone’s family life which

were more influential in turning him from merely the first of two offspring of

Hollywood parents to becoming a substantial figure in American theatre.

Firstly, Stone’s father actively discouraged him from a career as a writer.

Through this struggle, Stone found something of his writer’s voice that was to

come through in his career. Consider the native talent of a young man not yet

established as a writer, corresponding with his father, a sceptical veteran of

Hollywood. While this example shows, on the surface, the single-minded

tenacity of a young man determined to find his own way in life, it also

prefigures some of the rhetoric he would assign to the characters in his first

Tony Award-winning musical 1776:

And when that day comes when you can respect me even though you cannot share

my opinions and values, when you can believe that I respect you even though I do

not, for the moment, share every one of your opinions and values, when you can

understand that TWO opinions and TWO sets of values can BOTH be valid in respect

to TWO individual personalities, on that day all difficulties between us will be over and

done with.

(Stone 1958)

Consider too an excerpt from Stone’s stepfather, the Hungarian-born literary

agent who Stone visited in Paris annually for much of his early adult years.

 

This shows the kind of connections Stone had access to as well as the

support and the nurture extended to him:

‘I would take you into the agency and make you the sole heir of all Marton enterprises

at the drop of a hat. But - look Pal, you have to do more to prove to yourself and me,

that, as a writer you are a wash-out. I don't buy that yet. ‘

(Marton 1956)

It is no surprise that we can consider Peter Stone to be a skilled writer: both

by temperament and by circumstance he was provided with considerable

resources which he was to put together in a long career as a specialist

practitioner.

Practitioner  

Stone’s career as a writer of musical books was well recognized by his peers

(he shares first prize with three other writers for the most number of Tony

Awards for Best Book of a Musical, see Fig. 4). As a specialist practitioner,

what emerges from the archives is the craftsmanship evident in the drafts for

the various works. Stone was meticulous in keeping working versions with

their revisions and penciled annotations. Arguably the best example of the

value of a book writers craft can be found in Titanic, Stone’s 1997 and last

Tony Award winning musical (not to be confused with James Cameron’s

movie blockbuster which opened in cinemas more than six months after the

curtain rose on the Stone-Yeston show).

 

In his essay to the published libretto Stone describes the collaborative

approach he employed with composer Maury Yeston, careful to explain

scenes were carefully constructed to stitch together the story and the music.

He also explains how much of this construction was later unpicked in the

production phases of the show, much of it at the director’s insistence. In

analysing the published libretto I was struck by the difference between its very

flat construction in comparison to the masterly plotting in 1776 with its intricate

use of events, obstacles, complications and reversals to generate suspense in

a story where the outcome (the signing of the Declaration of Independence) is

an inevitable historical fact. Titanic, on the other hand, while sharing an

outcome which is also inevitable and historical, was much more linear in its

plotting sequence with the consequence that the amount of suspense

generated was significantly lower. When working through the various drafts of

Titanic it became obvious that Stone, the experience practitioner, had indeed

capitulated to the needs of his director-collaborator, and in doing so had rent

the delicate fabric of his preferred book, leaving both the scenes and the

music exposed. In essence, what had been removed was an entire layer of

sub-story: the story of the Royal investigation which followed the sinking of the

great liner, intercut within the conventional historical narrative of the ship’s

journey into devastation. The great loss of these edits, it seemed to me, was

the tension and suspense that came with the juxtaposition of the two stories.

For example, the final version contains a simple ballad in praise of Marconi’s

telegraph, and the telegraph operator aboard the Titanic expresses how the

invention brought him in contact with a broader world as he sings “And the

night was alive with a thousand voices fighting to be heard”; this same lyric

 

reprised in a Royal Investigation scene takes on another quality as Bride, the

telegraph operator, tells the story of how his SOS went unnoticed by the

nearby Californian which could have picked up all of the remaining survivors

in the water if it hadn’t sent its own telegraph operator to bed at midnight:

“And the night was alive with a thousand voices fighting to be heard”. But the

scene was removed and the gravity lost. Despite this the drafts show the deft

skill through which he was able to swiftly accommodate directorial requests

through simple edits even if this is an example of the specialist practitioner

failing to bring to bear his influence; even a highly political animal like Stone

had to make compromises and concessions for the sake of the work.

Fig 4. Selected list of multiple Tony Award winners for Best Book of a Musical.

Political  creature  

Stone and his wife were well connected socially and professionally with some

of the highest ranking officials in American political life. The archives contain

regular invitations between the years 1977 and 1993 to attend receptions at

the White House from no-less than four American Presidents: Carter, Reagan,

Bush, and Clinton.

 

This personal note from Teddy Kennedy to Stone demonstrates the high

regard that the Boston politician held for the East-side Manhattan man of the

theatre:

‘It is wonderful having special friends like you stand with me in the important

campaign and I am ever grateful. You are a wonderful and valued friend.’

(Kennedy, 1958)

Mary Stone indicated that the friendship between the Stones and the Clintons

extended beyond the professional into the personal. Even so, Stone was

frequently engaged to write, and sometimes mount, benefit concerts in

support of a political candidate, notably the 1992 event Broadway for Bill

Clinton. Stone penned a memorable opener for host, Alec Baldwin:

Good evening, I'm Alec Baldwin. Normally I'm appearing a couple of blocks north at

the Barrymore Theatre in "A Streetcar Named Desire" where eight times a week I

have to rape Jessica Lange so I can really use a night off.

(Stone 1992)

Stone’s influence extended into matters directly affecting his profession when

for fourteen years he helmed the Dramatists Guild of America, petitioning for

improved rights and stronger legal contracts for authors and playwrights as

well as mentoring rising writers such as African-American playwright and

director George C. Wolfe.

This extended network of connections at a range of levels demonstrates the

potential influence Stone was able to effect and complemented his other

characteristics as skilled writer and long-time specialist practitioner.

 

Conclusion  

The recently released archives of Peter Stone in the New York Public Library

signal an opportunity for scholars to explore the work of a specialist book

writer working in the field of the American musical theatre. It is my pleasure

and my privilege to be one of the earliest to undertake this task, and from it I

hope to develop an expanded understanding of the form and function of ‘the

book’ of the American musical theatre, leading to a more complete

comprehension and conception of this multi-modal form of human expression.

Bibliography      

Hartnoll, Phyllis and Peter Found (eds). 1992. The Concise Oxford companion

to the theatre. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Kennedy, Dennis (ed.). 2003. The Oxford encyclopedia of theatre &

Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kennedy, Edward M. 1958. Note to Peter Stone, 28 September 1958.

[manuscript] Peter Stone Papers. T-Mss 2010-109/192/1. New York: Billy

Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library.

Marton, George. 1956. Letter to Peter Stone, 24 January 1956. [manuscript]

Peter Stone Papers. T-Mss 2010-109/175/5. New York: Billy Rose Theatre

 

Division, The New York Public Library.

Stone, Peter. 1958. Letter to John Stone, 14 January 1958. [manuscript]

Peter Stone papers. T-Mss 2010-109/176/5. New York: Billy Rose Theatre

Division, The New York Public Library.

— 1992. Program dated 22 June 1992. [manuscript] Peter Stone papers. T-

Mss 2010-109/192/2. New York: Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York

Public Library.

— 2003. The Musical Comedy Book. The Dramatist.

— 2011. Peter Stone papers. New York: Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New

York Public Library.