Leiber & Stoller & Brecht & Weill

Jerry Leiber (who died yesterday) and Mike Stoller deserve more respect from the theater world than just as the songwriters behind one of the better jukebox musicals.

Man, even the Leiber obit in Playbill Online sells the guy short, concentrating mainly on Smokey Joe’s Cafe while mentioning in passing that Stoller co-wrote the score for The People in the Picture and that Leiber/Stoller songs figured in jukebox or revue shows such as Dancin’, Rock ‘n’ Roll! The First 5000 Years Ring of Fire, All Shook Up, the Peggy Lee show Peg and of course Million Dollar Quartet.

Read their amazing tag-team autobiography Hound Dog and you’ll find Leiber and Stoller enthralled by live theater at a young age. When not writing million-selling pop hits, they spent untold hours trying to crack the musical theater firmament with scores for a wide variety of stage projects.

In the book, they drop theatrical references throughout the book. When they began to produce other artists, including the Greek-chorus-style pop group The Shangri-Las, Leiber and Stoller wanted to be credited not as producers but as “directors.”

Plus they approached pop songs as little plays. Here’s how Stoller describes the writing of the Peggy Lee classic “Is That All There Is?” (Lieber had crafted the song’s despondent spoken-word verses after reading Thomas Mann for the first time.):

Stoller: Jerry and I had been talking about stretching out as writers, and when he gave me these verses I saw this as the perfect vehicle to do just that. Jerry’s vignettes ached with the bittersweet irony of the German cabaret. I wrote music that I hoped caught the spirit of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.
Then we got a call from Hilly Elkins, who was managing Georgia Brown. The English singer-actress known for “As Long as He Needs Me” was finishing her Broadway run of Oliver! and heading back to London for a TV special. She needed a song. When she heard those vignettes, she was convinced that that was it—except for one thing.
“It needs a chorus,” she said, “something for me to sing between verses. The spoken parts are beautiful, but it needs something else.”
Jerry and I agreed. We happened to have a chorus lying around, a leftover section from another song that didn’t work. It came complete with lyrics. We played it for Georgia and she loved it.

Leiber and Stoller worked hard on the score of a musical based on Mordechai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The show died in try-outs, the songwriters claim, because Richler wouldn’t take the time to fix his libretto. They also wrote the yet-unproduced musical Oscar, based on the Peter Finch film The Trials of Oscar Wilde, working directly with the film’s director Ken Hughes. They quote two of the songs in their Hound Dog book: a rant for Lord Queensbury, which begins “Homosexuals, oh, how I hate them, oh, how I loathe the bloody lot/ Why don’t they just exterminate them, exterminate them on the spot?” and a ballad titled “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.”

The Hound Dog chapter about Smokey Joe’s Café begins with mentions of much more audacious musical stage projects that never came to be:

Stoller: We weren’t thrilled that out many attempts to get a musical on Broadway had been in vain. Other efforts like The International Wrestling Match, songs we had written to turn an off-Broadway [sic] play—a Brechtian apocalyptic melodrama—into a musical, hadn’t taken off.

Yet having wanted to crack the format of book musicals for decades, when Smokey Joe’s Café began gestating, Leiber and Stoller insisted that it not have a book, that “the songs are their own stories.” They fell out with a choreographer/director over this exact point during workshops in Chicago, which led to Jerry Zaks coming in as director and agreeing that no book was needed.