POINT-COUNTERPOINT on Broadway's "I Want Songs"
David and Mateo debate parts of your world and corners of the sky
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In today’s MARQUEE: The Broadway Maven’s Weekly Blast: A) a “point-counterpoint” debate between David and Mateo about the function of “I Want Songs”; B) a Broadway Blast about A Little Night Music; C) a Broadway Maven YouTube Gem about the Bean Theme from Into the Woods; and D) a Last Blast about CATS.
POINT (Mateo Chavez Lewis): Theatre creators and theatre fans alike love to throw around the term “I Want number” to describe any knockout solo song, but the term lacks the kind of clear industry-standard definition that would make it more useful in academic discussion. In this short essay I want to establish a standard definition for “I Want numbers.” (See what I did there?)
In order to achieve its goal – setting the audience up to follow the journey of the musical – I would argue that an “I Want” number needs to have three main characteristics. First, it must appear near the beginning of the show. Second, it must be sung by the central protagonist. Third, it must address the central protagonist’s central want – not a sidequest, but the main goal we are going to watch the protagonist fight for throughout the entire musical. Therefore, my definition is as follows: An “I Want” song is a song for the central protagonist, near the beginning of the show, which defines that character’s central want or desire.
This definition might prove controversial, due to the fact that it would strip beloved songs like “I Dreamed a Dream” and “If I Were a Rich Man” of the “I Want” title (Fantine is not the central protagonist, and getting rich is not Tevye’s central want.) Regardless, I think this definition is the most useful for addressing an “I Want” number’s structural function in the score of a musical.
The most important thing to notice is that, following this definition, you cannot simply label any song in which any character wants anything an “I Want” song. If we were to use the term that broadly, the term would become completely meaningless, because every song in a musical should involve a character who wants something. If there are no characters onstage pursuing a desire, then there is no conflict; if there is no conflict, the scene becomes dead and boring. In order to have any relevance whatsoever, then, the term “I Want” song must refer to a more specific kind of song and cannot be used more generally.
So, while this definition may strip some of your favorite songs of their “I Want” status, it makes the term much more useful in describing one very particular structural function, served by one very particular kind of song. That's why I think we should adopt it across the theatre industry.
COUNTERPOINT (David Benkof): One problem with Mateo's proposed song-structure regime is that many people who have studied the matter, including Mateo in a recent video, cite Jack Viertel's 2016 tome The Secret Life of the American Musical for its brilliant breakdown of the constituent parts of successful shows. And Viertel disagrees with Mateo on several key points regarding "I Want" numbers, as demonstrated by the fact he sees many Broadway shows (My Fair Lady, The Producers, and Camelot among others) as having not one but two such songs for two very different characters, a fact incompatible with Mateo's insistence that the term should be reserved for the main character's main want.
But there's a larger issue here, and that's the difficulty of establishing in many shows who the "central protagonist" is. Typically, a show's protagonist is understood to be the figure with the clearest character arc, who learns something, who winds up in a different place at the end of the show than she began. That means the "obvious" protagonist (Annie, Dolly, Sally Bowles) sometimes does not actually play that role at all. We see Daddy Warbucks's heart melt, Horace Vandergelder grow into romance, and Cliff/Brian decide to leave Berlin.
In an "ideal" Broadway show, the "main" character is also the character who changes and is also the character who has an "I Want" song and the 11 o'clock number (in which we learn how and why they changed). Ultimately, though, the beauty of the song structure conversation (and why I'm grateful to Mateo for proposing a definition he likes) is that it gives us a way to talk about Broadway shows when their protagonists, title characters, "I Want" songs, and 11 o'clock numbers do NOT line up.
Example: If Gypsy followed Mateo's understanding of show structure, then Rose would be the central character because her song "Some People" sure sounds like an "I Want" number in terms of its lyrics and its placement in the show. But Rose's obsessions don't evolve in the show. It's Louise who changes, into a self-confident performer.
Or take Fiddler on the Roof. As Mateo correctly points out, the third song "If I Were a Rich Man" expresses an intense want our main character has, but it's not followed through in the rest of the show. Does that mean the song in second position, "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" is the "I Want Song" and the protagonists are the daughters? It's an interesting conversation to have.
Look, Mateo is a musical theater composer-lyricist, and if I had his job I'd be pining for a clearer, cleaner rule on expressing a character's desire. But Broadway is just a messier place, and for that I say thank God.
BROADWAY BLAST: Madame Armfeldt opens A Little Night Music by stating, “Solitaire is the only thing in life that demands absolute honesty.” This quip about a solo card game masks a deeper commentary on the play’s central theme: the impossibility of honesty in human relationships. As the musical unfolds, Madame Armfeldt continues to play cards with herself, pragmatically drawing and dealing hearts (love), diamonds (wealth) and other charged symbols. After all, she's the character who reminisces in “Liaisons” about a time when relationships were baldly transactional but at least transparent. Her straightforwardness, reflected in her solitary card-playing, stands in stark contrast to the delusions and deceit of the others, whose romantic entanglements are anything but honest. She may hold her cards close to the chest, but they still underscore a deeper truth: Madame Armfeldt is the only one who isn’t bluffing.
BROADWAY MAVEN YouTube GEM: One of the most notable motifs in the Broadway canon is the Bean Theme in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Into the Woods. This one-minute video presents 15 examples of this five-note melody, showcasing the brilliant ways Sondheim seeds the score with the Bean Theme while staying fresh.
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• Sunday, April 6 Noon ET “Before Broadway” with David Armstrong (Members only)
LAST BLAST: What if "Jellicle" cats in Andrew Lloyd Webber's CATS don’t actually have a nonsense name but an abbreviated one? The last three syllables of "angelical" sound like "jellicle," suggesting that these whimsical felines might be "angelical" cats—fitting, since the story revolves around which cat is chosen for a second life in the Heaviside Layer, a clear metaphor for Heaven. This subtle connection adds a spiritual undercurrent to a show often dismissed as frivolous, making the cats’ journey one of redemption and transcendence rather than mere spectacle.
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I think it's useful to have coherent taxonomies of form, and in this instance, Mateo is the one making the argument for that. David gets to what I think is an important, but unrelated concern about the risk of structural taxonomies becoming perverted into an archetype of the "ideal" form, making all stories that don't follow all the tropes somehow lesser (or Loesser). In other words, yeah, Disney (and specifically Ashman-Menken) established a central (typically female) protagonist with an I Want song, ostensibly set against the villain's I Am song. This is basically the Cinderella story retold in various ways. However, even without considering the concept musical, revue, or other shows that lean more toward abstraction and allusion than narrative, not all musicals are elaborated Disney or Cinderella stories, nor should they be, just as not all movies are Shane Black action hero flicks or Save the Cat stories. We should be able to acknowledge Mateo's definition of the "I Want" song without insisting that a show must have one to be considered fully satisfactory or superimposing its existence on every story.
The moment you start contorting your analysis to fit your taxonomies is the moment you've copped out on unpacking what makes a particular production work or fail. We should have enough tools in the kit to find one that fits and facilitates our understanding without insisting that one size fit all.
But is "If I were a rich man" really about just being rich? While the words say that, I always looked at this as an I want song where he is actually more philosophical- it is not about being "rich" but if he were then he would not have any of the "problems" that he faces as the protagonist throughout the play. He would not be living where he lives, he would not have to worry about marrying off his daughters or what would make them most happy, as he would have wealth and not have to worry about their lifestyles, he would not have to break his back working, and his wife would be happy and not have to toil. So while I agree with Mateo's definition I would not preclude the song as being cast out by the definition. This could still be the I want song of Fiddler, but only if you do not take it so literally- it is about a man wanting better for himself and his family overall and really that is what he ends up accepting over the play, letting love and his daughter's happiness (whether he agrees or not) control. So I think even under Mateo's definition it would work. (I just read Tracey's comment below after I wrote this and I agree with her words as well.)