By Marc Acito
19 Feb 2012

	Lysistrata Jones songwriter Lewis Flinn and librettist Douglas Carter Beane.
	photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

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.