Another Golden Age?

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

“They tell me now I was living in a golden age,” the musical-theater star Barbara Cook told audiences at her recent one-woman show, “Barbara Cook’s Broadway.” “I didn’t know I was living in a golden age.” And then, tilting her head quizzically, she asked her attentive listeners, “Do you think we’re living in one now?”


The startled silence that greeted Ms. Cook’s rhetorical question was a reminder of the paradox that haunts today’s musical theater, on Broadway and elsewhere. Financially, the American musical could hardly be doing better; artistically, everyone from fans and historians to leading practitioners wonders where it will go next – or if it has any place to go at all. Tickets for the hit shows still flow merrily from the booking services’ computers, and mobs of tourists still crowd you off sidewalks in the 14-block stretch of Broadway known as Times Square, but the old long-running shows are winding down, while the new ones, containing less and less original work, often give off a prepackaged, recycled feel.


“Catalog” musicals collect the assembled works of some rock or pop songwriter. Clumsy stage versions are carpentered out of old movie musicals (usually salted with irrelevant songs from their composers’ catalogs). Popular nonmusical movies of recent vintage are turned into synthetic, pastiche-sounding “new” musicals. Revivals of ultra-familiar hit shows from the past get tinkered with to match their movie versions. When not based on fairly recent nonmusical movies, such new musicals as do arrive tend to be soft-rock drivelizations of a publisher’s pre-World War I backlist: Having outlived “Les Miserables,” “Jekyll & Hyde,” “Tom Sawyer,” and “Jane Eyre,” Broadway is now enduring “Dracula” and gritting its teeth in anticipation of “Little Women.” Gone are the days, apparently, when seeing a musical meant squirming with delight while the Astaires whirled to Gershwin tunes, Ethel Merman belted out Cole Porter zingers, or (way back when) Flo Ziegfeld’s splendoramas alternated parades of gorgeous girls with the antics of Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, W.C. Fields, Bert Williams, and Ed Wynn, all to songs by Irving Berlin.


So is the musical dead? Is it time for critics to hang up their hats and show tune fanatics to weep in their Chablis? Let’s not be too hasty. With musicals, the one thing to be certain of is that any generalization will be partly untrue. Evolving as it has, vacuuming up as it does such a wide range of traditions, means, tactics, and intentions, the form is simply too complex to be reduced to any single definition. All you can do is catalog its varieties and trace the ways they’ve blended into each other; you never can tell where they might go next.


This simple truth is reaffirmed, almost unintentionally, by Michael Kantor’s “Broadway: The American Musical,” a six-part series that begins airing on PBS tonight. (The DVD edition is already in stores, along with a coffee-table book, a five-CD anthology of numbers touched on in the video, and a single-CD sampler.) Mr. Kantor and his staff, including three additional writers and an imposing team of advisers, have done a heroic job of assembling, with the subtle craft of a master joiner, an awesome array of visual and aural materials: still photographs; archival film records of stage performances; clips from film and television versions of musicals; live recordings; original cast and studio cast albums; movie soundtracks; and “cover” renditions of show tunes, some recorded especially for the series. The battery of onscreen talking heads includes one of the last surviving Ziegfeld Follies girls, producer-director Hal Prince, a garland of theater composers, and a procession of stars, among them Carol Channing, Joel Grey, Jerry Orbach, and host Julie Andrews.


Pretty impressive, but as you might expect, this cascade of materials and personalities could hardly be channeled into a single vision of what constitutes a musical. Ironically, enchantingly, the resounding success of Mr. Kantor’s venture stems from the joy with which he torpedoes his own attempts to construct a thesis. The idea he would like to present is a variant on the simplistic – and misguided – view of the musical’s history widely accepted by today’s aficionados. This notion postulates that the form aspires to be an American vernacular version of opera: Initially, the musical was merely a loose string of numbers and sketches, arbitrarily arranged. Then a few heroic figures (who shall be called Rodgers and Hammerstein), struggled against all odds to make musicals “integrated” -meaning that the songs arose naturally from characters in a believable story – and “serious” – meaning stories dealt with matters like racism, death, gang violence, and others not normally viewed as the province of light entertainment.


This is true as far as it goes. Both Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II showed an interest, from the start of their respective careers, in making musicals that were coherent works and dealt with adult realities; after their partnership began in 1943 with “Oklahoma!” their hegemony was long and influential. The move toward tightly woven, continuously sung music drama has been carried on by Hammerstein’s disciple, Stephen Sondheim, inarguably the most remarkable artist at work in the field today. And Mr. Sondheim’s influence has extended to virtually the whole younger generation of musical-theater writers.


But the musical theater, by its nature, can never be only one thing, even when (to quote a satirical cabaret song of recent vintage) “Everybody Wants To Be Sondheim.” Its development can’t be linear because (like America itself) it has too many sources and caters to too many different tastes. The highbrow desire to elevate such a form inevitably provokes a relapse into simple fun: After “Sweeney Todd,” the natural next step is back to “Hairspray.” The period of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s huge success with “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel” was also the period of producer Mike Todd’s lavish girlie shows – essentially upscale replacements for the burlesque theaters that Mayor LaGuardia had shut down at the start of World War II.


The PBS series touts the odd notion that pre-R &H musicals were “optimistic,” as if comedy and optimism were synonyms. Several voices in Mr. Kantor’s first episode also assert, inaccurately, that in the 1920s, its basic form was that of revue. But European operetta, which the series fastidiously eschews except for passing mentions, is one of the main tributaries flowing into the big river of the American musical.


The long series of innovative shows that Rodgers wrote in the 1920s and 1930s with Lorenz Hart (who gets respectful but all too brief treatment from Mr. Kantor) were “integrated” book shows well before “Oklahoma!” merely lighter in tone. Hart, who had begun his theater career with a drudge job translating Viennese operetta books for the Shuberts, was responsible for many of the innovations commonly credited to Hammerstein. It was his idea to extend the form’s range by musicalizing Shakespeare (“The Boys from Syracuse”) and John O’Hara (“Pal Joey”). He and Rodgers had been attempting “sung-through” scenes from the start of their joint career. (A program note for their 1926 show “Chee-Chee” states, “The musical numbers are so interwoven with the story that it would be confusing for the audience to peruse a complete list.”) In their early film musicals, Hart even experimented with rhymed dialogue, spoken rhythmically over music.


Hammerstein, for his part, made similar efforts during the 1920s in his collaborations with transplanted European operetta composers Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml. Long before “Carousel’s” hero died in a robbery attempt, audiences had seen a murder, for which the hero is nearly framed, in the Hammerstein-Friml “Rose-Marie” (1924). Hammerstein’s aim, as Mr. Sondheim cogently points out in Mr. Kantor’s film, was to merge the European operetta tradition with a more American entertainment style.


Though Mr. Kantor’s series puts the “Broadway” musical’s beginnings to the building of Times Square, the form’s history predates New York’s current theater district by nearly four decades. Most scholars locate its birth much further down Broadway, at the corner of Prince Street, where, in 1867, the enterprising manager of Niblo’s Garden Theatre merged a Gothic melodrama that was dying at the box office with a French ballet troupe stranded in town. “The Black Crook’s” blend of legs in tights and sinister conspiracies among the stalactites proved a winning combination, and the American musical had its first ungainly hit, spawning four decades of loose-jointed extravaganzas, burlesques, and spectacles. (Mr. Kantor’s series sloughs all this off in one fleeting mention; there isn’t much film footage or sound recording available from the 1870s.)


Operetta provided a coherent, semiserious model to counter these gussied-up variety shows, cross-breeding with them through successive stylistic waves: first Offenbach’s French operas-bouffes, then the satirical “light operas” of Gilbert and Sullivan (a principal model for many writers of the musical’s first great phase), and finally the more romantic Viennese operetta of Lehar and his peers. By the time of the Viennese dominance, however, American operetta had emerged strongly with the generation of Victor Herbert, Reginald deKoven, and John Philip Sousa (yes, that John Philip Sousa). Since Viennese operettas were always Americanized, with adapted books and interpolated songs, they served as a training ground for young composers like Jerome Kern.


Kern, who with Hammerstein laid down the parameters of the operetta-ized musical in “Show Boat” (1927), actually pioneered the development of the “integrated” musical even earlier, in a series of intimate shows of the late 1910s on which he collaborated with playwright Guy Bolton and lyricist P.G. Wodehouse (yes, that P.G. Wodehouse). These “Princess Theatre shows,” as they were known, go wholly unmentioned in the PBS series: The tiny theater where they played was on West 39th Street, in the pre-Times Square theater district; its intimacy made it the equivalent of today’s Off-Broadway houses. Mostly based on popular farces of the preceding decade, the Princess Theatre shows were slight, but the authors took pains to make them cohesive and even witty. They became a fashionable sensation and, like Gilbert and Sullivan, a particular model for young writers. In their own time, they were cited for administering the same aesthetic rebuke to the loosely constructed extravaganzas of the pre-World War I era that the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals gave to the “frivolous” pre-World War II shows.


In fact, when we look back on the origins of the 20th-century musical, what we see isn’t unlike what’s on Broadway’s stages today. Though “catalog” musicals had not yet sprung up, pre- Princess Theatre book musicals had such crazy quilt scores that their song lists read like catalogs of pop songs pulled from a stock set of categories. In this regard, an invaluable supplement to the PBS Broadway series is the two-CD set of original cast recordings from a nearly forgotten 1903 musical that began in Chicago, not New York, and was one of the gigantic successes of the time just before Mr. Kantor’s film begins: “The Wizard of Oz.”


Far from the Arlen-Harburg score of the 1939 MGM film version that all Americans know by heart, this “Wizard’s” score amounts to a virtual hijacking: Initially written by “Oz” novelist L. Frank Baum himself with composer Paul Tietjens, the show was taken over by its director, Julian Mitchell, and turned into a topical, scenery laden whoop-de-doo with barely passing reference to the story of Baum’s book. The songs recorded from it are virtually all interpolations, tearful ballads and brash comedy numbers in a chop suey of ethnic dialects. (Released in 2003, the CD is now distributed by Archeophone, which is currently issuing important CD collections of such early musical-theater artists as Bert Williams and the team of Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth.)


Musicals don’t deal in topical gags and ethnic stereotypes anymore, but the form has aggressively scrambled away from the earnestness Rodgers and Hammerstein imposed on it, into a freewheeling world of spoof, silliness, and hit-parade pastiche. This isn’t necessarily better than seriousness, but it has the major virtue of not feeling like the artistic equivalent of castor oil. “Broadway: The American Musical” waves the castor-oil spoon about frequently in its commentary, but its sounds and sights tell a story that’s richer, more varied, and vastly more entertaining. Who can say that the musical isn’t on its way back to such delights, all claims of seriousness and the evolution of an American equivalent for opera notwithstanding?


Given the thesis of the series, though, it’s interesting that it omits mention of two important phenomena: the existence on Broadway of actual operas, commercially produced and often successful, in the 1945-55 period, and the artist whose experiments in precisely this “Broadway opera” form should have made him a central part of the filmmaker’s argument: Kurt Weill. Music by the composer of “Lady in the Dark,” “Lost in the Stars,” and “Street Scene,” though well represented on the five-CD set, shows up in the video only while the final credits roll.



Mr. Feingold, chief theater critic of the Village Voice, is currently translating the lyrics for Martha Clarke’s “Belle Epoque” at Lincoln Center Theater.


The New York Sun

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