This is a crime against
nature!" My friend had risen with dowager dudgeon from his seat at
"Footloose." "Where is Jesse Helms when you need him? This is
perversion!"
Helped to the street by an usher, he scanned the billboards. "This
is Sodom," he screamed. "Beauty and the Beast.' 'The Civil Wars.' 'Les
Miz.' 'Miss Saigon.' 'Annie Get Your Gun and Use It to Kill Irving
Berlin.' All carry the mark of the beast!"
As a few well-dressed extraterrestrials turned to stare, it
occurred to me that we might be witnessing the season's best
performance — with nary a T-shirt concession nor sitcom spin-off to
its name. Luckily he didn't break into song, but in every other regard
his soliloquy embodied all that Broadway musicals have forsaken:
passion, emotion, the ability to surprise. For as they've bloated,
exploded, self-aggrandized, aerobicized, our mega musicals have
paradoxically shrunk. They've lost their soul. How fitting that the
transformation took place in the newly sterile Times Square: the muck
that urban renewal cleaned out was the stuff that fertilized a great
American art form.
The finest musical theatre is, after all, a direct descendant of
tacky operettas and vaudeville, with all its cheap jokes and bawdy
lyrics. Featuring stock characters straight out of American mythology,
satirizing class difference and full of song-and-dance numbers, the
earliest light-hearted musicals emerged at the turn of the century
almost organically to serve a working-class immigrant culture at a
very tumultuous moment in American history. Theatre must be a paradox
to succeed, and this was ferocious fluff, deadly uproarious political
theatre that was also tons of fun.
What's more, it constantly reinvented itself. It incorporated
complex narratives, ethnic dance styles and Old World melodies. (Could
Gershwin have found his voice without klezmer?) Having learned in
Hollywood how to write for an even bigger audience, Rodgers and Hart,
Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and others returned to New York, to giddy
grief, ecstatic suffering and devastating hilarity, and they made it
all sing. The results? A lot of junk, sure, but also "Porgy and Bess,"
as great and complex as any opera; "Carousel," which dared to sing
soaringly about the wrong kind of love; "South Pacific," which
confronted the wounds of war; "West Side Story," which introduced
12-tone techniques to a matinee audience. Music as great as any ever
written, married to powerful stories that mattered. All works of
genius, all commercial hits.
Can anyone but my sentimental friend imagine such a combination
today? Not at "Footloose," where everyone but us was simply delighted
by the merry fare. He and I are like ghosts who feel keenly but can't
be seen, not even by saucer-eyed little boys in Bruce Willis movies.
In the 70's and 80's, financial pressures pushed the industry to
forsake medium-size productions in favour of gigantic spectacles. As a
result, medium-size backers — central to the culture of Broadway —
threw in the towel, leaving the field wide open for Disney. Today, it
seems no producer cares about a score unless it's a tinny soundtrack
with a shot at the charts; no one buys the book unless it can spawn a
Saturday morning cartoon; no one touches the concept unless it can
glorify a city's self-image. Musicals have become grossly glossy
advertisements for themselves, conspicuous consumption and little
else. And even after all that, tragically few of the shows ever earn a
dime.
Meaning is a phantom; a chandelier falls and we go home happy —
minus a hundred shekels and 10,000 brain cells.
The only great musical I've seen this year was "South Park." People
actually left humming the wonderfully potty-mouthed tunes. But it
savagely satirized musicals as a whole, adapting banal clichés as a
vehicle for scabrous, inflammatory ideas. And when the only good
musical is an antimusical, it doesn't say much for the genre's life
span.
Yet instead of humbly retreating, the musical is spreading like
kudzu. This year alone, we're staring down the barrel of "Saturday
Night Fever"; something based on Abba called "Mamma Mia," sure to be
one spicy meatball; not one but two adaptations of "The Wild Party";
"Jane Eyre"; Disney's "Aida," with music by Elton John; "Riverdance"
(again!); a revival of "Finian's Rainbow"; a revival of "Jesus Christ,
Superstar"; a revival of "Kiss Me, Kate," and a revival of "The Music
Man."
Ladies and gentleman of the audience, it is time to end this tragic
tale. Let's stop pretending that there's any life left in the
once-transcendent American musical or any way to revive its bloated
corpse given the immense costs, corporate greed and reactionary old
guard that now stifle all theatrical creativity. Let's drive a stake
through its heart and celebrate its execution — as Pierre Boulez once
cried, "Let's blow up the opera houses and concert halls."
But don't shed a tear. Recently, three producers unveiled plans for
"The Spirit of Broadway," a 60-minute revue of favourite moments in
American theatre meant to provide tourists a taste of the Great White
Way without forcing them to shell out the cash or struggle through a
third act. Purists (especially those with competing financial
interests) were scandalized. But maybe that's the only sensible future
for the genre. It no longer functions as art, but at least it can
continue to amuse the narcotised masses. So chop it up into
greatest-hits samplers, and hawk it for a dime at the Circle Line
ticket booth.
