Broadway... Now and Then.

I did not finish reading the interview by broadwayworld. Let them cry and cry for a lost time. They enjoy it. And I enjoy my show , happily.

Yes, erinrebecca. Even accounting for inflation, Broadway is in a healthier state today than it has been in decades.

To be clear, I'm not arguing the "artistic" state of Broadway. Many complain that the Disney shows, BROOKLYN, MAMMA MIA, et al., are destroying the artistic integrity of Broadway.

But this doesn't really seem to be the case either. Last season and this season have both had high profile, "arty" shows: CAROLINE and LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA. The reasons for CAROLINE's failure can be argued ad nauseum... but that's another discussion entirely. I'm just saying that the whole "Broadway is dead" argument is ridiculous, from ANY vantage point, whether artistic OR commercial.

Updated On: 1/15/05 at 12:44 PM

eslgr8, while I agree with most of your post, I do feel compelled to say this:

Regarding "choices" of today compared with the so-called "Golden Age": Say you wandered into NYC this season without having seen anything. What are your choices? Tony Award winners: HAIRSPRAY, THE PRODUCERS, RENT, AVENUE Q. Hot tickets: WICKED, DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS, SPAMALOT, MAMMA MIA. Artistic, smart musicals? SPELLING BEE and LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA. Long runs? CHICAGO and PHANTOM.

Yes, in the so-called "Golden Age" there were a few more choices. But ANY SINGLE ONE of the musicals mentioned above is of better quality than BAJOUR or WHOOP-UP, a couple of your moderately successful "choices" during the Golden Age.

Do you know what you couldn't have seen during the so-called "Golden Age?" SPELLING BEE or LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA. Those musicals didn't exist. They are the evolution of the American musical, a lineage that is directly traceable from Oscar Hammerstein, through Stephen Sondheim, to William Finn and Adam Guettel.

Updated On: 1/15/05 at 01:12 PM

What are you all talkign about? The Broadway musical has DEFINITELY lost something since the Golden Age.

Look at the 1954-1955 season:
The Boy Friend with a young Julie Andrews
Fanny
Peter Pan with the incomporable Mary Martin
House of Flowers, a flop, but with a beautful score
Plain and Fancy, easily one of the most underrated musicals of the entury
Silk Stockings, Cole Porter's last musical and a damn good one at that
Damn Yankees, the runaway hit of the season with direction by George Abbott, choreography by Bob Fosse, and the spectacular Miss Gwen Verdon

Now look at this season's musicals:
Dracula the Musical, a cliffnotes version of a story by a less than mediocore pop composer
Brooklyn, the screaming musical that's so inane and cliched it makes Home Sweet Homer look like The King and I
Little Women, another cliffnotes of a famous story
Spamalot, there's a problem when what is supposed to be the runaway hit of the season proclaims itself literally "ripped off" from a Monty Python musical
All Shook Up, Shakespeare comedies set to Elvis, enough said
Good Vibrations, you know a friend of mine said that he refused to see Illya Darling in 1967 because he resented it for interpolating the song "Never on Sunday" from the film for which it drew its basis because in 1967 it was the first time a musical contained a song not espressly written for the theatre and now we have to listen to a ridiculous story set to the music of the Beach Boys

It is stuff like this that makes people want to look back and remember when musicals were the talk of the town. When musicals were actually artistically valued and affordable and interesting and compelling. Now I really don't agree with the new book The Rise and Fall of the Musical Theatre when the author says that the Golden Age ended with Cabaret in 1966. I think that it held out until about 1975 with A Chorus Line and then teetered around with a few good musicals until Cats really lobbed off anything still good about the musical theatre.

But Mark N. Grant's point that there are really three stages in the American musical theatre, and the first and the third are very similar. In the teens and into the twenties the musical were ridiculous stories with songs that were aimed primarily at the hit parade. The book had really no importance whatsoever and the music and lyrics seldom had anything to do with the story.

Then starting with Show Boat and a few musicals leading up to Show Boat, that completely changed. The songs began to stem from the book. Musicals could still be star vehicles or have popular songs, but that wasn't the most important reason to do a musical. The music and libretto became equally important and the form perfected itself into the late forties through the fifties to the early to mid-sixties. People began to experiment with the form like Stephen Sondheim. And they were successful. The musical was still intriguing and entertaining, but were just a little more challenging and deep.

Then something happened. New musicals suddenly began to decline in quality and structure. And now we are back where we started, except in my opinion it is worse. Silly little stories surrounded my music that quite often is aimed at the hit parade and not very good. There are really no pieces of musical theatre that can entertain you and challenge you at the same time. Something comedic yet dramatic. It is all spectacle or pieces that are challenging, like Caroline, or Change, but not really very entertaining.

Personally I think the whole craze in archiving and studying and glorifying The Golden Age is good because if we do it enough maybe history will repeat itself. I can only hope that it does.

gherbert, thanks for the long, thoughtful response.

But for me, you didn't prove your point. In fact, to my mind, you proved mine.

"Look at the 1954-1955 season:
The Boy Friend with a young Julie Andrews
Fanny
Peter Pan with the incomporable Mary Martin
House of Flowers, a flop, but with a beautful score
Plain and Fancy, easily one of the most underrated musicals of the entury
Silk Stockings, Cole Porter's last musical and a damn good one at that
Damn Yankees, the runaway hit of the season with direction by George Abbott, choreography by Bob Fosse, and the spectacular Miss Gwen Verdon"

You listed a slew of mediocre musicals. Yes, some of them had great extenuating circumstances -- Julie Andrews in the otherwise unremarkable THE BOYFRIEND, Verdon and Fosse's work in DAMN YANKEES (I would add the terrific Adler and Ross score, although I think that the book of DY is a prime example of George Abbott's ineptitude as a creative collaborator).

But let's compare to today. We're not comparing BROOKLYN or DRACULA to that list. You listed the "best" of that season, so let's compare the "best" of what's currently playing. For its "type" of show, THE PRODUCERS is miles better than DAMN YANKEES. (DAMN YANKEES has a better score, sure. But THE PRODUCERS is, hands down, a better show.) PIAZZA is rather similar to FANNY, in subject matter, and yet infinitely superior, in ALL respects. SILK STOCKINGS? A terrible film translation with a middling Porter score. I would submit either DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS or SPAMALOT as a better film-to-musical translation. ("Ninotchka" was a really, really terrible property to musicalize. "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life" may seem like a dumb idea, but audiences are apparently feeling differently. While audiences found SILK STOCKINGS pleasant, it was a pale comparison to its predecessor. DRS is probably the best idea -- a middling movie can often make a great musical. A great movie NEVER makes a great musical, unless it happened to be a great play beforehand (i.e., MAME)).

"I've been hearing about Broadway disappearing since I put on long pants. I mean, it's been the fabulous invalid, you know? But, it survives...it survives."

-Al Hirschfeld, Broadway: The American Musical

Whenever there is a new trend, people proclaim it is the end of Broadway. The same was said of the introduction of ragtime in the early 1990's. Hollywood was faced with the same lament when "talkies" were introduced in movie houses. It's really sad that people choose to only live in the past and reject the evolution of art. The same people who wail about the Golden Age forget that it also had a beginning, and that there was a Broadway that existed previously. Who mourns for that? It just boils down to small-minded snobbery. Painting did not end with Modernism. Music did not end with Rock and Roll. As long as there is freedom of expression, then every art form will continue to live on. There will always be trends and there will always be change. And there will always be those who choose not to accept it.

---

Great points, Mr. Matt.

This particular nomenclature is really bothering me. It's one thing for someone to say, "Hey, it ain't what it used to be." It's quite another for myriad printed and filmed histories of the art form to come out, entitled THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BROADWAY MUSICAL, or BROADWAY: THE GOLDEN AGE.

Of course, it's shockingly presumptuous to quantify that sort of thing, especially given today's trends. Yes, there was a severe decline in both the quality and quantity of the Broadway musical, starting roughly around 1970. There was also a significant upswing in both the quality and quantity of the Broadway musical, starting roughly about 1990. NO ONE has documented the upswing. Look at BROADWAY! A GRAND TOUR! or even Mordden's HAPPIEST CORPSE I'VE EVER SEEN. All of these books point to the decline, and yet not a single one of them has pointed out what seems blatently obvious to most of the rest of us: the Broadway musical is bouncing back. Both creatively, with the new forms of musicals we discussed earlier in this thread, and financially, with proportionately larger audiences discovering the art form every year.

The basic argument that everyone uses doesn't wash. Everybody says, "Well, Broadway music is no longer "popular" music." Sure. That's a fact. However, it does not explain why PHANTOM OF THE OPERA has run nearly three times as long as MY FAIR LADY -- even though the PHANTOM cast album didn't have remotely the success that the MY FAIR LADY cast album did. Using this simple "hit parade" comparison to justify the theory that Broadway is on its deathbed makes NO LOGICAL SENSE WHATSOEVER.

Not only that, but it's a destructive statement. Saying that Broadway had a "Golden Age" artistically implies that no new composer will ever come up with a show that can compare with what came before them. The act of publishing all of these titles simply reiterates all this destructive nonsense.

Good point, Spider, which leads me to another point about this whole "pop" music as showtunes thing.

Isn't it funny that the SAME people who are complaining that Broadway music is no longer "pop" music are the ones who also tend to loathe contemporary "pop" music when it appears in Broadway shows?

The reason that show tunes are no longer on the "pop" charts is simple. Show tunes used to be extractable from Broadway musicals. Look at "Hey There" from THE PAJAMA GAME, a terrific example. A big, big hit on the pop charts. But utterly extractable. That song says nothing SPECIFIC about the characters in the show, although it fits the situation in which it occurs.

The musical theatre has advanced significantly. It is no longer acceptable to write random, generic songs that sort of suit the character in a show, but can also be extrapolated as "pop" tunes.

For me, this is a good thing. Not someting that portends the "death of the Broadway musical."

I'm all for musical theatre songs that specifically FIT the action going on when the character sings it. They make the theatre piece more compelling.

Updated On: 1/16/05 at 05:42 PM

Whatever. Call me a purist, a fool, whatever you want. Take your best shots. Tell me I don't know what I am talking about.

But I have friends who lived the Golden Age. They saw it and they were part of it. And you ask any one of them if musicals thrill them the way they did 35 years ago. And you will get the same answer every time, "No."

Love Wicked and Rent and Thoroughly Modern Millie. Call me an old fogie although I am only a teenager.

Say I'm unable to accept new trends and new ways of music. Argue that Idina Menzel has the same presence as Ethel Merman and tell me that Cole Porter really wasn't that good.

Say that George Abbott was a bad director and tell me that Jerome Robbins's choreography was simple and overrrated.

Tell me that Broadway stars like Gwen Verdon and Alfred Drake are the same thing as Brooke Sheilds and Joey MacEntire.

Tell me that the book to Gypsy is bad and that Sondheim's music isn't hummable.

But you know what, I am beyond the point of caring.

Its gonna be people like who who are going to tell me this my entire life and who have already told me my whole life up until now. And I just don't care any more.

Whatever. I've stopped caring. People say this to me all the time and I have worked my butt off my whole life for somethings that I can't really mention and soon they are finally oming together.

So I've just stopped caring and started working to get my opinions heard by people who can do something about it rather than arguing with you all over the artistic merits of Dracula the Musical vs. Gypsy.

I'm not meaning to offend anyone. But just bickering and getting constantly ripped apart by people isn't fun at all. So instead of doing it my whole life, I wanna tell people who will really listen to what I have to say about all this.

I used to be nice and polite before I entered this board. Oh, well.

Updated On: 1/15/05 at 07:39 PM

Are you calling me some sort of a liar? I'm confused.

Amen, NightLaughs.

Give me a WICKED-obsessed teenager any day over a contrary, ill-informed negative Nancy.

Professing dislike for something is extremely easy. It can also be an effective tool to disguise one's lack of knowledge about a subject.