Ethan Mordden - The Happiest Corpse Ive Ever Seen--The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical

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C ONTENTS

T O M Y M ARVELOUS E DITOR

M ICHAEL F LAMINI

Under separate cover, in six volumes, I have been tracing the development of the American musical from the 1920s through the 1970s. That was the Golden Age, because the culture was smart and the musical its smartest popular form. It was universal in appeal yet sophisticated, coaching the imagination, independent, even subversive. It preached on such texts as racial tolerance and pacifism even while entertaining. It was Anything Goes and Hello, Dolly! but also Lady in the Dark and West Side Story. Above all, it was Show Boat and Oklahoma!, authentic national art built on the very meaning of America. The musical attracted the most gifted artists, earning them the covers of Time and Life, the certain sign that the genres maximum leaders were cultural avatars.

Today the musical is suffering dislocation and alienation. It no longer leads the culture. It follows, adopting the degenerative policies of schlock. Smart creators share the stage with inarticulate idiots specializing in worthless forms based on exhausted old song catalogues and the staging of movies. Present-day America has summoned up a new kind of musical, coarse and uneducated, Broadways equivalent of the lower life-forms that have become our national idolsAdam Sandler, Anna Nicole Smith, Eminem, the Osbournes. In the decade books, I have discussed every important or interesting title, or even virtually any show that ran at least a few months. In this books period, 1978 to 2003, shows that ran years might not deserve discussion, even mention.

Many have commented on the traditional musicals humanitarian liberalism, but few note how enlightening it was not only socially but pedagogically. Golden Age lyricists routinely widened ones knowledge with impish allusions to lit and history and ontological wisdoms veiled in bons mots. They were wits; they were poets. Challenging Carousel s Julie Jordan to explain herself through the observations of her pal Carrie Pipperidge, Oscar Hammerstein II lets Julie put Carrie off with evasions. But when Carrie wonders why Julie is up early every morning, gazing out the windowat what?hear how laden is Julies empty response: I like to watch the river meet the sea.

Its the dreamer and her symbolsan existentialist rebus, a character study, a denial. Julie Jordan isnt a queer one; shes an easy solution in a place of self-replicating problems. In a dysfunctional world, the sensible seem queer. This dreamgirl is the musicals Ockhams Razor, cutting through the excepts and hesitations to the simple truth. All of this Hammerstein catches in a single line, set to ten notes of Richard Rodgers at his most logical, with a capricious little flip to finalize the exchange.

It was thought at the time of Carousel that (to quote a more recent work) dreamgirls will never leave you: because writers in the Golden Age knew what people were. They knew life. Today, many writers cant even rhyme properly, and what they know is pop. Pop music, pop politics, pop language, pop ideas. After two generations in which musicals were hits or flops, or entertaining or dull, or operetta or musical comedy, these new writers have invented something once inconceivable: the inaccurate musical. It brays with self-confidence because it has no idea how ignorant it is. And that is what ignorance means.

Meanwhile, the last decade of the Golden Age fell under the control of the super-director, as if making up for the concomitant passing of the personality star. The wild magic was now to be made behind the scenesbut such magicians as Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, and Michael Bennett died without proper successors. As the current narrative starts, in 1978, Robbins has finished with Broadway and Fosse and Bennett have but two shows each to deliver.

So the six volumes that precede this one are chronicles; this volume is a rant, in defense of an enlightened genre hijacked by pop. Dreamgirls will leave you: with a cast of vapid kids phoning in sick as often as they can get away with. The stories run on an automatic pilot of poses, and the music makes one long for the whoopee-cushion melodies of Marc Blitzstein. The artistry is that of a graffito artist, and the attitude that of a Kinkos clerk. And thats the new pop fun on Broadway.

They knew how to write a musical comedy in the 1920s. There was the Cinderella show, usually set in New York and often Irish in flavor. There was the legacy-with-a-catch plot left over from the 1910s: heroine must keep her temper for a year, hero must marry mysterious stranger, and so on. There was the rustic-conquers-the-city premise; also its converse, the slicker-among-the-peasantry tale.

Most dependable of all was the engagement-threatened-by-a-snag setup, with farcical plot development involving mistaken identity, jokes about marriage and politics, out-of-story gags such as byplay with the orchestra (who by logics rights are not part of the narrative reality), the sudden appearance of dancers who dont even bother to check into the plot before launching their act, and other extraneous fun.

This describes many a twenties title, but especially one of the most successful of the kind. Of course, it had a touch of novelty. Shows had to, with so much monotony of genre. Kid Boots (1923) had golf. The Cocoanuts (1925) had Florida real-estate scamming. A Connecticut Yankee (1927) had time travel. And this show had a homosexual romance bonding its two leading men. Im thinking of the last of the twenties musicals, La Cage aux Folles (1983).

This was not the first musical to include a gay couple. The little-known Sextet (1974) presented a party hosted by two male lovers, and some three months before La Cage aux Folles opened, Dance a Little Closer offered a pair of airline stewards who actually asked a clergyman to marry them, leading to a full-scale musical scene on this matter a generation before gay marriage became even a controversy.

But La Cage aux Folles unprecedentedly starred its gay lovers, George Hearn and Gene Barry. Moreover, they played not merely sweethearts but a couple of twenty years standing who have raised a son (John Weiner). It is the sons engagement that rests in jeopardy in Harvey Fiersteins script, drawn from Jean Poirets play of the same name. The title translates as The House of Crazies and refers to the Saint-Tropez cabaret that Barry runs and over which drag artiste Hearn presides.

One can only guess how the show might have gone over if key producer Allan Carr had hired not these two straights for the leads but, say, Nol Coward and Liberace. The production, directed by Arthur Laurents and choreographed by Scott Salmon, was conservative generallytraditional, let us saywith a heavy scene plot necessitating old-fashioned blackouts and motorized set changes over orchestral distraction. And Jerry Herman, who defines mainstream simply by showing up, wrote the score.

Still. Two gay guys dominating the evening in domesticated security and no one calls the cops? Herman even provisioned the cabarets drag-queen chorus with the merrily unapologetic We Are What We Are. The engagements snag is that son Weiner loves the daughter (Leslie Stevens) of a homophobic politician, and thus Hearn finds himself excrescent in his own family. This inspires the defiantly unapologetic I Am What I Am, capped by Hearns throwing his wig at Barry and storming up the theatre aisle to end Act One. And this of course becomes a revolutionary gay anthem in real life, as Herman, Carr, Fierstein, and Laurents must have known it would.