Archives for December 2003

Bruce Weber has an excellent article in today’s New York Times about the state of the Broadway musical–excellent because he talked to a lot of people in the business and got candid answers. This is one piece that really needs to be read in its entirety, not quoted piecemeal (you can read the whole thing here), but if there’s a money graf, this is it:

“You could spell whither either way,” said Jack Viertel,
the artistic director of the Encores! series of musicals in
concert at City Center. “There’s a real reluctance on the
part of producers to take on new composers because to some
degree no one is sure what a Broadway show is supposed to
sound like anymore. Is it supposed to sound like Michael
John LaChiusa? Or Alan Menken? If the Broadway sound were
the pop music of the day, which it used to be, it would
sound like hip-hop, but I don’t think anyone feels there’s
much of a Broadway audience for that at the moment.”

What I think Viertel is groping toward–as well as several other people quoted in the piece–is that the success of the “classic” Broadway musical-comedy idiom was in large part a function of the existence of the common culture that began to dissolve in the Sixties, more or less around the time that the Broadway musical began to lose its way.

Here’s another relevant excerpt:

In any case, as rock took over the radio airwaves in the
1960’s, songwriters began turning from the stage to the
recording studio. A few songs from Broadway managed to
climb the charts – “The Impossible Dream” from “Man of La
Mancha,” for example – but the music of Broadway was being
overwhelmed by the cultural tidal wave that was
transforming the rest of the world.

“I can tell you almost specifically when it changed,” said
John Kander, Mr. Ebb’s partner. “When we did `Cabaret’ in
1966, I was unpacking in my hotel room in Boston, even
before we went to Broadway, and I turned on the radio and
heard five songs from the show. Our next show, in 1968, was
a musical called `The Happy Time,’ and I think we got maybe
one recording. So it was right in there that the changeover
happened.”

The “untheatricality” of rock music is a complicated subject about which I’ve never gotten around to writing. It’s far too complicated to go into in a short posting, but I can say that to blame the decline of the Broadway musical on rock is to mistake a symptom for the disease. What happened in the Sixties was that the old-fashioned standard-style ballad ceased to be the lingua franca of American popular music–and that nothing replaced it. Instead, our musical tastes shattered into a million pieces. After the Sixties, there was never again one kind of music to which “everyone” listened. In the absence of that kind of broad-based consensus of taste, popular music began to take a back seat in the mass media to other forms of pop culture.

Anyone old enough to remember The Ed Sullivan Show will recall that Sullivan regularly booked musical-comedy stars, and even presented whole scenes from hit shows. (It was Sullivan who turned West Side Story and Camelot into box-office hits.) Nowadays, there aren’t any prime-time variety shows, because the culture is so deeply fissured that such shows can’t draw a large enough audience to be commercially viable. Similarly, Top 40 has given way to a large number of sharply differentiated formats with minimal overlap. If you ever wondered why David Letterman and Jay Leno almost never bring on their musical guests until the end of the show, that’s the reason: no pop musician, however successful, appeals to a sufficiently large slice of the demographic pie. Were Leno to open the show with a musical act, no matter what it was, a significant number of his viewers would promptly switch to Letterman in search of something more to their liking–and vice versa.

All this means that there is no “universal” musical language in which a Broadway musical can be written. That doesn’t make it impossible to write good musicals, but it does mean that they will almost certainly appeal to niche audiences, not the masses that once flocked to (and bought original-cast albums of) the great musicals of the pre-rock era. For this reason, my guess is that the really interesting musicals of the coming decade will be small-scale, low-budget shows–and that at least some of them will be written for and premiered by opera companies.

My mother and I just finished watching Holiday Inn and Meet Me in St. Louis on TV. Holiday Inn is a much-loved film whose shining parts are greater than their slightly commonplace sum: Astaire and Crosby, “Say It With Firecrackers,” and two terrific Irving Berlin songs, “You’re Easy to Dance With” and “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” that got lost in the looming shadow of “White Christmas.” Meet Me in St. Louis, on the other hand, might just be the most underrated of all the great movie musicals. Sure, it’s a bit heavy on the Hollywood nostalgia, but Judy Garland is at her purest and best, Vincente Minnelli’s direction is unobtrusively right, and the score–the score! Was there ever a movie that contained three songs as fine as “The Boy Next Door,” “The Trolley Song,” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”? (Yes, I know, Top Hat, but that film exists in a realm beyond comparison.) Even the orchestrations, by Conrad Salinger, are exquisite.

I enjoyed tonight’s double feature so much that it almost made me forget how irritated I was by a story I read in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal about how red and green are sooooo pass

“Subtlety is the curse of man. It is not found in the deity.”

Flannery O’Connor, letter to an anonymous correspondent (1961)

I wanted to write something about the orange alert, but Lileks did it for me:

Either we look back at the days of Orange with the same remote interest we have today when we see ration stickers in a Bugs Bunny cartoon

I took my mother to dinner last night at the newest restaurant in town, Ruby Tuesday. It’s one of the many franchised “dinner houses” (as they’re known in the food business) that dot the American landscape, and its presence in my home town is an anomaly. When I was young, the only restaurants in the area were fried-chicken-and-steak affairs, and there weren’t all that many of them. Most families ate at home, and they ate as families, gathering together at the table at a fixed hour to discuss the day’s events. Eating out was something you did on Saturday night, usually not all that often.

In time, the major fast-food chains made their way to southeast Missouri, and every new McDonald’s and Pizza Hut was a major event. By the time I left home in 1974, there were many such places in town, but nothing much more ambitious. It was the conventional wisdom that “dinner houses” would never take root here, even though they were doing a booming business in the college town 30 miles north of us. Then, last year, an Applebee’s opened on the south side of town, and drew customers with a vengeance. It seems that the eating habits of the younger baby boomers and Gen-Xers in town had changed without anybody noticing. They were no longer committed to dinner at the dinner table: wives were working, children busier, and dining out had become, here as elsewhere, less a luxury than a necessity, even in a small town like this.

After Applebee’s came Ruby Tuesday, to which I took my mother for the first time on the night before the night before Christmas. It was shiny-new, the waiters were friendly and helpful, and the menu, if not exactly continental, was nonetheless worlds away from what one ate at the Charcoal House circa 1966. I dined on a nicely blackened piece of fish accompanied by rice pilaf and steamed broccoli. As we departed, I noticed that Thomas Dolby’s “Blinded by Science,” one of the very first rock songs I ever saw featured on MTV, was playing over the restaurant’s sound system.

It seemed to me that we both needed a bit of countervailing nostalgia, so we drove around town after dinner and looked at the Christmas lights. They’re not as spectacular as they used to be, but I’d still say that one out of three houses in my home town is electrically decorated come late December. Then we came home, watched a Randolph Scott video, and went to bed, there to rest up from the encroaching onslaught of modernity.

(P.S. Speaking of Lileks, he had a nice posting yesterday on holiday lights.)

“It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape.”

I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

I’m always struck by the small things that distinguish my home town in southeast Missouri from my adopted home, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I’d never really noticed until today, for instance, but the only houses that are architecturally “modern” in any recognizable sense are a half-dozen Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs built in the late Fifties. Similarly, you rarely see reproductions of modern art on anybody’s walls. It’s as though time had stopped in 1900. None of the video stores carries more than a handful of “older” films (i.e., made prior to 1975). I was astonished to find Citizen Kane and Casablanca at the neighborhood video store this afternoon. And while our local cable service offers Turner Classic Movies as part of its regular package, TCM isn’t included in the program guide published each day in the local newspaper. To find out what’s showing, you’ve got to buy TV Guide or go on line.

I went Christmas shopping this morning, driving 30 miles to the nearby college town where most of my former neighbors do their “serious” shopping. It has a medium-sized mall and two movie theaters that show about 10 first-run features on any given day–nothing out of the ordinary, though I did see You Can Count on Me at the older theater a couple of years ago. From my point of view, the most important store in the mall is a Barnes & Noble, the only good-sized bookstore in the immediate vicinity. (The sole bookstore in my home town is a small shop that deals in used paperbacks.) I noticed that none of this year’s National Book Award nonfiction nominees was in stock, not even Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana, the winner. On the other hand, I did find five copies of the trade paperback edition of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, a pleasant surprise.

After I finished shopping, I treated myself to a frappuccino in the Starbucks café attached to the bookstore, and took a closer look at the mural on the wall above the serving counter. It portrays an oddly eclectic, vaguely PC assortment of authors seated in an imaginary coffeehouse: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Franz Kafka, Pablo Neruda, Rabindranath Tagore, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Raymond Chandler, D.H. Lawrence, Carl Sandburg, Edith Wharton, and somebody named Hughes (presumably Richard, the author of A High Wind in Jamaica, though I don’t know what he looked like and so can’t say for sure). I didn’t check, but I doubt if many of them were represented on the shelves of the store.

I’m not being sarcastic or dismissive, by the way. Growing up in a small town gives you a different perspective on chain bookstores, just as it causes you to see the Wal-Mart phenomenon from the point of view of the people for whom such stores are an unimaginable boon. (The first Wal-Mart outside Arkansas was built in my home town.) The Barnes & Noble where I shopped today isn’t remotely close in quality to any big-city bookstore, independent or otherwise, but it’s still a vast improvement on nothing. When I was a boy, people in southeast Missouri went to the library or did without. Now they can drive 30 miles to the Barnes & Noble, or order from amazon.com. Times are changing, slowly but surely—but slowly.

“In spite of his quaint Tory prejudices Dr. Johnson is one of the few persons in recent times that one may term wise without serious qualification because he never dodges or equivocates in dealing with the problem of evil; he never fades away from the fact of evil into some theosophic or sentimental dream.”

Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism