BOOKS
Bringing the roof down
Philip Hensher
BROADWAY BABIES SAY GOODNIGHT: MUSICALS THEN AND NOW by Mark Steyn Faber, f20, pp. 250 here's a good game to be had thinking up the least likely subjects for musicals the last years of Sibelius, Clement Attlee, When We Dead Awaken — but one of the dangers of the game is that reality over- takes it. Mel Brooks's conceit, in his film The Producers, of a musical on the life of Hitler hardly seems remotely improbable any more, given some of the boggle-eyed nightmares which have strutted and fretted their hour on the West End stage recently. We were sadly prevented from seeing Robert Maxwell: The Musical after a court injunction, but there is little doubt that there is somebody out there at this moment writing a musical on the life of Mother Teresa, and none at all that half a dozen no-hopers will have a go at commemorat- ing the Princess of Wales in Puccini-and- water.
But one of the many nice things about Mark Steyn's affectionate and sparklingly witty portrait of the musical is that he reminds us that many of the classic musi- cals are on hardly more likely subjects. Who now would bet on The Pajama Game proving a success, or Oklahoma, musicals based on Thomas the Tank Engine, at full volume, on roller skates, an appallingly long and tedious novel by Victor Hugo, or some teeth-grindingly arch poems by T. S. Eliot about cats? Some musicals, of course, could hardly fail; updatings of the Puccini back-catalogue are particularly strong bets at the moment. After Miss Saigon, Madame Butterfly set in Vietnam, we now await something called Rent or La Boheme in Greenwich Village, and it's hard to believe that no one's already attempted Tosca. But other equally strong-sounding bets — last year there was one based on the Abdica- tion — somehow fall completely flat, and it's often the completely bizarre idea which catches the public imagination.
Of course, it's easy to say that there are things which are beyond musical theatre, and easier to assume that musicals, because they are irresistible, are also not very seri- ous. But as Steyn points out, even the con- fections of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Les Miserables became so popular because they made some specific points. An actress who played the title role of Evita in Budapest in 1980 remarks that
there was a kind of parallel between the speeches given by Evita and Peron and the speeches given by [Janos] Kadar . . . it expresses so well someone making wonderful promises while we can see what's happening in reality.
One shrinks slightly from that 'expresses so well' after sitting through Evita itself, a small-scale burlesque blown up to unbear- able proportions. But it's certainly true that popular musical theatre has always been a focus for wider and unexpectedly serious popular concerns. In the 19th century, the Italian censors kept a close eye on the assassinations of political leaders in Verdi's operas; by 1980, Andrew Lloyd Webber would have to do to serve the same pur- pose.
The tension of the classic musical, from Show Boat onwards, is between the big showy elements which are going to pull the punters in — special effects, on-stage extravaganzas, the hit tune — and the undeniable subtlety and seriousness which make the best musicals last. It doesn't have to be about the conditions in South Ameri- can jails, like that dreary Kiss of the Spider Woman, or any other high-minded piece of tosh. The best musicals often talk about nothing much at all. Oklahoma, South Pacific or Stephen Sondheim's wondeful Into the Woods are, I suppose, about some- thing, but the heart of them is just listening to somebody singing, truthfully, about how they feel. What really is 42nd Street about? And yet you cry at it.
That's what makes a musical last, but as Steyn shows, there's a constant pressure from producers to produce two things. The first is spectacle — Time, starring a holo- gram of Laurence Olivier's head as an intergalactic sort of space judge thingy, is still fondly remembered by the same kind of people who can recite episodes of Blake's Seven. There's nothing new about that; I dare say Euripides had to put up with some bright spark suggesting putting a life-size ship on stage. 'Who wants to come out of a show whistling the lightbulbs?' Jule Styne observed of Starlight Express, which has, nevertheless, been running so long it's not even funny any more. Stage spectacle is one of those things we all rather like, while not considering it very crucial to the sur- vival of a show.
But the second, perhaps, does seem like a more crucial element; the hit song. The idea that every show needs a hit is difficult to eradicate, and plenty of good musicals have thrown away dramatic impetus for the sake of a ballad which will bring the roof down. Personally, I can't stick shows, like The Boys from Syracuse, or even, blasphemy of blasphemies, A Little Night Music, which by design only have one hit number; you always sit on the edge of your seat waiting for it and rather dreading it. The greatest musicals don't have a single song which stands out; either, like West Side Story, My Fair Lady or The Sound of Music, every song sounds like a hit, or, like the best of Sondheim, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, nothing is allowed to interrupt the psychological flow. There's something dead about 'anthology' shows, those musicals, like Crazy for You, which just whack one famous Gershwin song on after another, and try to construct a plot around it. They're fun if they're well done, as Crazy for You certainly was, but somehow the scale, the sense and the momentum dis- appear.
Mark Steyn's fans, of whom I am one and you are probably another, will need no encouragement to buy this book, but it's worth saying that he's produced a remark- ably amusing, enthusiastic and readable history-cum-diatribe. He's dug up a lot of frankly obscure musicals, and writes with the same perceptiveness and sparkle about Carnival in Flanders as about Annie Get Your Gun, though perhaps not quite so generously. I'd like to have heard a bit more about Kurt Weill's musicals, which, despite a great deal of concerted effort, haven't quite reached the audience the best of them deserve; but anyone should be grateful for Steyn's unaffected and serious appreciation of what most of us are too ready to write off as kitsch, like most of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Dropping the smart and breezy Lorenz Hart for the faux- naif Oscar Hammerstein,
Rodgers reinvented himself: not a song-
writer, but a playwright, not 'is this a good tune? but instead 'what should we be singing about here, and how should we sing it?'
Absolutely right, and it makes you want to go and see The Sound of Music again. Well, almost.
There's a sense that the musical is past its high point now, if not actually a musical form as dead as the concerto grosso, and not likely to return to the high-water mark of its most glorious period. The musicals of Stephen Sondheim are a brilliant, ironic coda to a genre, and the rest of the musical theatre seems less interested in exploring new ideas and having fun than in casting round for a failsafe return on investment. Perhaps the problem is, really, that the musical has always depended on drawing on the best and most interesting popular songs, and there's something about pop music now — something mechanical, bom- bastic and repetitive — which isn't going to work in any kind of dramatic context. Somehow I can't see the Prodigy's 'Smack My Bitch Up' as a convincing Act I finale.
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