No more enchanted evenings - appreciation of the American musical play

National Review, March 29, 1993 by Anthony Lejeune

Ronald Reagan once said that he couldn't read his official papers the previous night because The Sound of Music was on television. No wonder he swept the country! Here, plainly, was a politician with a proper sense of values. The Sound of Music, hated by curmudgeons but loved by almost everyone else, represents well enough the greatest American art form of the twentieth century, the musical play. Now, just fifty years after Oklahoma! opened on Broadway, is a suitable time to reconsider, in wonderment, the treasures we were given and how much we have lost.

The musicals of that golden age - plays and films - are not mere cult classics. Quite the contrary. What else has touched so many people with joy? We have only to hear the opening notes or glimpse a song title - "The Way You Look Tonight," "Some Enchanted Evening," "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" - for the tunes to come flooding irresistibly back: and the words, as poetry should, have become part of the fabric of our minds. Such commonplace things as laughter across a crowded room or cigarette smoke in your eyes have been endowed, for us all, with an emotive, nostalgic meaning.

No one can doubt the quality of such work; its adhesiveness alone is proof. Nor could anyone plausibly deny the subsequent degeneration of popular music. Occasionally a song may still be added to the canon: but even the manifestly brilliant Stephen Sondheim, who was taught by Oscar Hammerstein, has been able to do only once or twice in his career what Hammerstein, Rodgers, Kern, and Porter did countless times. Andrew Lloyd Webber could no more write "Younger than Springtime" than he could write a Beethoven symphony.

To us looking back, the quantity offered seems almost as amazing as the quality achieved. On September 16, 1927, Vincent Youmans's No, No, Nanette was launched; on September 18, a new show by Rodgers and Hart, Dearest Enemy, opened; on the 21st came Rudolf Friml's The Vagabond King; on the 22nd Sunny by Kem and Hammerstein: all within six days. In the 1927-28 season 53 musicals opened in New York. And the golden age of the American musical had not yet even begun. Nor had movies yet found their singing voice. By the close of the 1930s Hollywood was producing as many as forty new musicals a year, most of them with original scores.

Compare any recent season, in Hollywood, New York, or London. There have been virtually no musical films at all; and the theaters both of New York and of London have experienced a long succession of well-deserved flops, which vanished after a few nights or weeks, leaving, one might say, not a trace behind. Meanwhile, there has been a happier succession of revivals, compilations of old songs, even old Hollywood musicals transferred (with varying fortunes) to the stage. A new kind of musical show has made money, but the contrast is painfully clear. About a revival of The Sound of Music one reviewer said that "the melodic score has an enduring richness undreamt of in latter-day musicals"; about a revival of Show Boat another concluded that it was "a thousand times better than Miss Saigon or Phantom of the Opera." The objective truth of those judgments can hardly be challenged.

But how shall we explain it? Must we be content to say that the wind of genius comes and goes mysteriously? Or should we seek some external correlation, some social or political significance?

Musicals that were openly about politics constitute a recognized and respectable strain, with an ancestry which includes Aristophanes and Gilbert and Sullivan, but they were not the most significant, even politically. The roll call is quite brief. The most admired was Of Thee I Sing, which had a Gershwin score ("Wintergreen for President. He's the man the people choose, loves the Irish and the Jews . . .") and was the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize; Brooks Atkinson wrote that it was "funnier than the government and not nearly so dangerous." Fiorello boasted a pair of exquisitely sharp, funny, and amusing songs, "Little Tin Box" and "Politics and Poker." Strike Up the Band, about the futility of war and the ruthlessness of capitalism, was not much liked at the time, though a revival, with a new plot and fresh songs, fared somewhat better. Up in the Park, about Boss Tweed, became an ill-suited vehicle for Deanna Durbin. More recently, King, about Martin Luther Jr., with lyrics by Maya Angelou, opened in London to avoid the New York critics, and closed six weeks later, having lost $3 million.

Anglo-American audiences are not fond of political themes. A French director, on the other hand, said recently that his favorite American musicals were those, such as Of Thee I Sing, which had plots "more committed, more inflammatory, on social issues . . . militant . . . almost Brechtian." Obviously he understands American musicals as little as the French intellectual admirers of Alfred Hitchcock understood Hitchcock (who despised them).

Within the Broadway tradition doses of political medicine go down only when administered with large spoonfuls of sugar. The bitterest song, "Thank You, Herbert Hoover," comes from the thoroughly cheerful Annie, in which, although a kindly Roosevelt welcomes the little girl to his Cabinet meeting, Daddy Warbucks is unashamedly a Republican. Nobody thinks of The Pyjama Game as political, although it centers on a strike (applauded and successful, naturally - neither Broadway nor Hollywood ever takes an anti-trade-union stance), or of South Pacific and Finian's Rainbow as political, despite their anti-racist themes. High Society contains a mildly conservative message - that the over-taxed rich deserve some sympathy; more usual was Riding High, in which Bing Crosby rebukes the businessman for "accumulating wealth and gobbling up the little fellow." Right-wing themes are rare, unless you count a penchant for royalty and religion.