It keeps
happening. Here I am, doing what old fags do, buying old musicals in the sale
bin at HMV (Do I still shop at HMV? Yes, I certainly do.) Well, recently I came across So Long, 174th Street -- a long
forgotten musical – a big failure in 1976 (16 performances). Who was involved
with it? Oh -- people like Joseph
Stein, Robert Morse, and Kaye Ballard. So, I took the cd home, and listened to
it. And guess what.
It was fabulous.
This keeps
happening over and over again. I find an old musical that everyone has
forgotten about, one that was a flop sometime around 1976 (hm…why does that
year ring a bell?) put in the ol’ computer, and big surprise! It’s better than
anything I’ve heard (musical-wise) in years.
Well, I did
a little digging (web-wise) and discovered that 1976 was a year that featured
two other musicals you may have heard of: A Chorus Line, and a little show called Chicago. Interestingly, A
Chorus Line was a mega-hit (6,137 performances!), and spawned what we now
know as the megamusical. It also killed Chicago
(936 performances) and So Long, 174th
Street. And as far as I’m concerned, it killed musical comedy, period.
Now I don’t
blame A Chorus Line. Sure, it’s a boring musical with only one good song (okay,
maybe two). So why was it such a big hit? Well, it seemed incredibly
contemporary at the time – gay content, monologues, and an altogether
avant-garde feel.
However the fault lies not in the
musical, dear Brutus, but in ourselves.
The problem is capitalism. Money
kills culture. It eats culture and spits culture out its rear-end. (Catch Spiderman. On it’s way to Las Vegas no less.) When capitalism
marries art, art goes down the tubes. (See Garth Drabinsky. I know Elaine Stritch praises him in Showstopper. But let’s face it, she’s an actress, and when it comes
down to actresses, they really need jobs).
So since
musical comedy is now a thing long gone,
it makes sense to me (cuz I’m an ol’ guy) to try and remember what it once was.
The most important
word in ‘musical comedy’ is ‘comedy.’ It’s a word that is usually excised from
the phrase. That’s because comedy has pretty much disappeared from mega-musicals.
And comedy was the most important element in musical comedy.
Opera finds
its origins in tragedy, and operetta finds its origins in farce. Opera is not funny (except unintentionally). Operetta is intentionally funny in the hands of Offenbach, or Gilbert and
Sullivan. But the characters in operetta are not real. They are cardboard
cutouts singing funny songs and representing human vice.
It took the
American musical to carve out a very special niche for music and comedy – which appeared together for the first time. This means that the characters in musical
comedy are sympathetic and real as well as being funny, The best songs -- the
ones that define musical comedy -- are not the ballads (though they can be
nice) but the comic songs.
In Stan Daniels’ score for So Long 174th Street there is
not a single bad song – not a tuneless number, or a witless one. Kaye Ballard
brings tears of laughter to my eyes every time I listen to her sing ‘My son,
the druggist,’ because she was portraying a real mother, and singing a very
funny ode to human vanity -- sweet and hilarious at the same time. What did the
estimable Clive Barnes say after the musical opened?
“When the music and lyrics
do not work for a musical, the musical does not work.”
Well that’s biting criticism.
What he
should have said was:
“The American musical comedy is dead. When money and art fight,
money always wins.”
