Broadway musicals bore, bother, and offend me. There: I’ve said it. One might think that I’m indulging in hypocritical grandstanding, given that original cast albums made up a whopping portion of my musical upbringing. Before I finished elementary school I could play “My Fair Lady” by ear from first track to last. I knew the Rodgers & Hammerstein canon better than the Beethoven symphonies. I deciphered the mysteries of compound meter on my own by puzzling out America from “West Side Story.” I saw most of those shows as well, thanks to Fort Worth’s summer-stock Casa Mañana with its geodesic dome and bathroom acoustics.
And I liked those shows. But time passes and taste changes. “Camelot” absolutely sent me back in 1965. But so did Grape Nehi and Trix. Ditto Daniel Boone, the Mickey Mouse Club, and Khachaturian. Forgive me. I was a ten-year-old in suburban Fort Worth.
My distaste is limited to the shows themselves, and not necessarily their scores. I’m usually just fine listening to a cast album. It’s the performances that raise my hackles. The Broadway musical, like opera, is musical theater, and that’s precisely what’s wrong with it. Musical theater is a vile sop to tone-deaf peons who can’t absorb thirty seconds of music without a faceful of distracting entertain-the-monkey shenanigans. But Broadway outdoes opera’s stagey sham by adding gee-whiz dance routines, trap sets, and chorus lines. Subtlety is lost in the cavernous spaces of a 1500-seat house; every gesture must be broadly histrionic, every emotion overblown, every situation overcooked. Vaudeville lurks within even the most dour and tuneless Sondheim affair. Sooner or later, somebody’s gotta sing a showstopper or launch into a big dance.
I freely admit that my thinking has been warped by cringing through dinner theater, community theater, and bus-‘n’-truck roadshows. But there’s not really that big of a gap between the St. James Theater and the local BPOE lodge. I’ve been to both, and it mostly boils down to ticket prices and parking. For sheer grimness nothing beats a Sunday afternoon lost forever in Cupertino’s Flint Center, suffering through a threadbare “Bye Bye Birdie” with some faded 1950s Hollywood glam boy smirking through the Paul Lynde role. Deliver those blah jokes right out to the crowd, guys. Light up that spotlight every time somebody has a song. March through that stead choreography, gang. Let’s all forget that the stupid thing was topical fluff in 1958 when Elvis was drafted, and that it has not improved with age.
As I write this I’m listening to the 2010 revival recording of “Finian’s Rainbow” with Kate Baldwin and Cheyenne Jackson. No Broadway show ever had a more winsome score, Burton Lane’s ticket to 42nd Street immortality. Yip Harburg’s lyrics have aged less well, given their New Deal-y, Marc Blitzstein-ish socialist schtick and their tiresomely in-your-face cleverness. Nonetheless, the album is a delight. Nobody has ever sailed through “How Are Things in Glocca Morra” and “Look to the Rainbow” more exquisitely than Kate Baldwin. Cheyenne Jackson extracts so much sexy juice from “Old Devil Moon” that you almost forget that it’s a musty old chestnut reeking of Dick Haymes and the Electrolux Radio Hour. The crackerjack orchestra plays the spots off the score. The recording is engineered to a T.
Spiffy album of a memorable score. But on the several occasions I’ve seen a production of “Finian’s Rainbow” I’ve been on the verge of bolting in revulsion. Horrid isn’t the half of it. A more pointless, brainless, mindless, hopeless two hours cannot be imagined. Screw the chorus line of gingham’d and coverall’d Maybelline hillbillies and Brylcream boys, all hootin’ and hollerin’ and dancin’ and twitchin’. Ship that mugging horny leprechaun back to County Meath. Lose the ham-handed socialist commentary crap with the bigot senator and Steppin Fetchit quartet. Nuke the peppy production finale with everybody slam-banging through some hysterical Hooray Yippee Wowza, all those yards of expensively whitened teeth a-glitter amidst all those quarts of pancake makeup. I can’t stand it, I tell you, I just can’t stand it.
I begin to understand why so many operas end with a pile of corpses. It’s audience wish fulfillment.
The ideal Broadway show has been pickled in a cast album, just the music and no lit-up box with people flailing around inside. Most shows dissolve in such an acid test; shorn of their geegaws and tomfoolery, their scores are ruthlessly revealed as inane dreck. But the best hold up well enough, a flow of musical numbers without intervening recitative, modern-day singspiels that offer at least as much musical substance as your basic 18th-century trifle by Cimarosa, Hasse, Leo, or Piccini. Which is to say not much musical substance at all, but that’s OK by me. I don’t look to musical theater—performed or canned, populist or artsy-fartsy—for an ennobling musical experience. But I’m OK with it just as long as I don’t have to look at it.
Curtain up! Light the lights! We got nuttin’ to hit but the heights!
I’m outta here.