The sinking of broadway

...And so, in 1997, we get hookers and shipwrecks and not a single song you can remember a day after you've seen the show...

...Just as the action movie's plot is merely a device used to string together a certain number of shoot-'em-up sequences, the musical's plot was simply a way to string songs and comedy bits together featuring star performers whose personalities and voices were so large they could fill a 2,000-seat theater without microphones...

...Despite winning the Tony, Titanic is not going to have a smooth passage and will probably lose its $10 million capitalization...

...This is surely intended to be ironic—the show is about what happens when man tries hubristically to control that which he cannot control, after all...

...Absurd...

...After several years in which you could literally count the new musicals on one hand, American musicals especially, a slew of them opened in one year...

...City of Angels was directed by Michael Blakemore, who also directed The Life...

...Shows would occasionally stop dead so that a beloved performer like Eddie Cantor could do amusing shtick...

...There's also a lot of boring stuff about how the poor people on the boat don't have it as good as the rich people...

...Two wonderful performances by Lilias White and Chuck Cooper (both Tony winners) cannot disguise the fact that it's hard to care for, be amused, or even mildly diverted by the romantic and professional difficulties of hookers and their pimps...

...Then they all try to sing and dance simultaneously even though they're already panting because the dancing takes a lot of energy...

...The difference between musicals on the one hand and opera and ballet on the other is that opera and ballet feature people doing one thing and one thing only...

...In fact, that $75 million is basically going straight down the drain...

...Those who would defend musicals as an art form point out that opera and ballet feature preposterous behavior as well, and yet only a philistine would judge them stupid...

...The performers who starred in shows like The Boys from Syracuse would never have made it in contemporary show business...

...But the truth is we are so relieved to hear the pretty tune again that we exit the theater humming it...

...In the midst of Oh, Kay!, Gertrude Lawrence sat in the middle of the stage singing "Someone To Watch Over Me" to a rag doll...

...James Theater in New York and ushered in the so-called "golden age" of the Broadway musical...

...This is an art form in which people talk for a while until they suddenly start to sing, whereupon other people they don't even know emerge from nowhere and begin to sing with them...

...Part of the reason that the shows themselves were so weak is that their makers were producing product, not art...

...What genius had the bright idea of featuring the graphic beating of a hooker on stage in The Life...

...And so it went...

...Steel Pier was the first show written by John Kander and Fred Ebb following the triumphant return of their 1975 Chicago to Broadway...

...The Life won't have a long one...

...This is the Broadway musical...

...So did Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein with Show Boat and the Gershwin brothers with Porgy and Bess...

...May it rest in peace...

...It won out over a musical about prostitutes and pornography in 1970s Times Square, another one about the weird Depression-era events called dance marathons, and an avant-garde "carnival mass" performed by bizarre-looking puppets...

...the John Podhoretz, deputy editor of The Weekly Standard, is a regular panelist on CNN's Reliable Sources...

...Then they all dance for a while...

...But musicals mix stylized activity with naturalistic activity—people who sing and dance, which we don't do, and who talk conversationally, which we all do...

...Besides the four nominees, there was a revue of Johnny Mercer songs called Dream, a version of Twelfth Night set in Harlem to Duke Ellington music called Play On!, and a wannabe Phantom of the Opera called Jekyll and Hyde...

...But these shows were more akin to opera than the musical (Porgy and Bess especially), and in the 1930s even a philistine like Flo Ziegfeld was intimidated by the idea that he might stand in the way of a High Art Form...

...Every now and then, one of the artists would take control, but usually by writing something that was not really a musical...

...But, my God, the songs...

...Because, to put it plainly, who wants to go watch a cast of 50 sing a big production number while the Titanic sinks...

...In opera, they sing (even if there's an occasional dance break...

...Titanic begins magnificently, with a bravura 10-minute number in which the cast celebrates the beauty and ambition of the enormous ship just about to make its maiden voyage...

...Alas, yes, this is the Broadway musical...

...The defenders are wrong...

...Then, three hours after we first entered the theater, everybody who went to the bottom of the North Atlantic springs back to life and reprises the cheerful anthem with which the show began...

...Hello...

...They were there to entertain people and to fill seats, and they filled seats with great songs...

...And it is true that in the years that followed, most of the shows that still please us today—the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals like Carousel and The King and I, Guys and Dolls, The Music Man, My Fair Lady—were made possible by the maturation of the form...

...After that, it's all downhill, quite lit-erally—for most of the second act, the set is tilted to suggest the ship's eventual demise, a very distracting effect...

...The moment at which the Broadway musical's most passionate boosters think it first came to maturity was on March 31, 1943, when Oklahoma...

...The years were the 1920s and 1930s, and the shows for which these men wrote songs were self-consciously silly, throwaway things...

...That was the way things were with the musical during the years in which it was so alive, so vibrant, and so popular that 70 of them were staged every year on Broadway and at any given time you could find a show written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, or Cole Porter, or Irving Berlin, or George and Ira Gershwin, or Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, or Vincent Youmans and Irving Caesar, or DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson...

...But the dominant figure in the world of the Broadway musical was the producer, not the artist...

...They chafed at the inanity of the form and were infuriated by their lack of power...

...Their plots made as much sense as one of the summer action movies that so enthrall audiences today, which is to say, they made no sense at all...

...if somebody told you about a great song he had heard, you had to either go to Broadway to hear it yourself or buy the sheet music and play it for yourself...

...Steel Pier, Juan Darien, Play On!, and Dream have closed, taking something like $15 million with them...

...And why on earth did anybody think it would be entertaining to watch unattractive characters dancing themselves sick for a few desperately needed Depression-era dollars in Steel Pier...

...But the Broadway boomlet has generated so little enthusiasm, excitement, and critical acclaim that it has almost certainly died aborning...

...premiered at the St...

...If you start hearing this anthem at pro-choice rallies, and you will, just ask those in attendance if they know the song is really about prostitution...

...She meets her one true love—and he's dead, it turns out, a barnstorming pilot who dies at the beginning of the show and is, thereafter, a ghost...

...Jekyll and Hyde is going to struggle...

...But it is also clear that, by raising the bar to include matters of serious moment, from racism (Finian's Rainbow, South Pacific) to colonialism (Pacific Overtures) to AIDS (Falsettoland), the Broadway musical was being asked to carry more weight than it could bear...

...It might sound like heaven for a songwriter, but it was by all accounts a frustrating environment for the creative talent on Broadway...

...They can really craft a sassy, infectious, bit-ingly clever song, but with the exception of one number in Steel Pier called "I'm Everybody's Girl," the numbers were dispirited...

...Each of these shows is (or was) such a failure that it is instructive to examine them individually...

...The Life has a soulful score by Cy Coleman, a distinguished man of the theater whose brilliant 1991 show City of Angels will probably prove to have been the last of the great Broadway musicals...

...These four musicals—Titanic, The Life, Steel Pier, and Juan Darien— were part of a watershed season on Broadway...

...The trick with an art form that is inherently stupid, as musicals are, is to embrace the stupidity, not to flee from it...

...To milk it for all the stupid pleasure it can afford...

...The previous year, Broadway proved it could ignite a little spark in the popular culture with two unexpected hit shows—Rent and Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk...

...In the 1920s especially, records were not yet a mass medium, and radio was barely extant...

...The songwriters grew in fame as radio and recordings made their work nationally famous, and as Hollywood came calling for their talents...

...The amazing recovery of New York has brought tourists to the city by the planeload, filling hotels...

...Their humor is so timebound that it seems utterly incomprehensible...

...Just as New York has saved itself, so too, it seemed, might the Broadway musical, which is, after all, the only art form named after a New York city street...

...Hardly...

...To revel in it...

...their vocal and physical mannerisms would strike most of us as horribly obvious, even screechy...

...All in all, tens of millions of dollars—maybe as much as $75 million—rained down on Times Square, an infusion of cash the likes of which Broadway hadn't seen since the late 1960s...

...More than absurd...

...And there the similarity between the two shows ends, because while City of Angels was a delightful mystery about a 1940s novelist-screenwriter and the gumshoe detective he created, The Life is about whores...

...Didn't happen...

...And not just any whores—whores who sing self-right-eously about how "it's my body and my business...

...If even two of these shows had hit it big, then the new Broadway money might have taken root and generated more capital, leading in turn to more shows, leading in turn to a really lively new American theater...

...Musicals are stupid...

...These shows deserved what they got, and so did their creators...

...Rich, talented, ambitious, the creative talents behind the Broadway musical decided that they would expand the form...

...It was the producer—Florenz Ziegfeld, George White—whose name sold a musical to the Broadway audience, and the producer felt free to stick in whatever he wanted in pursuit of a hit, including the much-hated practice of "interpolating" songs by other composers and lyricists...

...And revivals were opening with clockwork regularity too, as Annie, Can-dide, and Once Upon a Mattress all followed in the wake of the triumphant rediscovery of the little-known 1975 show Chicago...

...And I write as someone who has been mad for musicals most of his life...

...Over time, the balance of power shifted away from the producers to the creators...

...At any moment, the whole set-up can come to seem so ludicrous that you feel like you won't be able to take it for another second...

...They would try to make it seamless, integrating song and story and dance into a cohesive whole...

...Both forms are purely stylized...

...And why not...

...Many Broadway composers, Richard Rodgers especially, had artistic ambitions...

...in ballet, they dance (even if the orchestra is playing a great piece of music...

...Today, these shows are, for the most part, impossible to perform...

...drop in crime has made Broadway a delightful, colorful, and unthreaten-ing place to visit...

...There's no getting around it...

...Songs were paramount, songs and jokes and stars, and no demand for a consistent plot was going to get in the way of that...

...Is this a tragedy—the death of an art form due to lack of interest...

...a recent concert-style performance of one of the few enduring musicals from the 1930s, Rodgers and Hart's The Boys from Syracuse, was rife with casually violent physical comedy I found painful to sit through...

...There are relatively few American standards that were not introduced on Broadway in these years—or in a 1930s or 1940s movie musical, usually featuring Fred Astaire, the greatest of the Broadway musical stars...

...By embracing art instead of frivolity, the Broadway musical slowly, but unalterably, and now finally, committed suicide...

...And the revivals, most of them poorly reviewed, have all been disappointments...

...Finally they come to a big stop, they freeze in place—and then, when the applause has died down, start talking again...

...They didn't want to write songs, but "scores"—an integrated series of numbers with themes, counterpoint, repeated melodies, and the like...

...In Leave It to Me, Mary Martin showed up on a Siberian ice floe and brought the house down with "My Heart Belongs to Daddy...

...The Sinking of Broadway A Burst of Enthusiasm for the Theater Goes Bust By John Podhoretz This year, the Tony award for best musical went to a show about a calamitous real-life event in which 1,500 people died by drowning in the North Atlantic...

...The show is about people who dance in agony for 400 straight hours, particularly a once-famous chanteuse now reduced to trying to win the dance marathon to reestablish her career...

...The two masters of the Broadway operetta, Sigmund Romberg and Victor Herbert, mostly got their way...

...True, not every Rodgers and Hart or Cole Porter or Irving Berlin show included a song that would become a standard, but these men were working at such a furious pace that if one show were a dud there would soon be another that might improve on it...