Watching, Seeing, Reading
Watching, Seeing, Reading If you are, as I am, an inveterate consumer of pop culture, half the time you must wonder why on earth you bother. Most of the movies you see, television shows you watch,...
...It's pretty wooden, but it's all there...
...It was wonderful to have that experience in the raw again, even if what I was experiencing was less a trip to the theater than a visit to my own origins as a pop-culture vulture...
...It was the first show I ever saw...
...The piece of parchment is the Declaration of Independence, and the politicians are John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson...
...But that is not why, watching 1776, I found myself transported, so much so that at one small and quiet moment, my eyes filled with tears...
...I sat through the show spellbound, and that evening my mother and I went to the record store to buy the original-cast album, which I listened the grooves off of, as we used to say...
...After all, as our ironic culture has taught us, really terrible stuff can seem perversely entertaining after a while, if you let it...
...In fact, 1776 is entirely delightful, and unexpectedly moving because it is utterly besotted with America, but without being corny—a frank and unembarrassed pride in country that would be impossible to duplicate in our multicultural, postmodern atmosphere...
...The reason I became so passionate about reading, seeing, and watching in the first place is that they were the ways I learned how to transcend myself...
...something clicked...
...It isn't...
...There was no purpose to its being on the air other than to employ its cast and crew and make a few bucks from Vagisil commercials...
...Others find transcendence in physical labor, or in the outdoors, or in a boat, or on a golf course...
...No, 90210 was awful because it was dead...
...Sherman Edwards's score has one catchy and clever song after another (the ensemble, which plays the Continental Congress, complains at the outset of the show on June 4, 1776, that "it's hot as hell/In Philadel/phia," which is a very nice lyric indeed...
...Is this what it means to be a cultural consumer these days—seeing how long one can go before one is literally bored to death...
...And, thanks to the remarkable cleverness and literacy of Peter Stone's libretto, 1776 actually manages to convey the seriousness of the debate over the Declaration (and the later Articles of Confederation) within the confines of a Broadway musical...
...Narrative provides me with an experience that seizes my attention— something that pulls me up out of myself and sends me off somewhere else...
...It wasn't awful because it was badly written, though it was, or because it was badly acted, though it was, or because it was pointless and plotless, though it was...
...John Pqdhqretz...
...Does it sound as though it is bound to be reductive and embarrassing...
...I can remember when that wasn't really the case for me, when even a bad television show held a certain fascination because it might have a moment or a performance or a snippet of dialogue worth remembering...
...This is an unusual show in the annals of modern-day Broadway...
...Instead, I find myself testing my powers of endurance...
...You can find out yourself by renting the movie version, which may be the most faithful rendition of a Broadway show on film...
...a piece of parchment and a couple of politicians...
...Its cast is almost entirely male, but it is not about homosexuals...
...But after three decades, my ability to enjoy those very small pleasures is diminishing...
...Lifeless...
...I had such an experience, the first in a long time, just this week in a small Broadway theater where I went to see the much-lauded revival of the 1969 musical called 1776...
...Does this sound horrible...
...In fact, 1776 is probably the only Broadway musical that attempts to make you laugh, cry, and fall in love with...
...Before, I was too restless to be a spectator—unable to remain in my seat at a movie theater, unable to sit still watching television...
...This happened the other week, when I watched the premiere of Beverly Hills 90210, the once-hip show about teenagers that has been on so long they are probably worried about their reimbursements under Medicare Part B. I have never—and I mean never—seen anything as awful as this episode...
...For me, it comes through narrative, any narrative: a story, a joke, a song...
...But when the curtain went up, and after about a minute the assembled actors suddenly burst into song with the phrase "Sit down, John...
...Most of the movies you see, television shows you watch, books you read, are disappointing...
...Its utter lack of energy was stultifying...
...In 1969, when I was 8 and growing up in New York City, I was taken to see a matinee of 1776 with a friend...
...That feeling—the feeling of being taken in hand on a journey that is not your own invention, but has been planned for you by someone else, and to which you cannot help but react—is the basis of all aesthetic experience, whether the art itself is enduring, like a great novel, or appealing but perishable, like 1776...
...The love stories it features are entirely incidental, and they are heterosexual...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 5
