THE DYING STRAINS OF THE MUSICAL

The other morning at Taft High School in Woodland Hills, one of the students asked, with a wistfulness I’d have said was more appropriate to someone three or four times her age, “Will the movie musicals ever come back?”

The reluctant answer had to be: I doubt it.

I understood the wistfulness, because the Hollywood musical continues to have an appeal across the ages to those of every age. Movies are made all over the world, but no other culture has been able to come close to duplicating the American musical.

But it was born in a particular time and place, Hollywood, and nurtured from a particular tradition, Broadway. And it’s a time, a place and a past that I’m afraid can’t be recaptured.

In the years before television put its strangling fingers on Hollywood’s throat, the major studios had choreographers and composers, singers and dancers, all under contract. MGM, which made many of the best and most enduring of the musicals, recruited the sidemen for its studio orchestra from symphonies around the country.

There were producers whose whole life was the musical. The names Arthur Freed, Pandro S. Berman and Jack Cummings spring immediately to mind, and there were others.

In its incandescent heyday, RKO did the Astaire-Rogers classics. There were musical traditions at Fox and Paramount and Columbia. Composer-conductor John Green, who worked at several studios and became the director of music at Metro for a decade between the late ‘40s and the late ‘50s, remembered the “try anything” spirit that prevailed in the musical team at MGM under Freed, who was himself a lyricist as well as a producer.

“It wasn’t uncommon for Fred (Astaire) or Gene (Kelly) and their associates to spend days, and as much as $25,000, $50,000, even $100,000 on the rehearsal stage,” says Green, “trying out a new idea, which in the end might work, or might not.” In those days, the in-house talent pools were there, and so was a willingness (originating at the top) to break old rules and new ground. And so was the 20-cent gallon of gas, the 50-cent admission and a large, loyal audience that went out nights, and had not yet been pinioned by the living room screen.

Television, which learned so much from motion pictures, enriched its variety shows and musical specials with some of the magic the movies invented. Ironically, as in other genres--like family fare--the movies had shown how it was done, and thereby contributed to their own demise.

In a more subtle way, television, which has given us such a deluge of visual information and diversion over the years, may have compromised a kind of innocence (that magical suspension of disbelief) that was part of the enjoyment of musicals. I often fear that we don’t play make-believe as easily or comfortably as we used to.

Characters don’t burst from speech into song the way they did, nor is there a 100-voice choir lurking behind the potted palms or the garden wall. The best later musicals (“All That Jazz,” “Cabaret,” “Saturday Night Fever”) are pitched much closer to a kind of reality, and innocence is definitely not the name of the game.

Once upon a different past, too, the musicals were songs, lyrical melodies and melodic and often literate lyrics in an amazing profusion each time out. Whether Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Harry Warren and such surviving giants as Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn have their equals in a later generation is far from certain.

Max Wilk’s 1973 collection of oral histories celebrating the great songwriters, “They’re Playing Our Song,” has just been republished (New York Zoetrope: $24.95). It is full of wonderful vignettes, as of Lorenz Hart retreating to a quiet corner amid the cacophony of a Broadway rehearsal, and scrawling a new set of matchless lyrics on the back of an envelope.

Hart’s lyrics can of course be quoted by the hour, like all good poetry. Wilk mentions just one line--”that unfelt clasp of hand”--from “My Heart Stood Still,” as proving beyond doubt the power of musical verse. And who could argue? Or, from “Mountain Greenery”: “Beans could get no keener re-/ception in a beanery.”

They don’t, I think, write ‘em like that anymore. And even if they did, I’m not sure who would know how to assemble a musical around them. It appears to be a lost art, like making Packards.