COMMENTARY : Can’t Help Lovin’ Those Shows : The artists who stage great musical revivals help keep the flame alive and inspire people who will write the next great ones.

The death of the musical is a sore point for any serious lover of the form. It’s a perennial topic, made relevant recent ly by the Broadway premiere of the great-looking “Sunset Boulevard”--a show that offers visual grandeur but very little in the way of heart or even joy, traditionally the musical’s stock in trade.

Norma Desmond is not the first deranged protagonist in a musical, but she lacks the big emotion, unless you count fear and insecurity. Even the title character of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” (1979) was a man who knew how to be elated. It doesn’t help, though, that the latest Sondheim work to open is “Passion”--a musical notably lacking in any.

People often point to the ubiquity of musical revivals as proof not only of the sorry state of musical theater but of all theater. Revivals can certainly be dismaying; the current revival of the excruciating “Grease,” for example, can’t make anyone optimistic about the future of civilization.

But, in fact, a plethora of revivals is not a de facto sign of theater’s ill health. A first-rate production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” for example, revives Eugene O’Neill’s demons for a new generation. The same is true for musicals.

In fact, many new productions of major musicals manage to be astonishingly fresh, considering that they often celebrate values that now seem quaint, at best. All too many of the great American musicals center on women who just want to get married (witness Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls”), and they rarely bother to accord cultures outside the mainstream much respect (let’s remember that in “Peter Pan,” the Native Americans say, “Ugg-a-wugg, ugg-a-wugg, ugg-a-wugg-a”).

*

Musicals have long been a form of cultural escape, yet the work considered to be the first great book musical is a show that is wide open to the world outside. That musical is “Show Boat,” adapted from the Edna Ferber novel by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II for the Broadway stage in 1927. It is once again on Broadway, at the Gershwin Theatre, and director Hal Prince and producer Garth Dubinsky have made a vital and relevant piece of theater that provides a window back in time to bygone styles of acting, from the charmingly melodramatic performances by gaslight on the Cotton Blossom, 1887, to turn-of-the-century Chicago nightclub acts, to the Broadway of Kern’s own day.

When Prince’s “Show Boat” opened Toronto’s new North York Performing Arts Centre last fall, a group called the Coalition to Stop Show Boat protested outside the theater, calling the show racist, anti-African American propaganda. Part of the community there was clearly hurt that an expensive new performing arts center would open with a musical that begins, famously, with a derogatory word for African Americans. Prince used the alternate “Colored folk work on de Mississippi / Colored folk work while the white folk play,” but even in its raw, original form, Hammerstein’s lyric announces that “Show Boat” is not an escapist or blithe entertainment and that it is concerned with an America needing to change and to look at itself through honest eyes.

In fact, the mulatto Julie, superbly played by Lonette McKee, is perhaps the most fully imagined character in the piece. And her tragic downfall has its roots more in the function of women in the melodrama of Ferber’s day than it does in any cliched mulatto experience.

McKee sings Julie’s two masochistic ballads--”Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man” and “Bill”--minus the air of tragedy traditionally instilled in those songs since Helen Morgan first sang them. McKee’s Julie is a fairly contemporary rendering, and she gets a lot of swing and even joy out of “Fish got to swim, birds got to fly / I got to love one man ‘til I die,” a philosophy she passes down to her young friend Magnolia. Julie and Nola are both eventually deserted by their respective husbands; neither one ever gets over it.

Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II was a great promulgator of the suffering heroine whose credo can be found in Julie’s two songs. He makes Julie’s self-sacrifice ennobling, and McKee’s performance is so moving that one never stops to think, “Why is Julie’s life over when Frank leaves her? She’s gorgeous; she has an amazing voice. Why does she have to become a drunk and fall apart?”

The answer lies in the character of Ellie, the second banana, whose attempts to become a serious actress are continually rebuffed by the Cotton Blossom’s impresario, Capt. Andy. Ellie has a song espousing almost the reverse philosophy, suggesting that the key to a happier life is to keep it light. Ellie’s “I Might Fall Back on You” didn’t make it into Prince’s streamlined version, although the song can be heard on the definitive 1989 recording conducted and directed by John McGlinn. Sung on that recording by the wonderful Paige O’Hara, Ellie’s philosophy goes like this: “After I have looked around / The world for a mate / Then perhaps, I might fall back on you!”

Actually, Ellie’s kind of esprit would quickly move from the sidelines to the forefront of the book musical. Even Hammerstein, in his first collaboration with Richard Rodgers in 1943, wrote a heroine who asked: “Why should a woman who is healthy and strong / Blubber like a baby cause her man’s gone away?” (That was Laurey in “Oklahoma!”)

The musical genre may have been slow to absorb social change, yet a capacity for joy and an appetite for life became the raison d’etre of the musical heroine long before the feminist movement made its entrance onto the musical stage.

In his La Jolla Playhouse revival of Frank Loesser’s 1961 “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” slated for a March opening on Broadway, Des McAnuff cut “New Rochelle,” his heroine’s dream of suburbia as mecca. But he retained “Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm,” Rosemary’s paean to her future husband’s ambitions.

McAnuff rather brilliantly shifted attention away from the triviality of Rosemary’s dream by accenting its kitschiness. While Megan Mullally sings, computer-generated images take the audience on a goofy magic carpet ride, out of a jungle of skyscrapers (which look so spectacular you wonder why Rosemary needs to escape the city), across the bridge and into the Technicolor, Disneyland heart of her suburban dream house.

McAnuff’s direction helps take the onus off the song’s dopiness and helps us to see it as it is supposed to be seen--not as heroic but full of life and dreams and, yes, even ambition, for a young woman in Rosemary’s place and time.

Like McAnuff, the artists who stage great musical revivals help keep the flame alive and inspire people who will write the next great ones.

In “Show Boat,” Capt. Andy (John McMartin) must take over when a redneck in the Cotton Blossom audience threatens the stage villain with his gun and all of the actors make unrehearsed exits. The stage is empty, but Capt. Andy still has a full house waiting to be told a story, so he leaps to the boards and plays all the parts--young heroine, evil villain, handsome hero. He is the patron saint of the Cotton Blossom, and, one senses, Hal Prince identifies with him wholeheartedly. Prince has become the patron saint of a certain kind of musical, the kind with a social memory and heart as well.