The Magic Theater

The death of the American musical has been predicted so often, for so long, that it is startling to read it has already occurred. Or so Denny Martin Flinn informs us in “Musical! A Grand Tour.” “A great art form has passed,” he writes, and then ends his long history of the musical--from Aristophanes (literally) to Stephen Sondheim--with a melodramatic one-word curtain: “BLACKOUT.”

The lights went out on the musical-as-we-knew-it, Flinn tells us, on April 21, 1977, at the Alvin Theater on West 52nd Street. The occasion was the premiere of “Annie,” a so-so musical based on a comic strip, whose highlights included FDR’s Depression-lifting epiphany, sung by Annie, that (get this) “Tomorrow is only a day away.”

“Annie”--in Flinn’s book--killed off the musical by winning Tonys and profits, no matter how weak it was. Flinn is right to remind us that when “bad work substitutes for good, the end is surely near,” but it seems as mean-spirited as orphanage-warden Miss Hannigan not to note that the red-haired moppet cheered up audiences on Broadway for 2,377 performances, ran for 3 1/2 years in London and is only now winding up a Broadway revival a full 20 years after her deadly debut there. Still, it is worth suggesting--and Flinn is not alone in doing so--that what Little Orphan Annie couldn’t kill off, maybe the Brits could.

The Broadway musical’s day on the town may, indeed, be done. Musicals don’t originate on Broadway now as often as they do in London, Los Angeles, Toronto and rehearsal halls equally far afield. The shift in origin has more to do with economics than with anything else but has brought shifts in creativity and sensibility with it. It is instructive that “Ragtime,” which has yet to open on Broadway, is already being widely touted and performed with the stately grandeur of a classic.

For those who cherish the bright and sassy vernacular show that for decades typified the American musical no one but Americans could do, there has been a terrible falling off, symbolized perhaps by the crash of that chandelier in the schlocky “Phantom of the Opera.”

Chief suspect, of course, is Andrew Lloyd Webber, who, when not confusing Eva Peron with Judy Garland in what Flinn calls “fascism as show-biz,” has smothered the beat of Broadway beneath Puccini-flavored treacle in fake fur or on roller skates. That one of Lord Lloyd Webber’s shows has just become the longest-running musical in Broadway history is--to a fan of Porter, Rodgers, Berlin and Gershwin (I plead guilty)--merely proof that even T.S. Eliot can be turned into kitty litter.

Flinn, a former dancer and choreographer who appeared in “A Chorus Line,” has written about his experience in “What They Did For Love.” I have not, as far as I know, seen him dance, but he is doubtless more graceful en pointe than on paper. His book is oddly structured and under-edited, but it is punched up with insider savvy. He is good about stagecraft and dance and choreography, disdains Hal Prince, worships Michael Bennett and is scathing about Edwin Lester and the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera. His chronicle will supplant none of the works of his betters--Cecil Smith, Stanley Green, Gerald Bordman and Lehman Engel come to mind--and his errors are mostly harmless. (For some reason, he thinks Noel Coward’s “Cavalcade” was a flop musical, though it was a huge hit as a patriotic pageant--with songs--and won the Best Picture Oscar when filmed by Fox in 1933.)

Whatever its shortcomings, “Musical! A Grand Tour” is not the least of the current crop of books about the musical theater, a distinction that goes to the outpourings of another dancer-choreographer who has produced (on tape, one suspects) a nonbook for the nonreader.

Tommy Tune gives us “Footnotes,” which is subtitled (in lower case, which pretty much says it all) “a memoir.” “Footnotes” is as slender as its author, chatty and ever so madcap, a virtual catalog of gypsy cliches about the business there’s no business like.

Tune reminds us that he first tapped into public awareness in 1973 as an openly gay character in “Seesaw,” for which he won the first of his many Tony Awards, and if he isn’t out, he isn’t anything. His outness is out there on every page, with breezy accounts of his deflowerings (gay and otherwise) and subsequent carnal adventures. The virtue of his vices is provided by his touching nods to the devastation AIDS has wrought on both the musical and his personal life.

On the self-help side, “Footnotes” contains a recipe for facials borrowed from Mae West via Andy Warhol that is, well, “organic.” Because I doubt this newspaper will let me print it, I merely alert you to seek out or avoid Page 92. Tune’s confessional mode further reveals that a psychic once told him he was an alien, a showstopper he passes on to us adding that, “deep down somewhere it has a ring of truth.” Indeed.

Kurt Ganzl does not claim to be an alien, but you may draw your own conclusion from his “The Musical: A Concise History,” in which he rates France’s “Irma la Douce” and England’s “Salad Days” over Broadway’s “The Most Happy Fella.” Ganzl, who lives in England and hails from New Zealand, provides global focus in a book less concise than it is weighty--enough to anchor (or serve as) a small coffee table.

He richly details lyric theater landmarks in Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Hungary long before Broadway was electrified by Edison, let alone by Ethel Merman. He writes with amused tolerance of the American musical even when he patronizes it. He refers to “subtexts and morals and things” in the works of Sondheim, a composer he admires even if Sondheim is “New Yorkish” in shows such as “Company,” in which being “New Yorkish” is rather the point.

The author’s great strength is his erudition about international musical theater, beginning with John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” (no Aristophanes for him!) and working his way through Jacques Offenbach, Franz Lehar, Gilbert and Sullivan and their less familiar contemporaries before getting near 42nd Street or “42nd Street.”

He writes wittily and well and is a more reliable guide than Flinn, though his taste is sometimes as mysterious as it is catholic. He finds “Evita” “stunning” and goes all misty-eyed over such English shows as “Robert and Elizabeth” (“the most remarkable piece of romantic musical-theater writing to have been seen [sic] on the musical stage in years”) and “Chess” (“fine and dramatically effective”), both of which I saw (and heard) in London, one of which seemed to me dreary and the other incoherent.

As appreciative as Ganzl is of such classics as “West Side Story” and “My Fair Lady,” he can be loftily condescending. He notes, for instance, that “Gypsy” is “a favorite with a particular group of musical theater enthusiasts,” without identifying the group he has in mind. Jule Styne, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents and Sondheim, who created it? Or is he offering the back of his hand to Merman fans? To ecdysiasts?

No such condescension mars Geoffrey Block’s “Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From ‘Show Boat’ to Sondheim,” a solid and frequently fascinating work that should become a model of how to investigate and report on the evolution of a musical. Block covers a slew of them, in fact, including (among others) “Show Boat,” “Anything Goes,” “Pal Joey,” “Lady in the Dark,” “Carousel,” “Kiss Me, Kate,” “Guys and Dolls,” “My Fair Lady,” “West Side Story” and “serious” works like “Porgy and Bess” and “The Cradle Will Rock.”

He is an academic who doesn’t sound like one. He has written definitively about Charles Ives but obviously relishes Broadway and, to his credit, takes it seriously. He challenges perceived conflicts between popularity and critical acclaim in studying shows the reader is likely to know and, best of all, by showing how they got that way.

“Enchanted Evenings” is all about process and the collaboration that turns process into progress. “Show Boat” isn’t just Jerome Kern but Edna Ferber and Oscar Hammerstein II too; “Pal Joey” is Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and John O’Hara; “Lady in the Dark” is Moss Hart as well as Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin; and “Anything Goes” is P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay, and Ethel Merman along with Cole Porter. And so on.

His research is persuasive and his writing vivid. Not every reader will be fascinated to learn that the opening notes of “Show Boat’s” “Ol’ Man River” are the same as those of “Cotton Blossom” reversed or that both are cribbed from Antonin Dvorak’s “New World Symphony,” but knowing this adds to the appreciation of even the most general reader.

Vernacular energy is the heart and soul of the Broadway musical, and Block helpfully finds it in lyrics, plot and character, as well as in music. He is at his best, though, illustrating “what happens musically or how songs interact [within] a dramatic context” and likes a “thundering good song-and-dance show” as much as Brooks Atkinson did when he wrote those words in 1934 about “Anything Goes.”

Block guides us painstakingly but effortlessly through the “West Side Story” creative team’s avoidance of what Leonard Bernstein called “falling into the ‘operatic trap,’ ” without ever himself falling into the “academic trap” of the cloistered musicologist.

“Enchanted Evenings” is indispensable for anyone who cares to know more about Broadway musicals than Playbill can provide, and if Block finds Broadway “collapsing under the weight of the musical spectacles of the 1980s and early 1990s,” he offers hope. In a final chapter about Sondheim, he positions the composer (was any Broadway figure ever harder to peg?) as a “reinterpretation, rather than a revolution” of all that has gone before. Sondheim, he writes, is the “worthy heir” to a great legacy, in which “more fun than profundity” is as acceptable as experiment and aspiration and a lot easier to take than humorless pretension, a quality nowhere to be found in this subtle and entertaining book.

Block begins with “Show Boat,” which is where Ethan Mordden ends in “Make Believe: The Broadway Musical in the 1920s.” Mordden is the author of a number of previous books about theater, opera and movies. His “The Hollywood Studios” is a standard work about the studio system and the distinctive look of its films, just as his “Broadway Babies” is standard about musicals. Like them, “Make Believe” brings an imaginative gift to its material that can only come from the author’s love of his subject and fervor for embracing the reader in the rush of his enthusiasm.

Mordden writes fiction too, which must account for his ability to re-imagine and render a period he never saw but brings to life with the immediacy of an eyewitness hanging over the balcony railing. Early on, he describes Fred and Adele Astaire performing a forgotten Gershwin song in “Lady, Be Good!” The world of the musical theater of the 1920s fairly sings and dances across the page. His command of theater lore is impeccably detailed, which inspires trust. He is also a witty iconoclast about the received opinion and apocrypha, which he neatly replaces with greater perceptions than the time-rusted wheezes of yesteryear.

If Tommy Tune is an alien, Mordden too comes from a rare and special place: that of the appreciator who conveys not only his enthusiasms but the heartbeats behind them. One of his best books is the admirable “Rodgers and Hammerstein,” and in “Make Believe,” he returns to pre-Rodgers and Hammerstein like this: “[I]t was one of Hammerstein’s most fervent notions that certain important relationships, even important encounters, can change our lives: that humankind is a community in which some teach, goad, and inspire the rest of us.”

That, I think, describes a quality the American musical theater--the Broadway theater--teems with at its best. It needs no crashing chandeliers or roller skates (and will survive them) because it is brimming with a kind of exuberant energy that sings and swoons and laughs and dances; it has a future because it has a moral dimension rooted in the life it springs from and celebrates.

“Ours is a culture that has made show business its definitive contribution to Western civilization,” Mordden writes. “It is not an avalanche, this American energy, but an evolution that never rests.”

****

MUSICAL! A Grand Tour. By Denny Martin Flinn . Schirmer Books: 556 pp., $40

FOOTNOTES: a memoir. By Tommy Tune . Simon & Schuster: 242 pp., $24

THE MUSICAL: A Concise History. By Kurt Ganzl . Northeastern University Press: 480 pp., $50

ENCHANTED EVENINGS: The Broadway Musical: From “Show Boat” to Sondheim. By Geoffrey Block . Oxford University Press: 400 pp., $35

MAKE BELIEVE: The Broadway Musical in the 1920s. By Ethan Mordden . Oxford University Press: 272 pp., $30