‘Waning’ in style

A quasi-story always fun to read is the demise of the Broadway musical, and Patrick Pacheco (“Drama in the Score,” Oct. 17) does a particularly good job juggling all the usual contradictions.

“Its fortunes have waned,” proclaims your attention-grabbing teaser. Contemporary musicals are “completely marginalized, scoffed at,” claims composer Adam Guettel, grandson to Richard Rodgers.

How could that be, though, when ... wait! ... a few sentences later we read that Cameron Mackintosh’s four biggest shows “have out-grossed the top four films of all time -- and they’re still running”? Some of those shows, like them or not, will one day be fondly remembered by today’s younger crowds lamenting the decline of their own golden era. And producers will continue favoring populist songwriters or raiding jukeboxes from the past.

And the beat goes on.

David Lewis

Piedmont

David Lewis wrote “Broadway Musicals: A Hundred Year History,” and his next book, a history of the musical “Flower Drum Song,” will be published next year by McFarland & Co.