Talent. It comes and goes, gracing some ages abundantly, slighting others. It is irreplaceable. All the producing savvy in the world cannot make up for shoddy material. Let them bring in the brightest directors, the best set designers and orchestrators. If the talent at the core is not there, they are just erecting so much elaborate scaffolding over a vacant stage.
Kern. Rodgers. Harburg. Lane. Lerner. Berlin. Ashman. None was the product of a school for the privileged or the disadvantaged, nor were they weaned on government grants or “genius” awards. No, they developed their gifts for expression by absorbing and giving new voice to the cultural patterns of their time. And by honing their talents in the free market place, thus were they the inevitable beneficiaries of forces beyond their control. Culture: Would there have been a George Gershwin at all—would we today be singing “Fascinating Rhythm” or “Our Love Is Here to Stay”—had the young champion roller skater from Brooklyn who composed those tunes grown up eighty years later, racing on in-lines to the beat of Gangsta rap and chilling out between sprints at Starbucks?
The intersection between creative impulse and contemporary trends can lead to unexpectedly exciting new modes of expression. Can also lead to dithering dead ends. So, beyond the futile search for history or human genetics to explain why some eras foster greater works than others, we are still left back where we began: no given age is guaranteed × number of artists. Creative genius was never that easy to understand or replicate. And never was the American musical theatre more bereft of it than during a long listless drought through the 1980s.
Deferring for a moment to the many who continually lament the so-called “fall” of the American musical, let us focus first on the dearth of American talent. (Outsiders, waiting in the green room to appear, will have their day in another chapter.) Certainly, during the 1980s almost everything that opened on Broadway came crashing down with depressing regularity, or, worse yet, died a protracted death before tiny audiences conned into a kind of mercy patronage. Taking stock of a slew of reasons advanced for the alleged rise and fall of the Yankee tuner, all are secondary to the troubling demise of talent.
And direction. The creative depression was certainly caused in part by a Sondheim-led allegiance to the “concept musical.” Ordinary ticket buyers not from the East Village became increasingly turned off by its aloof disregard for story and character. We may never know how many promising young songwriters who toiled slavishly in their misguided dreams of duplicating Mr. Sondheim’s style, might otherwise have produced dramatically sound projects more attuned to general tastes. There are, it seems clear from reports and chatter, tons and tons of Stephen Sondheim sound-alikes lurking—and languishing—out there in regional theatre purgatory, silently cursing audiences who don’t yet get it. Virtually none of their work had ever gotten to Broadway in successful form, not by the year 2000. How sad to consider their blind loyalties to so dubious a school.
By now, American musicals with rare exceptions no longer supplied popular songs to the public at large. Through the ’70s, a fair number of shows—among them, Annie, Grease, Pippin, The Magic Show, A Chorus Line, Godspell, Purlie, I Love My Wife, They’re Playing Our Song—generated songs the public embraced or at least heard on radio stations; by the ’80s, with the lone exception of Henry Krieger’s Dreamgirls, no other new American musical landed numbers on the Billboard charts. This is not to argue that shows containing hitless scores are bad (West Side Story, remember, was one); rather, to suggest a bench mark for gauging the overall decline in accessible songwriting during those times.
A few shows did produce cabaret standards. None was more endowed with excellence in this regard, nor a more glowing exception to the abysmal era in which it was born, than Jerry Herman’s 1983 smash, La Cage Aux Folles. Long after his blockbuster success with Hello, Dolly and Mame, Herman took much bolder steps in a more serious direction. His thoughtful songs for La Cage serve to affirm the unconventional tale of a couple of homosexual men, Albin and Georges, who have lived together as a virtual married couple for many years, facing a crisis over whom to invite to the wedding of Georges’s son, Jean-Michel. Georges, the more straight-acting of the pair, has mounting reservations over his lover’s likely behavior at the wedding ceremony, fearing that Albin’s flamboyant mannerisms will cause unease and embarrassment. This leads to the first act finale, “I Am What I Am,” a roof-shattering anthem to individual identity.
Jerry Herman never composed with such genuine feeling. Tragically, after testing positive for AIDS around the time the show opened, Herman was left so devastated, believing he faced a certain death sentence, that he would not have the strength of spirit to compose another musical for nearly two decades.
Herman’s “The Best of Times” will certainly grace piano bars for decades to come, as will “Song of the Sands,” or “Look Over There,” a quiet song which poses the question of who is more important, the person one spends a life with, who is there for that person day after day, or some distant little-seen relative who might be offended by the person’s choice of mates? Who, indeed. “Cocktail Counterpoint,” “La Cage,” and “Masculinity” are very funny songs, full of Herman’s grasp of the ironies inherent in his subject. And what heart-lifting melody! The theatre had not been this romantic a place in many seasons.
Composer Jerry Herman (lower left) and director Arthur Laurents confer with original cast album co-producer Fritz Holt (right) during a recording session of La Cage aux Folles. Above them, from left: co-stars George Hearn and Gene Barry, and record producer Thomas Z. Shepard.
In between La Cage and two 1989 hits, City of Angels and Grand Hotel, not much at all happened during the vacuous 1980s. Not much except for two proficiently engaging adaptations which captured critical favor (or sympathy) in 1985, a time when residents of the Big Apple were desperately in search of anything they could hold up to show the world they still knew how to produce musicals.
Exhibit #1: Big River, the Roger Miller tuner about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. It has enjoyed scant respect, even disdain, from theatrical in-crowds, a puzzling contradiction to the heap of critical favor it earned on opening night—according to Variety’s critical tally: 17 favorable notices, seven mixed reviews and only two unfavorable calls. Country and western star Roger Miller got roped into the enterprise by two of his most devoted fans, New York producers Rocco and Heidi Landsman, and Mr. Miller’s first and only musical lasted for two respectable seasons at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre.
It is not so much a put down of Mr. Miller—for his songs are pleasantly serviceable—as it is an indication of how bleak things were in surrounding Times Square playhouses to note that, smack dab in the middle of that dismal decade, Big River proved to be one of only two new shows of lasting commercial value. Steve Suskin, one of numerous non–Big River fans, called it “the best musical of the worst season for Broadway musicals in seventy years.”1 (Other entries that year included Grind and Leader of the Pack.) In fact, Roger Miller’s effort gave the Tony Awards show something to crow about. His folksy backwoods tunes evoke a sense of character and place, though they fail to provide much dramatic traction. The best of the bunch, “Muddy Waters,” conjures up real excitement, an element of the theatre Mr. Miller seemed unprepared by nature to effect at will. Big River did not contain nearly enough muddy water.
Exhibit #2: Later the same season came another relative newcomer to the stage with a popular music background, Rupert Holmes. His Mystery of Edwin Drood arrived uptown following a summer of free performances under Joe Papp’s aegis in Central Park. It too had a more than sympathetic hometown press waiting to give it every benefit of the doubt when it opened at the Imperial Theatre on December 2. Down upon it came a shower of warm appraisals. In his legit follow up review, Variety’s Richard Hummler praised the show’s “unmistakable stamp of Broadway professional expertise” and its “skillfully executed hokum.”2 Holmes, who did all the creative work, adapted the unfinished Charles Dickens novel and made some intriguing changes geared to generate additional publicity.
At each performance audiences were offered the chance to decide on the show’s ending by vote. As for the songs—evidently not pre-selected by audience polling—the best of the lot is the hurricane-paced opening grabber, “There You Are!” From there on out, things on the cast album sound, at best, sporadically interesting. And there you go. You can’t make a lasting impression with such marginal material. Many outsiders were struck by how marginal it all seemed when the show went out on tour. Before its one-year anniversary on Broadway, the tuner’s title was shortened to Drood in a failed effort to rebuild sagging box office. Within months the Imperial stood dark.
Established writers with major track records also fell onto hard times during the decade of Michael Jackson and Madonna and Boy George. Kander and Ebb, as previously noted, reached Broadway twice during the ’80s, with Woman of the Year and The Rink, the latter a 1984 offering which kept its glitter ball rotating over a rink full of aging skaters for about six months. Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, struggling to reclaim the glory that once was theirs, had already embarked on a sad journey of self-destruction, beginning in 1969 with Celebration, continuing through the 1970s when they saw their first version of Colette fizzle out in an off–Broadway house and another work, Philemon, turn into an off–off–Broadway dud. Following that, what for an encore? Into the perilous 1980s, when the closest they came to Broadway was a place called Seattle, where their second version of Colette folded faster than the first one. Ken Mandelbaum considered it a “class act,” sincerely believing that to be done right it would demand “a riveting star.”3 It would not be the first musical desperately in need of a riveting star. Thereafter, Schmidt and Jones set up their own workshop and tried out a few more projects on local members of the New Haven crowd. None of their works-in-progress caught the fancy of a comped-in producer.
Much the same for Strouse and Adams. Together or apart, they managed to generate not a single success during the entire eighties. Not for lack of trying. They began in 1981 with a hapless sequel to their smash Bye, Bye, Birdie, called Bring Back Birdie. It may have brought back Birdie, but not the original fans. The loathing reviewers were in no mood for protracted 1950s adolescence: “The kind of a show that teaches one to be grateful for small mercies, such as the final curtain.” That from Clive Barnes. And this from Richard Watts, Jr.: “When Bring Back Birdie isn’t simply dragging itself across the stage in one dull musical number after another, through a series of desperate plot developments, it is busy being tasteless.”4 Donald O’Connor, whom you’ll fondly remember from movie musical fame, had the misfortune of falling head-first into this albatross, a fate that may have hastened Mr. O’Connor’s descent into senior citizen bus-and-truck concert tours. Chita Rivera, another Bring Back victim, stumbled quickly into another veiled turkey, magician Doug Henning’s 1983 bomb Merlin, before semi-resurrecting herself later years in the long-running loser Kiss of the Spider Woman.
Who produced Bring Back Birdie? Lee Guber, a name well known among his co-producing unknowns. Directed? Not just directed but “conceived it,” too—one Joe Layton. The book? By none other than seasoned librettist Michael Stewart. Sad but true, it also takes talent to create finished flops. Charles Strouse, away from Lee Adams, made three more attempts on his own during the ’80s—Dance a Little Closer (to the lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner), Mayor and Rags, all dead on arrival.
Another unforeseen 1980s casualty was Marvin Hamlisch. Following his two big hits in the seventies, A Chorus Line and They’re Playing Our Song, success totally eluded him. Song, the stronger of the two scores, had lyrics by Carol Bayer Sager. Too bad that Hamlisch and Sager became romantically embroiled during their collaboration. The doomed affair apparently killed any chances of their working together again. What they did for love. Song won both praise and scorn from a barrage of schizophrenic reviews. It has been unfairly underrated by Hamlisch haters, the folks who rightfully lambast the composer for appropriating Scott Joplin music in the scoring he did for the movie The Sting and publicly taking credit for it. On his own, Hamlisch did what good theatre composers once did: He turned out songs of relevance and timely popular appeal. His contemporary tunes no doubt helped his shows reach younger ears.
You can’t blame Hamlisch alone for all the obstacles that came crashing down on so promising a career. The first two lyricists with whom he labored, Edward Kleban and Howard Ashman, both died at young ages. While Hamlisch and Ashman were working on the meandering mediocrity Smile (a show that some insist is not so bad—“perhaps the most underrated musical of the 1980s,” according to Ken Mandelbaum),5 Hamlisch was also toiling with Christopher Adler’s lyrics for the 1983 London flop Jean Seberg. In 1993, he was working with his fifth collaborator, David Zippel, on yet another well-reported fiasco, The Goodbye Girl.
Which is an invitation to speculate: Did Mr. Hamlisch suffer from creative promiscuity? Without a significant other to ground him in a particular style or strategic vision, to give him simple relationship security, he has knocked about like a restless teenager surfing the Net. And thus was he prone, it would seem, to the shifting of courses at the drop of an expedient suggestion or work offer. The preparation of Smile, involving a parade of tentative collaborators coming and going from one rewrite to the next, was bound to have wrought the oddball result that is called the official opening night version. The great unfulfilled promise of Marvin Hamlisch is not without precedent: We should not forget the similar fates that befell people like Vernon Duke and Burton Lane.
Bright new beacons of the future died off too soon or lost their way, mired in bad projects. Others with sterling credits from the past simply stopped trying. By the 1980s, Bock and Harnick, still both very much alive, were amicably no longer speaking to each other about writing songs for musical shows. After their 1976 disappointment, The Rothschilds, Bock expressed publicly a desire to compose “serious” music, while his disenfranchised partner was cast asunder to seek other associations. What he did six years hence with aging Richard Rodgers was an embarrassment so unbelievably bad, called Rex, that a basic decency prevents elaboration.
After Rex, Mr. Harnick took a crack, with composer Michael Legrand, at two more new musicals—The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in 1979, and A Christmas Carol in 1981. Neither undertaking progressed from regional theatre tryouts to anywhere inside the city limits of Gotham, the only place where success matters in the eyes of everyone outside the city limits of Gotham. Another serial collaborator by default, Harnick faced further taunts from the press when he teamed up with Joe Raposo to adapt It’s a Wonderful Life. Evidently it wasn’t. Then, in 1993, he would contribute additional lyrics to an epic turkey that clucked around on the boards long enough to shock disbelieving eyes and thrill to no end the New Haven crowd. They called it Cyrano, the Musical. Beware the phrase “The Musical” in the title, a usual tip off that trouble stalks the company. Without Bock, Harnick was as much a retro neophyte as was Adler without his Ross.
Other once-prosperous songsmiths simply never came back (or, more likely, we just don’t know about it), or they endured the indignities of producerly indifference at the reception desk, gave up and entered law, or returned to dentistry. I nominate the team of Howard Karr and Matt Dubey for the award of Most Underrated Musical Theatre Songwriters of the Twentieth Century. Creators of the 1950s Ethel Merman romp Happy Hunting, they became the butt of undeserving jokes by reputable scholars. There is Ethan Mordden, labeling their output “some of the worst songs ever written for a musical.”6 And there is Steve Suskin, quipping that “Happy Hunting was composed by a dentist, without novocaine,” and gleefully recounting how Merman refused to accept “untried composer” Sondheim on her next project, Gypsy. “Big Merm—who personally ‘discovered’ Dubey and Karr—insisted on veteran Jule Styne. No more amateurs for her!”7
Amateurs? Dubey and Karr only came up with a pair of Hit Parade candidates, plus some funny numbers, plus some graceful ballads and a few roof-raising refrains. They were following the mold cut by Adler and Ross, who mixed up Broadway with Tin Pan Alley, as had virtually all those who went before them when “pop” music was not a dirty word. Whatever happened to Dubey and Karr? Before Hunting, they had worked on a single number, both clever and bouncy, “The Greatest Invention,” for New Faces of 1956. After writing their hearts out for Merman, they pursued one more chance to work on a show bound for Gotham, called We Take the Town. Based on the adventures of Pancho Villa and starring Robert Preston, it closed out of town in short order when they first tried taking Philadelphia. The dentist, we presume, returned to drilling for gold, for it surely wasn’t to be found on a Broadway stage. It is a cruel, inbred little world, full of bitterness among rivals that can be incredibly counterproductive.
(It was no less treacherous on the West End for Lionel Bart, who followed up his gigantic 1960 success Oliver with a parade of sad fizzling failures. In 1962, Blitz fared poorly with the critics. Two seasons later, Maggie May drew a little more respect and stayed around for over a year. Twang, pelted by ghastly notices in 1965, marked Bart’s last West End production other than future revivals of Oliver. He tried his hand on American soil, straining futilely to rekindle the magic. In 1969, his ambitious La Strada, based on Federico Fellini’s screenplay, sank under the angry blast of five disapproving reviews after only one performance at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. So much for the additional music by Elliot Lawrence, additional words by Martin Charnin. Back in England, Bart tinkered on another loser, Costa Packet, which never saw the light of a West End opening.)
Hal Bacharach and Hal David—as far as we know—purposely did not try writing another show for the stage. Following Promises, Promises, they headed back to the West Coast and came up with a set of stillborn numbers for a movie musical version of the film Lost Horizon. Soon after, they dwindled apart. A pity, for neither man would ever again begin to achieve on his own what he had done so fruitfully in tandem with the other. A perfectionist accustomed to studio-recording standards, Bacharach’s “nerve-wracking” abhorrence of irregular stage singing drove him for a long spell away from considering future stage projects.8 In later years, the Bacharach-David songbook was mined for two unsuccessful revues. Thirty years after Promises, Bacharach on his own made a second known stab at a Broadway show, teaming up with B.A. Robertson on lyrics to retell “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” against a 1970s New York setting. “Manhattan Girl,” its working title, never made it to Manhattan.
Although The Wiz, a huge hit, got plenty of airplay, toured extensively and spawned a film, the real creative force behind its hit-laden score, African-American Charles Smalls, would never be given a chance to repeat his singular success. “It is astounding,” wrote Martin Gottfried in his book Broadway Musicals, “that despite the mammoth contributions of black singers and musicians to the performance of American popular music, only Duke Ellington and Fats Waller made names for themselves as songwriters, and only because they performed their own music…. Music publishers and theatrical producers have persistently denied black composers access to the public…. Even today, rare indeed is the Charlie Smalls who has the chance to write the music for a hit show like The Wiz. This is the disgrace of American popular and theatre music.”9
Smalls’s inexplicable fade was not so different from that of other composers who scored big in the ’70s with shows that imported sounds developed outside Broadway, from Nashville to Motown, and then languished thereafter. A few of those composers, as already noted, embarked on follow up projects that went nowhere. Perhaps they were ill-prepared to absorb the subtle changes in scoring away from a stridently narrow rock and roll heritage. And the leading pop songwriters of the day did not demonstrate much desire to subject their egos to the unique collaborative demands of musical theatre. Barry Manilow passionately tried a couple of times with original work that did not reach a major New York house.
Then there were those once-promising talents who passed semi-anonymously across doomed stages, contributing so many wonderful songs to fallen shows: Larry Grossman and Hal Hackady to Minnie’s Boys; Billy Goldenberg (music) and Alan and Marilyn Bergman (lyrics) to Ballroom; Craig Carnelia to Working. Grossman had composed three other flops (Grind, A Doll’s Life and Goodtime Charley); the Bergmans had been to New York once before, in 1964 when with composer Sammy Fain they worked on Something More, the only musical ever directed by Jule Styne, which left most of the critics wanting something different and lasted all of fifteen performances. In the indices of theatre books, Craig Carnelia’s name appears but once, referencing his association with the troubled Working, for which he composed with such singular inspiration. The Broadway canon is littered with great songs, most of which will never find an audience beyond the small devoted class of cast album collectors.
Other neophytes to musical theatre had arrived from country truck stops and Ivy League colleges. For skeptics with golden-age memories, the end of the line was probably spotted during a pathetically barren Tony Awards telecast in 1983, when a nice enough group of singers—Jim Wann, Cass Morgan, Debra Monk, John Foley, John Schimmel, and Mark Hardwick—took the stage and performed a few of their songs from a show nominated that year for “Best Musical of 1982,” Pump Boys and Dinettes. The Dodger Organization, the people who gave you Big River three years later, got behind this hokey backwoods truck stop revue, a kind of egalitarian enterprise which found high favor in the pages of the New York Times, Mel Gussow judging it “as refreshing as an ice cold beer after a bowl of five-alarm chili.”10 At the Tonys, it tasted more like flat lemonade at a flea market. The yawningly undramatic numbers do deliver amiably fresh lyrics, honed with intelligence in the country school of songwriting.
The same season brought another minor work, Nine. It is again tempting to suggest that mediocre musicals do unreservedly well in desperate times. Nine was warmly received by the press. Variety appraised it “a triumph of imaginative staging and production glitter over thin material.” Tommy Tune’s choreography, wrote the reviewer, cleverly concealed threadbare materials: “There isn’t much time to notice how little of consequence is at stake.”11 Whatever its on-stage merits, the score is amazingly devoid of lyrics (remember lyrics?). For this ornery non-achievement, hats off to composer Maury Yeston, a fully credentialed Yale music professor who tyrannized his own music (some of it quite lush and lovely) with his do-it-yourself verse.
One wonders: Exactly what does a producer of taste say to a Yeston in this regard? Had musical theatre sunk so low—were there so few decent lyric writers around—that Yeston could simply get away with it? Lyrics being the least critical of a musical’s three components, he did. Arthur Kopit supplied the book, patterned after filmmaker Federico Fellini’s 8½. Dance dazzler Tommy Tune directed and choreographed (with assistance from Tommy Walsh), and the glitzy thing stayed around for a healthy run. Nine years in the making, Nine was one of a newer breed of super slick production workhorses that have a way of lulling audiences into a false sense of entertainment. There are few mortals around willing to sing its praises.
The Tap Dance Kid, which opened in 1983 at the Broadhurst theatre, was an almost-hit that hung on for almost two seasons before going out on tour. The suitable songs came from the piano of Henry Krieger, the okay lyrics from the pen of Robert Lorick. A likable show at heart, The Tap Dance Kid dances on the conflict between a young black boy who just wants to dance, please—have you a problem with that?—and his father, who does have a problem with that. The dad, a proud attorney, dreads the digressive symbolism of it all. Librettist Charles Blackwell based his sensitive script on the novel by Louise Fitzhugh, “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change.” What the creators failed to do was find a more original voice. The important story they told got submerged in relentless feel-good, all-dreams-come-true refrains.
Also in 1983, the team of David Shire and Richard Maltby, Jr., ultimately famous for never having had a successful show on Broadway, came to town with Baby. Up till that point, they had worked on Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1968, and on Love Match, a tuner which opened the same season in Phoenix, Arizona, and closed out of town in Los Angeles exactly two months later. Baby barely lasted through its diaper stage at the Ethel Barrymore. Its hard-working score, influenced by the school of Sondheim with a few nods to Stephen Schwartz and Donna Disco Summers thrown in for fresh air, sounds marooned in the cerebral self-conscious ’70s. Too full of Yuppie jabber, it is not an easy listen, even though a few of the selections fly—the rhythmically inventive “Baby, Baby,” and the powerful anthem to parenthood, “The Story Goes On.” These are not the sort of whining rich-kid parents to whom audiences gravitate. Among a mixed set of notices, Richard Hummler wrote, “The diffused and unconnected stories of three expectant couples lack immediacy and dimension…. Baby has no central dramatic focus.”12 In the end, Baby succumbed to concept musicalitis.
Near the end of the decade, Broadway dusted off an old 1950s Edwin Lester Civic Light Opera relic, At the Grand, which had starred Paul Muni and got no farther out of Los Angeles than jinxed San Francisco. Its outing at the Curran showed mildly enchanting if musty promise. Especially moving was the sympathetic presence of the old man, played by Paul Muni, nearing the end of his life with a fatal illness and simply wishing to experience one last touch of magic, maybe a little love, at the Grand Hotel in Berlin. Thirty years later, they brought in Tommy Tune, a smart move. Tune transformed the creaking book into a virtual character-based revue without intermission. Maury Yeston added a few fine numbers which, on balance, complimented the effective original Robert Wright and George Forrest songs. And they produced one of the best scores of the ’80s. Grand Hotel, the show’s revamped title, enjoyed a very prosperous run.
Cy Coleman, who hadn’t been heard from in almost ten years, flopped out in early 1989 with the 12-performance dud Welcome to the Club, then rebounded wonderfully only eight months later when his City of Angels, an original film noir story developed and scripted by Larry Gelbart, took the town by a whirl. Coleman fashioned his sultry refrains after 1940s big band swing. David Zippel’s savvy lyrics matched the savvy music, and Gelbart’s laugh-loaded book earned special praise from a majority of the reviewers.
Hotel and Angels may long be remembered as exceptions to a decade of thundering reversals. Numbered among the era’s deluxe letdowns are the three musicals which Stephen Sondheim, eventually to be christened by Variety, “the preeminent figure in contemporary musical theatre,”13 introduced during the feckless ’80s. Mr. Sondheim could still produce interesting, sometimes rousing songs, could still impress with deft lyrical gifts. It is a shame he squandered so much talent in the puzzling servitude of such self-indulgent projects.
Sondheim surely hastened the demise of the concept musical with Sunday in the Park with George—only the fifth musical to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and, for non–Pulitzer judges, one of the most trying evenings ever in a New York house. Clive Barnes and Richard Watts, Jr., registered their disapproval. So did the man from Variety, who stated, “Dispassionate respect rather than enjoyment is likely to be the predominate reaction to Sunday … another concept musical in which an abstract subject—the creation of art—takes precedence over story and character….”14
Into the Woods, Sondheim’s 1987 offering, enthralled in its preliminary moments. There was a sense of adventure in the air as audiences embarked on a potentially dangerous journey. But once the show slipped into a second act that couldn’t make up its thematic mind, the intriguing fun turned into tedious mental speculation. “It is basically a dull show that never comes into satisfying focus,” wrote Variety’s Richard Hummler. “Where the characters in the first act are active and moving forward, in the second part they’re passive reactors to the menace of the murdered giant’s vengeful widow.”15
The production’s biggest asset was the production itself, a clever sleight-of-hand salvage job by director James Lapine, who also wrote the libretto. Much in the spirit of a George Abbott, Lapine shamelessly hauled out a vaudevillian’s bag of audience-pleasing tricks. Guffaws to slapstick can’t, however, get us out of these woods. In the morass that follows intermission, one trenchant lyric idea cancels out or supersedes another, there are so many competing Big Themes knocking windily about. Courtesy of the nation’s leading civic light opera companies, Into the Woods, the perfect thinking person’s musical, has found life after Broadway before Yuppie crowds and academics who harbor serious reservations with song and dance shows but feel “o.k.” about something that kind of sounds intellectual.
Mr. Sondheim narrowed his vision down to the razor-thin path of a shotgun in his next big surprise, Assassins. First staged in 1990 by Playwright’s Horizons, it amounted to a perversely perfect end to Broadway’s worst decade. As if he had not already done everything imaginable to alienate audiences, Sondheim now labored mightily to defend the diabolical choices made by American dissidents with pistols aimed at enemies both personal and political. His best number, “Everybody’s Got the Right,” so good that it sounded like a dropout from Follies, was one of only eight songs in the entire recorded score. In terms of shock appeal, they are one crazed bunch, maybe too unsettling for the average ticket buyer. Assassins failed to move from its Playwright’s Horizons preview into a larger house. In 1992, it sold out a twelve-week London run, where the critics loved it.
By 1990, Sondheim had almost completely lost touch with ordinary people, who still preferred musicals about reasonably ordinary people. (The way things are going in modern society, however, with high school students slaughtering clasmates with assault rifles, etc., Assassins may turn into a hot public high school drama department staple in another five or fifty years—if any public high schools are left to produce it.) By indulging himself so, Mr. Sondheim had virtually destroyed his credibility with the public. Oscar Hammerstein’s reigning protege, still trying to rewrite Allegro, had led the musical theatre up a dead end street—not without an entourage of idolatrous fans to insulate the master from his every misstep into the woods. Nor without the encouragement of numerous Tony Awards and other assorted prizes, honors, testimonials, and a quarterly devoted exclusively to reports and essays about his work. Bringing about the near demise of the American musical was a group effort.
Times Square stood eerily dormant as the ’90s dawned, its once-shimmering skyline of hit show titles in neon felled by an onslaught of ineptitude and arrogance. And when boat loads of gothic sets and garish pop-rock tunes from across the Atlantic docked in New York during the bleakest period, thousands of starved theatergoers lined up to buy tickets for West End imports, eager to experience once again the thrill of strong dramatic stories set soaringly to music.
And, please, not to concepts.