Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...been discredited by the escapades of Oliver North. The enduring ghost of Viet Nam returns not in the cretinous revenge fantasies of Sylvester Stallone but in Platoon, a movie that confronts the ambiguous mess and tragedy of America's mission in Viet Nam. The show that has captured Broadway is Les Miserables, with its themes of suffering and redemption, and the injunction "Look down!" -- meaning look down upon the poor, the homeless. The injunction of the Reagan years has been "Look up!" -- to success, to wealth...
...especially those under the age of reason. Inspired in equal measure by the roller derby, Coney Island fun fairs and the smoke bomb-accented variety of rock concert, Starlight turns a small boy's dream about model-train racing into an $8 million extravaganza, the most expensive show in Broadway history...
...might be the pop-music equivalent of the excavation of ancient Troy, but the dig was just five miles from Broadway. In 1979 Henry Cohen, an executive for Warner Bros. Music, which owns publication rights to the songs, made a rough survey of the Secaucus material. "He didn't know its significance," Kimball recalls, "but he sent the list around. In 1982 he showed it to Donald Rose, a Gershwin scholar. Donald thought it was awesome and called me. In the first two boxes we found Gershwin's Pardon My English, which was presumed lost, and Cole Porter...
Until the 1940s, few Broadway scores were published in their entirety, and few composers paid much attention to posterity. "These people were writing for a vibrant commercial theater," notes John Ludwig of NIMT. "Their eyes were on the next hit." Today sharp eyes are on the past. Scholars have already plundered the Secaucus find for spirited revivals of Porter's Gay Divorce, Gershwin's Strike Up the Band and Kern's early Princess Theater musicals. This summer Connecticut's Goodspeed Opera House, which in 1984 restored Kern's Leave It to Jane, will unveil a Secaucus-enhanced edition of Gershwin...
...Miserables, an epic musical of the downtrodden in bygone Paris, opens to Broadway box- office records -- and deserves them...