Word: broadway
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...series, which recently has concentrated on 50s and 60s musicals that are a familiar part of the Broadway repertory, must think about expanding its horizons. Of course I mean backward. Last year's revival of Sigmund Romberg's "New Moon" showed that operetta can comfortably nest in the Encores! bosom. How about a true faux operetta: "Hollywood Pinafore," George S. Kaufman's tweaking of "H.M.S. Pinafore" into a satire on the movie business? (It ran briefly on Broadway in 1946 and was not heard again until it surfaced six years ago in Discover the Lost Musicals.) Those Kern musicals that...
...STARS OVER BROADWAY...
...live in perhaps the direst age for this grand old form since it evolved a century ago - exactly a century ago, if you count George M. Cohan's "Little Johnny Jones" as the prototype Broadway musical. For 60 years the Broadway-style show tune fueled the pop charts, is by now a dead, or at least obscure, language. (The only song from a recent Broadway musical that anyone outside mid-Manhattan knows is "Karma Chameleon," the old Boy George number woven into his score for the short-lived, lamented "Taboo.") The sad fact is that most people under 60 have...
...many as 50 musicals might open each year; now the typical number is five. Performers thus have few opportunities to be employed, let alone become stars. Nobody these days graduates from Broadway musicals to mainstream celebrity, as Fred Astaire, Bob Hope, Julie Andrews, Streisand and dozens of others did. Why would any young person would want to be part of this antique, dead-end genre? It's like dreaming of becoming a hat blocker or a Yiddish scholar. What kid in the hinterlands would even know that a clear, crisp Broadway vocal style exists, when "American Idol" teaches that...
...musical theater. We happen to be blessed, at the moment, with a bounty of song-show talent. It heartens me that artists like Mitchell, Debbie Gravitte, Martin Short, Faith Prince, Judy Kuhn, Rebecca Luker, Murphy and Chenoweth (all veterans of Encores!) have devoted themselves to singing the grand old Broadway songs; and it depresses me that there's so little terrific new work they can devote themselves...