Broadway myths and melodies
Charles Marowitz
New York America is currently obsessed with mythology. Being a peculiarly American mythology, it is barely 50 years old. Its deities are Superman, Flash Gordon, Popeye, Frankenstein, Dracula and other folk-heroes from the Twenties and Thirties. In December, a hefty extravaganza on Mary Shelley's monster materialised at the Palace Theatre, next door to the multi-milliondollar film-epic, Popeye. On both sides of the Atlantic, Annie, based on the Thirties comic-strip character of Little Orphan Annie, continues to play to large audiences. Only a few seasons ago, there were rival Draculas in New York and I have no doubt lesser deities such as Tarzan and The Wolf-Man will shortly be commemorated.
Myths decked out in period trappings have the distinct advantage of being neutral and therefore universally acceptable. Nobody asks which way Popeye votes or if Frankenstein has powerful White House connections. These treasured characters are rooted in a time that both pre-dates and transcends local issues. And, like all myths, they have unconscious relevance to the society which worships them. Popeye represents prowess via spinach, physical fitness carried to preposterous extremes. Flash Gordon is the transcendental American hero — a kind of extra-galactic football star fighting metaphysical forces of evil which are faintly red. Dracula is the exotic exponent of mass production; the man who, by spawning more and more vampires, creates a ghoulish conformity throughout the world, and being ageless and unkillable, also satisfies the unconscious craving for eternal life. Frankenstein is the id made flesh; the obedient servant of everyone's super-ego and, being constituted of recycled anatomical parts, the supreme example of thrift. All myths give reassurance and the more familiar they are, the more they reassure.
On Broadway, as befits a mythological culture, legends are the mainstay of the musical stage; ancient and unoudgeable legends like, for instance, the story of the chorus girl who gets her big break when the star finds she cannot go on. This is the mythic basis of Busby Berkeley's Thirties film 42nd Street and the new musical which now bears its name. And, like every good legend, the retelling of the tale exemplifies deeply embedded moral values.
An unspoilt chorine from a small town is given a role in a big Broadway show (rustic innocence confronted with big city cynicism). When the bitchy and fading leading lady breaks her ankle (rotters getting their due comeuppance), the small-town girl rehearses relentlessly to take her place so that the show may open (puritan work-ethic overcoming all adversity). When she triumphs in the role, she opts for the modest company-party rather than the ritzy firstnight banquet (moral purity remains intact despite all temptations). Because of her valiant efforts, the entire company remains in work, a virtue treasured in the Depression when the film first appeared and just as dear to modern American audiences throttled by recession and mounting unemployment. The unsung hero responsible for all these achievements is, of course, the selfflagellating director (determined leadership overcomes all obstacles) who, like Warner Baxter in the original film, is left alone at the end to sentimentalise the murderous ethics of the Broadway ratrace.
If this description sounds snide, I hasten to add that, apart from its mythic qualities, 42nd Street also has an abundance of old-fashioned Broadway virtues: imaginative choreography, finely-poised comic performances, a peerlesss score by Harry Warren and Al Dubin, ingenious staging and extravagant design. Almost as if to fulfil the melodrama of its own story, its director, Gower Champion, died on the first night and, after its triumphant reception, the producer, David Merrick, stepped before a hushed audience to deliver the tragic news. It is a touch which would have warmed the heart of any Thieties screenwriter and made the Front Office boys cry, 'Keep it in!'
We all know that the musical is the supreme embodiment of the American genius (and the late Gower Champion was one,of its finest exponents), but 42nd Street has more going for it than most shows. Tunes such as `Lullaby of Broadway' and 'We're in the Money' are as culturally -embedded in America as 'Rule Britannia' or 'Down at the Old Bull ''n' Bush in England. Its book is a paean of praise to the bitch-goddess, one of America's two favourite leitmotifs— the other being the remorseless downslide of the born loser (see Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams). But its profoundest asset is unquestionably the legacy of the Busby Berkeley picture — and the others in the same . genre which has turned film nostalgia into a ' highly contagious national disease. The innocence and simplicity of the narrative of both film and show depicts a world in which presidential assassinations are unthinkable and Watergate inconceivable. It is an innocence that Americans, steeped in private and public corruptions, are desperate to reinstate even if only within the narrow parameters of art. There has never been a society more intent on its art reflecting not itself, but its former self.
The second hottest ticket in a city where honourable straight plays such as Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July and Athol Fugard's A Lesson from Aloes are struggling to survive and the latest Arthur Miller has been banished with unseemly haste, is Sugar Babies, a nostalgic rescension of American burlesque — ironically minus the strippers which were the staple of that theatrical form. This show also has its mythic ingredients; in this case, its stars. It has been put together to prove that Mickey Rooney is still alive and Ann Miller still has legs. Broadway audiences are vastly reassured by these facts because, in confirming Rooney's survival, it suggests that something of the freshness and brio of Andy Hardy lingers on. It seems to matter not at all that the low-comedy tradition of burlesque comedians such as Bobby Clark, Ed Wynn, Bert Lahr, Willie Howard and W.C. Fields is in no way personified by Mr Rooney, whose forte has always been poor-to-middling screen-comedies. He is part of the treasured Thirties and therefore, a preserved monuMent. As for Miss Miller, she is there as grandiloquent proof to American womanhood that the agei ng iprocesscanbe reversed. She is a 25-year-old hoofer in the frame of a 60-year-old robot and, as such the eighth Wonder of the world.
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