Letter from New York
A little good music
Gerrit Henry
New York
-e Antoinette Perry Awards—or Tony 8.wards, as they are affectionately known— • Broadway's answer to Hollywood's scars. This year, the ceremonies were held al the venerable Shubert Theatre on the evening of April 18, which happened to be Easter night. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were to have hosted the affair—a sting coup arranged by the Tonys' prodlicer, Alexander Cohen—but, due to their recent split-up, only Mr Burton appeared on the show, and not as a host. That weekend, New Yorkers had been stIffering through a spring heat-wave, with leruPeratures reaching the mid-90s; guests at the Tony awards ceremony looked more „than 'usually bemused and frazzled. There n5'though, perhaps less tension in the air t11 in Previous years: over the entries in "e Musical comedy categories, at least. As re)(Pected, Michael Bennett's A Chorus Line N‘vh ic h I discussed in my Letter of February Lvon award after award after award— Featured Actor in a Musical, Best Fead Actress in a Musical, Best Choreoi7hY, Best Book, Best Direction, Best th°re, and Best Musical. Pacific Overtures, ane,ineml work by producer Harold Prince w",..1/4! composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, a inch many of us hoped might provide an onftidote to the sentimentality and vulgarity ▪ horus Line, won for Best Costumes and t Set Design. A Chorus Line, you see, has costumes but dancers' work clothes, and (3:ets but some mirrors. 1i:till—and not just because of the torpid was hard to quarrel with the Amerian Theatre Wing's selections. Pacific Overt,. es had provided an antidote to the send itY and vulgarity of A Chorus Line,all „.6"t, but the cure was, in its own way, al;10st as bad as the curse. Over the past five or so, the team of Prince and Sondc:!In have created innovative works of musih theatre, and, until this year, the Tonys :ye been all theirs. But Pacific Overtures, of n, high a quality as it is, is not the sort of S"husical one gets too excited about. Earlier TyLs were. sto',11e 1970 Company, for instance, was the ha;,Y of a thirtyish bachelor-about-Manhin,"an, a human cipher unable to commit yo—„self Io any emotional relationship beWith those 'safe' dinner parties he enjoyed as tharried-couple friends. The score was sing°°d, and perhaps better, than anything bace the Gershwins; there was a witty, urth:e book by the playwright George Furth; an Sets, by Boris Aronson, were all glass tee' midtown lustre, and the staging, • Of It ensemble, much of it taking place Multi-levelled set, the levels of which
were scaled in a gleaming chrome elevator, was a Hal Prince masterpiece. Above all, Company had dynamism and spirit, and a lot of us footloose Manhattanites took it as our life story.
The 1972 Follies was the life story of an earlier generation. In a cavernous, gloomy theatre, a Ziegfeld-like showman named Dimitri Weismann held a reunion for his 'beautiful girls' of days gone by, now older, plumper, some helped up stairs by their chauffeurs, others lapsed, loose-living movie stars, still others happily or not-so-happily married, all nostalgic for their glamorous past and ill-at-ease with a present that would raze Weismann's glorious theatre for a parking lot. Sondheim's score ranged from soaring near-operatic arias for the middle-aged romantic leads to vaudeville take-offs, to gorgeous parodies .of Friml and Romberg and Rodgers and Hart, to cheek-to-cheek boleros; it was a work of eclectic genius. Aronson's set out-Piranesied Piranesi in its atmosphere of decay and death, and Michael Bennett's choreography, especially a bonebreaking tap routine executed by the ageing 'girls' just for the fun of it, was dazzling. Hal Prince's staging—ghosts of Follies girls past decked out in feathers and sequins and satin, drifting in and out of the present-day action along with the 'younger selves' of the leads—would have caused Marcel Proust many a sleepless night.
Follies was a musical comedy about the decline and fall of musical comedy. Where would Prince and Sondheim go from there ? we wondered. To turn-of-the-century Sweden, in A Little Night Music, a musical adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's film Smiles of a Summer Night, This was an operetta, and a charming one, concerning the romantic misadventures of a sextet of young and older lovers, played out among the silver birch groves and country estates of Sweden on the longest night oT the year, Sondheim's score was all in 3/4 time ; Prince staged the show as one endless, amorous minuet ; and film star Glynis Johns walked off with the Tony for her performance as Desiree, an actress who could be true to only one man, among others. This year, Sondheim won the record industry's Grammy Award for Best Song of the Year for his touching ballad from Night Music, 'Send in the Clowns'.
Pacific Overtures has no hits songs; the score, in fact, is as closely integrated with, and indigenous to, the entire concept of the show as that for any opera. Lyrically and musically, it is an awesome achievement, as are Boris Aronson's sets, all beige-on-white Orientalism, and Hal Prince's staging, a mixture of Broadway with Kabuki that, at its best, has the beauty of Japanese screens
come to life. Indeed, the whole show is beautiful—too beautiful. Where A Chorus Line errs on the side of sentimentality, Pacific Overtures errs on the side of discretion. All the fine intentions in the world can't save it from its extreme delicacy.
But, with a book concerning the opening up of Japan for trading by Commodore Perry in 1853, what could one expect but this kind of intellectual-aesthetic exercise? And with Chorus Line's hard-luck story of Broadway dancers desperate for the big break, is this show's banal sentimentality so surprising? The Broadway musical being what it is, of course, the 'heart' of Chorus Line was bound to win out over the 'head' of Pacific Overtures—sentiment is the bottom line of American musical theatre. But the best shows in the tradition—Showboat, Pal Joey, South Pacific, My Fair Lady—have managed to blend sentiment with intelligence, a feat far more often mastered on Broadway than in Hollywood, and one for which Broadway is justly famed. In our Bicentennial year, it's a little sad to see the musical theatre's best and brightest going for one quality—mind or emotion—alone, and ignoring the othey : as if any true work of art could exist without achieving both. Perhaps A Chorus Line's creators should choose, as their next project, something by Henry James, while the Pacific Overtures group should go about adapting Little Women. The results might be wonderful or, at least, refreshing.
Previous page
