Author’s Choice (February/March 1993 | Volume: 44, Issue: 1)

Author’s Choice

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February/March 1993 | Volume 44, Issue 1

The first musical I ever saw was South Pacific . I was taken to see it on my fifth birthday, only a month after it opened. Overprivileged brat that I was, I had no idea that I was being treated to the toughest ticket in the history of Broadway.

My sole memory of the original production today is Mary Martin washing that man right out of her hair. But my mother later told me I was so excited by it that I couldn’t go to sleep that night and that I sang—off key—tunes from the show for weeks afterward. I’ve been hopelessly in love with a wonderful kind of theater, the American musical, ever since.

But while I’ve seen South Pacific in other productions when I was more grown-up, it doesn’t—quite—make my top-ten list. It is not that there is anything wrong with South Pacific . Far from it; it’s a masterpiece. It’s just that there are ten other masterpieces that for reasons entirely arbitrary, capricious, and idiosyncratic, I happen to like even better.

South Pacific played 1,925 performances on Broadway. It produced half a dozen standard songs. Its original-cast album has been in print for nearly forty-four years. It has earned tens of millions of dollars. The fact that it is not, ipso facto, on everyone’s top-ten list only goes to show how extraordinarily rich, artistically, has been the American musical theater in the middle years of the twentieth century.

In truth, one must go back to late Elizabethan and early Jacobean London to find a time of equal theatrical fecundity. Like Shakespeare’s day, those years on Broadway were one of those incandescent moments in human history when genius and opportunity came together and created an enduring art form.

Today theatrical economics threatens the future of the American musical. Oklahoma! was mounted for eighty-three thousand dollars, but fully a hundred times that sum is needed to produce a major musical on Broadway today. Thus only sure-fire hits can get financing. And sure-fire hits are never the daring, experimental works that sometimes push an art form forward and renew its vigor. Instead, by necessity, they are formulaic, just as were the musicals that Oklahoma! made appear so old-fashioned.

On the positive side, the change over from LP to CD technology in recorded music has caused dozens of old original-cast albums to be remastered and made once more available. And the CD’s wonderful fidelity and long playing time have caused many of the greatest musicals to be recorded anew with world-class casts that could never be assembled on a stage and with their scores no longer truncated to fit on an LP. Thus, if the future of the American musical is problematic, at least its glorious past is now accessible as it has never been before.

So here, for what it’s worth,