I'm sorry to see the show get such a negative review from Brantley,
especially since I have the greatest respect and admiration for John
Bucchino, but I think Brantley makes some good points about the sort
of Puritanical expectations we've come to have of "new musicals" in
the Sondheim era.
Forbidden Broadway memorably described Sondheim's aesthetic (to the
tune of "Comedy Tonight") as:
Something elitist,
Something defeatist,
Nothing you'd care to underwrite ...
If you want your new musical to be taken seriously by critics and
musical theatre mavens, the theatrical Zeitgeist seems to forbid open-
hearted sentiment, romance, optimism, generosity of spirit, beauty,
elegance, and tenderness. The gentle liberal pieties of SOUTH PACIFIC
devolved into the sledgehammer irony and sour victimization of shows
like RENT, SIDE SHOW, and PARADE. New musicals must be harsh and "in
your face" to be taken seriously, like SPRING AWAKENING. Why is it
impossible to imagine critics praising a new show today as charming,
beautiful, graceful, or witty?
So even our most talented writers are drawn to small, dreary subjects
like A CATERED AFFAIR, for fear of being called bourgeois or
sentimental. If Verdi or Puccini had lived in our era, would they
have had the courage to set down a single note?
In a post-911 world, this aesthetic strikes me as seriously out of
date. Nearly a century after its heydey in the 1930s, the idea that
dour, sanctimonious agitprop is better and more "important" than
"mere" entertainment still has a stranglehold on our theatre and we
have declining ticket sales to prove it.
In the 90s I watched tedious, repetitively lefty agitprop pieces sink
the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Over the past few years, I've seen
David Esbjornsen nearly destroy the formerly robust Seattle Repertory
theatre with the same kind of programing.
I played Gaston last night in BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. At the curtain
call I saw a young woman in the second row, totally bald presumably
from cancer chemotherapy. She was beaming with pleasure. BATB is
considered silly fluff by most critics and "serious" theatre
aficionados, but I submit: how many preachy dreary "socially
conscious" plays have made life better for a single person on this
planet, as our silly show clearly did for this young woman last night?
Victorian drama now is almost totally forgotten -- precisely because
it labored under the same Puritanical notion, that the theatre's best
purpose is to browbeat audiences with currently fashionable
progressive ideas. I'm all for progressive ideas, but one can get
them from a million sources: from thinkers, politicians, on TV, books,
magazines, newspapers, and all over the internet. Politics is
everywhere nowadays, in every permutation from extreme Right to far
Left. Why must theatre simply add to the chorus?
Beauty, poetry, wit, charm, and entertainment (in its highest sense)
are things we CANNOT generally get from all these other media. It's
time the theatre got back to what it does best, and theatre artists
stopped fooling themselves into believing that shows which preach the
same old liberal pieties to affluent liberal audiences are somehow
making the world a better place.
Beauty, poetry, wit, charm, and entertainment in themselves can make
the world a better place -- in today's theatrical climate, believing
this may be the most radical idea of all.
|
