- Is the Party Over?-
A review of Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then
and Now by Mark Steyn (Faber, 1997. £20.00)
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Mark Steyn's Broadway Babies Say Goodnight Today!
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 Those
peerless New York lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green once
wrote a spoof operetta, 'The Baroness Bazooka' in which the hero
entered singing 'I'm a goat goat goat goat goat herd, And I herd
herd herd herd goats'. When this willing swain falls in love
with the Baroness, they warble a duet in which they ponder what
might have been 'If I were I, And you were you, And we were we'.
This doesn't appear in Steyn's generally quite entertaining essay
on Broadway musicals past and (not so) present, but there are
enough sappy anecdotes to keep the musicals freak coming back
to its pages. Apocryphal, maybe; funny, certainly. When Andrew
Lloyd Webber asked Alan Jay Lerner 'Why do people take an instant
dislike
to me?' Lerner replied 'It saves time.'
Fun-time with Steyn includes several gratifyingly rude comments
on Lord Webber, whose resuscitation of the British musical is
seen by a few of us as having played a part in the death of it.
Wasn't it healthier when shows came and went, rather than sit
in the West End, immovable, for donkeys years? Witless, cosmopolitan
they may be, but who argues with success? And what a reversal
of fortunes when Broadway becomes just one more tour stop for
the accumulated monstrosities of Les Mis, Miss Saigon et al.
Steyn's achievement is also his failure. His book goes everywhere,
and focuses on little, but he constantly scores. He is merciless
to Sondheim, and, having sat through Passion (while many of the
audience walked out) I'm not arguing. He pins Cameron Mackintosh,
too; I am still recovering from the revelation that while everyone
else went crazy over the Beatles, Mackintosh preferred Cliff
Richard. And Steyn is telling when it comes to the effect of
AIDS on musicals, questioning the maturity of a medium that has
almost signally failed to encompass it. In musicals, of
course, (as many a gay British composer could tell) we deal in
heterosexuality. But musicals are inherently dishonest. There
needed to be no response to what was happening in the real world.
It is a pity that Steyn's timing misses an interesting Broadway
season: you won't find the spellbinding Titanic, or the Siamese
twin show Side Show here, nor the sublime Kander and Ebb Steel
Pier, but if there is one real casualty of Steyn's approach it's
the British musical. He sees them as grotesque aberrations, and
from what he writes here he sure doesn't know a lot about them.
There is never a suggestion that it might be worth going back
to reconsider some of them; a summary dismissal seems all he
has time for.
This is an injustice. My money is on a lavish revival of Hooray
For Daisy! There is a time for everything, and now is surely
the moment for Julian Slade's 1960 musical about a pantomime
cow to come into its own. But alas, like Comden and Green, I
suspect that, commercially speaking, the party's over.
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