Tuesday, May 13, 2008
At long last, an American movie musical gets it right. Will the "Chicago" breakthrough bring a return to the glory days, or just a new onslaught of inflated Broadway schmaltz?
Feb 18, 2003 | Right now in New York you can go to the Ziegfeld, a real, lovingly maintained movie palace of the old days, and see "Chicago" on-screen starring Richard Gere, Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Or, for nine times the price of a movie ticket, you can go 10 blocks downtown and see "Chicago" live onstage starring a Backstreet Boy.
If "Chicago" does prove to be the roaring success it looks headed toward becoming, after accumulating 13 Oscar nominations earlier this week, it may well fulfill the seemingly impossible task of reviving the American movie musical. That will be a great thing for movies as a democratic art form.
When you look at the listings for the current big Broadway shows, you might feel as if you're reading a flier for the longest continuing white elephant sale of all time. Almost everything that isn't a revival is a musicalization of a movie. The big new show announced for this spring? "Urban Cowboy." But even if Broadway didn't feel as if it had long ago hit a creative dead end, there would still be the fact that, for reasons both geographic and financial, Broadway is out of reach for most Americans.
Tourists visiting New York save for tickets to a Broadway show the way families save for a vacation to Disney World (which makes sense, since Times Square and Disney World are run by the same corporation). Factor in ticket-agency service charges and a night out at a Broadway show for a family of four can easily hit $400. Even if that family is lucky enough to score tickets at the half-price ticket booth at the north end of Times Square, they're still shelling out $200.
Because of that, Broadway musicals operate on essentially the same principle as Hollywood action blockbusters. To justify the enormous cost, there must be something going on every minute. Spectacle reigns supreme. Does anybody know any of the songs from "Phantom of the Opera," "Les Miz" or "Miss Saigon" the way people who hadn't even seen "My Fair Lady" or "Camelot" knew "I Could Have Danced All Night" or "If Ever I Would Leave You"?
Talk to people who've gone to the big warhorse productions soldiering on for decades now and the first thing they talk about are the sets. They're sure not talking about the stars. After the big stars who open musicals move on, the long-running shows become revolving doors for a procession of soap stars and faded pop musicians. To paraphrase a recent Jay Leno gag, there are fewer stars on Broadway right now than on "Hollywood Squares."
A couple of years ago, my mother-in-law, who adores Bernadette Peters (who should be doing musicals), took my wife and me, along with my sister-in-law and niece, to a matinee of Peters in the revival of "Annie Get Your Gun." I'd never seen anything like it. Whenever two people were onstage in the midst of a simple dialogue scene, extras would walk through at regular intervals doing some bit of comic business. In effect, the director had blocked the show so that the principal actors were continuously upstaged. It was as if, having asked the audience to pay all that money to get in, the director felt that simply presenting two characters talking or singing would have been a cheat. All that was missing was a meter over the stage showing how each bit of business finally tallied up to the whopping ticket price.
That experience sufficiently behind me, I decided to give big stage musicals one more try. Last fall in London I got tickets to a well-reviewed revival of "My Fair Lady" directed by Trevor Nunn. Compared with New York, London theater is still relatively cheap. My wife and I were able to get a pair of orchestra seats for less than the price of one ticket to any Broadway musical. Cheered by that, we proceeded to the theater. How, after all, could anybody screw up "My Fair Lady"?
Easily, it turns out. The production wasn't bad, just depressingly adequate. The romance and wit of the show felt canned, rote. As in "Annie Get Your Gun," the staging was very peculiar. As the scenes changed, sets moved across the stage from left to right, and often people from the previous scene wound up in the beginning of the next one. What, I wondered, were dancers from the embassy ball doing twirling around Professor Higgins' study at 3 o'clock in the morning? Was this some new version where Henry, wanting to keep the party going, invited everyone back to his place?
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