Will American musical theater withstand the decades of devotion and distortion that await it? That is the question raised by the release, over the past two years, of several new recordings of older musicals, chief among them West Side Story, Candide, Follies, and South Pacific. The answer may depend on the strength of the form itself and on if and when another form comes along to replace it. In the heyday of American musical theater, about 1920 to 1970, dozens of shows hit the boards annually, and many of these were long-lasting. It was a vital form, and new work proliferated. Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwin brothers, Jerome Kern and his collaborators popped out shows at the rate of one or two a season. Later contributors, like Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Lerner and Loewe, slowed things down to a major show every two or three years. Today's musical theater composers - and there are precious few of them - produce work at an infinitely slower pace, thanks largely to the laborious system of workshopping shows for years before taking them into a theatre. A current Off-Broadway offering, Olympus on My Mind, reportedly took two years to write and three years to workshop. Yet it is exactly the sort of light, uncomplicated bauble of a show that Irving Berlin and Guy Bolton cranked out in two months, followed by three months of rehearsal and out-of-town tryouts.
This slowdown in new work has been accompanied by an increased revivalism. Four out of the five new musicals that opened on Broadway last fall (1986) have closed, but two revivals - a cornucopia of Noel Coward songs and the 1930s British musical Me and My Girl - have joined the growing lineup of resuscitated shows on the Great White Way. What happened slowly to opera has happened quickly to musical theater: A repetoire has been established, and the business of the day is no longer the creation of new work but the rethinking, reproduction, examination, and frequent exploitation of the old.
For collectors of Broadway show recordings, this means a chance to listen to favorite scores in new performances, and that is a mixed blessing. Two years ago, a West Side Story on Deutsche Grammophon began the current wave of rerecorded musicals. With an all-star operatic cast conducted by the score's composer, the inestimable Leonard Bernstein, it sold well then and still sells well today. But it is nonetheless a disappointing, often inflated performance that fails to live up to the urgency of the earlier Broadway cast and motion picture soundtrack recordings.
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is Maria, Tony is sung by Jose Carreras, Tatiana Troyanos performs as Anita, and Marilyn Horne is heard singing "Somewhere." Given such a cast and Bernstein at the helm, an absence of wonderful moments would have been impossible, and indeed, Dame Kiri's lovely reading of "I Feel Pretty," her duet with Troyanos on "I Have a Love," and Horne's "Somewhere" are glorious. There is a ponderous feeling to the whole, however, and Carreras sounds self-conscious and straining throughout much of his performance. The earlier recordings were fresh and bracing; this is respectful (except for a slam-bang "Gee Officer Krupke," which wouldn't sound respectful even if sung by a chorus of aging divinity students). If Bernstein's intention was to suggest that musical theater can and should be sung by operatic voices, he has instead suggested that the very difference between opera and musical theater lies in the fact that the former is scored for conservatory-trained voices, while the latter is written for pop-trained voices. Crossover not only blurs the distinction; it undercuts some of the
...
Read Full Article
|
