8
KEEP IT HOT
THE CONCEPT MUSICAL
Within one twelve-month period, from mid-1975 to mid-1976, three
shows greatly developed the most misunderstood form in the musical’s
history. What is a concept show? It is a presentational rather than strictly
narrative work that employs out-of-story elements to comment upon and
at times take part in the action, utilizing avant-garde techniques to defy
unities of place, time, and action. To put it another way: Love Life gives
Allegro a blowjob.
Chicago (1975), billed as a “musical vaudeville,” is a book show with a
score compiling old show-biz tropes—an Eddie Cantor number, a Helen
Morgan number, a Bert Williams number. Because Chicago sees show biz
as an overriding power in American culture—turning a murder trial, for
example, into a circus—the out-of-story “presentations” of the numbers
create an Alienation Effect at once Brechtian and Ziegfeldian. It’s a
peep-show Follies.
Pacific Overtures (1976) is completely different in every respect,
though it also employs out-of-story devices—a narrator, for example. It,
too, is presentational, combining elements of American and Japanese
theatre that make it, like Chicago, more an intellectual than romantic
experience. (For instance, all major roles are played by men, even the
female roles.) But Chicago, above all, tells of one person in a brief period
of her life. Pacific Overtures has no protagonist; its subject is history.
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976) offers a cast in modern dress on a
bare stage putting on a show. Thus a play inside a play, it covers the first
century of life in the White House, this being a metaphor for American
life. One couple portray the various presidents and first ladies; another
couple play their black servants. Most of the numbers are sung by characters
as part of the narrative, but these performers keep recurring in different
eras, making a fantasy of the flow of historical time.
The three shows have little in common. All boasted scores by major
writers, but Chicago is a musical comedy and the other two are musical
plays. Chicago is drawn from a satiric piece of the 1920s, the other two
from chronicle. Chicago was staged by a top director-choreographer,
Pacific Overtures by a top director who is not a choreographer; and 1600
had staging problems. Chicago was built around two great divas, while
Pacific Overtures’ players were unknown and 1600’s uncelebrated. Chicago
performed in a unit set that actually looked like something, with the
orchestra overhead on a giant drum. Pacific Overtures was a Boris
Aronson spectacle. 1600 lacked visuals, though there were period costumes.
And Chicago, underrated in its day, was nevertheless a hit. Pacific
Overtures was a succès d’estime. And 1600 was a bomb.
But all three are concept shows that expanded the definition of the
genre, as each concept musical tends to. No two are alike, because they
favor such complex interaction between naturalism and stylization,
between the integration of arts and the separation of arts.
Chicago is the simplest of the three in its “idea.” The source, Maurine
Watkins’ 1926 play of the same title, has a large cast and climaxes with
the heroine’s murder trial on a crowded stage. Yet it tells a tidy little tale
about Roxie’s crime in a place that thrives on sensation and has no
morals. Roxie’s husband, Amos; Roxie’s lawyer, Billy Flynn; Roxie’s fellow
murderess Velma Kelly; the matron of the prison; a sob-sister columnist,
Mary Sunshine; and Roxie’s confidant, a cynical reporter named
Jake (played originally by the young Charles Bickford), are all the speaking
parts of any size. When Bob Fosse began planning the scenario of the
musical Chicago, he did nothing more to the dramatis personae than turn
the cynical reporter into a cynical agent. This stresses the show’s view
that in America all types of fame are equal and all the famous are “stars”
in show biz, whether they are performers or criminals. Maurine Watkins’
heroine even mentions that she is headed for vaudeville, but it’s just a
line in passing. Fosse built it into his grand finale.
The project had been conceived as a vehicle for Fosse’s wife and star,
Gwen Verdon, in the early 1960s. Watkins was shy (though she did at
least arrange for Verdon to get first refusal after Watkins’ death). But by
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then Verdon did not want to carry a show alone. So the role of Velma
Kelly was built up for Chita Rivera, inspiring an amusing line from
Verdon as Rivera makes an exit: “She sure don’t look like a Kelly to me.”
Adding Jerry Orbach as the lawyer, Barney Martin as the husband, and
Mary McCarty as the matron, Fosse turned one trick in hiring a male
(billed as M. O’Haughey) to play Mary Sunshine in drag, his falsetto suggesting
the dippy high of the professional bleeding heart. David Rounds
played the agent, acting also as the show’s emcee. But tryouts led Fosse to
drop Rounds, give his important lines to the matron, and let others in the
cast play emcee at different times.
I say “Fosse” because Chicago was truly his work, though lyricist Fred
Ebb wrote out the book material (much of it directly from Watkins) and
though, of course, the Kander and Ebb score is not just one of the great
ones but the center of what Fosse wanted to do with the format of the
show. His “musical vaudeville” isn’t dog or magic acts, but rather the
songs that, together, summon up like those in Follies the American showbiz
past. In these songs lie the ideas, the performers, the styles—the art
that communicated certain notions that more or less everyone in the
country agreed on as received truth.
So Verdon is on a piano for “Funny Honey,” the Helen Morgan number
about the undeserving guy who nevertheless holds her in thrall. The
matron, in full nightclub kit, gets the Sophie Tucker number, “When
You’re Good To Mama.” The venal lawyer enters with the Ted Lewis
number, “All I Care About (is love),” and the drag-queen columnist takes
the Marilyn Miller number, “A Little Bit of Good.” (It even uses the
vamp to “Look For the Silver Lining,” from Miller’s Ziegfeld vehicle
Sally.) Marilyn Miller, the nation’s heroine, as a drag queen! Fosse, you
rogue. Other allusions take in Rudy Vallee megaphones, Bing Crosby
boo-boo-boo, Texas Guinan, Eddie Cantor, and Zez Confrey piano
novelties.
Not every number executes such precise archaeology. But the format
clearly wants to unmask hypocrisy in American culture by unmasking the
poses struck by “I love him so” numbers, “What’s money?” numbers,
“We’re all God’s creatures” numbers. Still, more important than Fosse’s
theme is Fosse’s organization. This is a very integrated show, in the way
that spoken dialogue interrupts and then alters or develops a song, and in
the way that the music keeps coming in sequences. Every now and then
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there is a sizable book scene. But generally, Chicago is a musical vaudeville,
racing through plot points to get to the next number.
At times, the songs travel in convoys. Near the end of Act One,
the lawyer and Roxie give a press conference in which she plays dummy
on his knee and he works her like a ventriloquist. This is “We
Both Reached For the Gun,” which climaxes when he holds a high
note while “drinking” a glass of milk. As the song ends, several reporters
phone headlines in, and the next number has already begun, “Roxie.” It’s
a unique piece: first, Roxie’s long speech in which she gloats over
her notoriety. There’s a lot of autobiography in it, as Roxie snaps her
fingers and dances around in those Fosse life-is-nothing-the-moment-iseverything
circles:
roxie: I started foolin’ around. Then I started screwin’ around, which
is foolin’ around without dinner.
Already, she sees this spot as the basis of her vaudeville act. Six chorus
boys have entered in Support, and the song has begun. Roxie even
tenders an explanation for America’s love affair with fame:
roxie: That’s because none of us got enough love in our childhood.
As the number concludes and the chorus men dance off to Roxie’s “Those
are my boys,” more headlines are called out to us. Then a two-minute
scene between Velma and the matron leads directly to Chita Rivera’s tour
de force, “I Can’t Do It Alone.”
This is a musical pile-on worthy of an operetta. Chicago, however, is
the ultimate musical comedy, bawdy and satiric. This may have led some
to underrate Chicago’s book and thus the show as a whole when it was
new. Walter Kerr said, “The storyline with its built-in satire has really
been lost altogether, sacrificed to stunts and soft-shoe.” On the contrary,
the story line had been jumped up by being carried by the score—in an
oblique way. Because so much of the pop music that Chicago re-creates
was specialty numbers, Kerr must have mistaken the purpose of Chicago’s
songs. When Sophie Tucker puts over “You’ve Got To See Mama Every
Night,” the number has no purpose other than to please. Sophie is not
Mama; Sophie is kidding. But Chicago’s matron singing “When You’re
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Good To Mama” is an explanation of the corruption on which The
System works. This is Chicago’s story.
At that, the book is all the more remarkable for the way it complements
the score. Because everything in Chicago that can possibly be
turned into music has been so turned, the book consists mostly of dealmaking
and jokes:
june: (one of the murderesses) Mrs. Morton, if my husband, Wilbur,
comes here to visit me, you tell him I do not want to see him.
matron: June, your husband is dead, you killed him.
june: Oh well, forget it then.
There is one flaw: the trial. It did get a lively staging, with one player constantly
changing his look to impersonate all twelve members of the jury.
Still, it goes on forever while covering events that we already know of in
ways that we can predict. Indeed, the sequence doesn’t come alive till the
scene changes to the prison, where Velma and the matron are following
the trial on the radio. Velma fulminates at Roxie’s use of Velma’s tricks
much in the way that a comedian treats a colleague stealing his jokes:
mary sunshine: (on radio) Mrs. Hart . . . looks simply radiant in
her . . . elegant silver shoes.
velma: (suspiciously) With rhinestone buckles?
mary sunshine: With rhinestone buckles.
It is worth noting that while the concept musical came into being in
the late 1940s, it could not flourish until the 1960s, when staging policy
had acculturated non-realistic design. Concept shows don’t look like
Oklahoma! or The Music Man. Chicago didn’t really look like anything—
yet the costuming was realistic, as if Jerome Kern had planned the clothes
while Erwin Piscator had built the set.
Boris Aronson built Pacific Overtures, fourth in the seventies quintet of
Sondheim-Prince collaborations. We knew that the sets would essentialize
the work, as with Company’s glass-and-chrome apartment boxes and
Follies’ blasted temple of delight. With the hanamichi (the runway for
entrances and exits through the house) and the elongated rectangular
staging area, Aronson presented something like a Kabuki theatre, and his
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art had the look of Japanese woodcuts. Florence Klotz’s costumes stood
boldly against the backdrops, especially as the players were so made up
that their faces disappeared as if behind masks.
They were figures in a play: exactly the point. John Weidman’s book,
about the forced opening of Japan by the West in the mid-nineteenth
century, sees all people as Tolstoyan puppets of history. In Tolstoy’s view,
no one man can make history, and not even an entire people can stop it.
History is going to happen. So, in another of those insanely brilliant
opening numbers, “The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the
Sea,” Sondheim presents the social condition of Japan, blithely secure in
its lack of contact with the outside world. To the characteristic Sondheim
repeated chord (e
5
4
2, so unexploited that Sondheim has virtually invented
it), we are treated to the three elements of perfect civil order, “arrangements”
of the screens, the rice, the bows: art, economy, and social degree.
Even this soon, the Reciter (Mako) functions as interested party as well
as Brechtian narrator. This is Epic Theatre, complete with Alienation
Effect, political footnotes, and character development set against historical
panorama. But Mako has joined us from a season or two among
Americans, and he has some of our style in him. He makes jokes. He
takes sides.
So Pacific Overtures is Kabuki and Epic Theatre but. It makes its own
rules, adapting those of the other two genres to suit. Nothing in it typifies
the Broadway musical, but it borrows here and there from forms that
Jerry Herman would recognize. Again: but. What could be more revolutionary
than a sort of Heroine’s Wanting Song delivered by two Observers
kneeling at sides of the stage while the heroine (Soon-Teck Oh, in one of
four important roles) dances, not least because the heroine will commit
suicide before her husband sees her again?
The song’s lyrics are revolutionary, too, broken into the tiny declarations
and wishes that, in typical Japanese style, combine into a truth.
“There Is No Other Way” is spare and carefully expressed, with its
recorder over hand drum. Then harp, then strings. It builds till, at an elegiacal
expansion on the line “The bird flies,” it seemed the most beautiful
music yet heard on Broadway.
I remember thinking at the time that few will get this work. Simply the
device of disintegrating this moment into its constituents would bewilder
the slow. Any other musical, even another bold one, would have stated
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this scene in a duet for the wife and her husband, Kayama (Isao Sato).
But only the two Observers sing, one about what is happening and the
other “speaking” for the wife. Note that even Jonathan Tunick’s orchestration
is segmented; the entire show is. Pacific Overtures breaks this vast
account down into the loosest and tightest of book musicals. Loose
because it allows room for so much; tight because it never relaxes its grip
on how the history is happening.
Some characters are introduced only to vanish. Others recur, such as
the government councillor Abe Masahiro (Yuki Shimoda). Similarly, the
score introduces many figures we never see again, such as a madam of
geisha girls or three British sailors. Yet it never ceases to consider the
turning of history’s wheel—the madam’s and sailors’ songs treat the social
dislocation caused by the Westerners’ arrival.
Conversely, the obviously eventful day on which Japan signed its first
treaty with America falls into the score in an offbeat way. “Someone in a
Tree” is a beguiling discussion by characters who didn’t understand what
was happening—exactly what history is while it’s in the present tense. The
trade negotiations between Japan and its visitors are conducted in “Please
Hello,” a burlesque. Costumed as if for the senior-class operetta in a
Japanese high school, the various Western admirals sing in pastiche. The
American gets John Philip Sousa, the Brit sings Gilbert and Sullivan patter,
the Frenchman a cancan; and the number climaxes with an evocation of a
word that was very much in use at that stage of the Cold War, “détente.”
Such an intricate pageant could not properly bear a protagonist.
However, two figures do form a central story line in this opera senza amore,
Kayama and his friend Manjiro (Sab Shimono, the original Ito in Mame).
They humanize for us the growing crisis in Japan, between Westernizers
and the reactionary élite. Ironically, the minor samurai Kayama goes
Western, while Manjiro, at first a commoner who likes America, grows
into a xenophobe devotee of aristocratic tradition.
These two also have a number that draws from the annals to develop
character. Sondheim himself likes to cite “Someone in a Tree” because it
centers the show’s view of history. But “A Bowler Hat” is perhaps the outstanding
number, in a coup de théâtre deftly blended of song, speech,
mime, and the use of props. We listen to Kayama as he becomes ever
more fluent in Western ways; we watch the silent Manjiro losing himself
in the rhapsodic tranquillity of the tea ceremony.
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It was a stunning experience in saying much with the most limited
means, another aspect of Japanese art. Alien, exotic, and complex, Pacific
Overtures represents more of the great disconnect between the musical
and its public. Back when Ethel Merman and Cole Porter ran things, the
notion of an intellectually challenging musical was unthinkable. Even
the spoken theatre seldom truly challenged its public, except perhaps to
persevere through the longer O’Neill works. Pacific Overtures encountered
such a buyers’ resistance during its Boston tryout that producer
Prince had to spend his own money to bring the show to New York. There
it got the most mixed notices in theatre history. One television idiot
described the music as “atonal,” and one of the supplementary papers
actually called the show “loathsome” and “disgusting.”
I think Women’s Wear Daily’s Howard Kissel, of those who liked the
piece, best appreciated what an Age of Sondheim meant to the enlightened
theatregoer. “The most original, the most profound, the most theatrically
ambitious of the Prince-Sondheim collaborations,” Kissel wrote, because
the best theatre is adventurous, not Contact or Mamma Mia!. “It is also,” he
continued, “the production in which the team that sets Broadway’s highest
standards most fully meets the astonishing objectives they set themselves.”
One could not say as much of Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner’s
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976), one of the most self-evident of the Bad
Idea musicals. That idea was to reduce all of American history to an
Upstairs, Downstairs on race relations. Ken Howard and Patricia
Routledge played various presidents and their wives; Gilbert Price and
Emily Yancy played the ageless retainers Lud and Seena. There was to be
none of Chicago’s plot motion, none of Pacific Overtures’ unity of action;
rather, 1600 was a revue with a throughline, embodied in the opening
and closing number, “Rehearse!”: democracy is ever in a state of
rehearsal, ever refining and developing its liberal urge.
Unfortunately, Bernstein and Lerner were suffering from the sixties
American version of the Disease of the West, whose symptomatic behavior
obeys the rule, Democracies cannot be criticized enough and leftist
fascisms cannot be criticized at all. The lack of patriotism in a
Bicentennial musical is simply silly; the self-hatred is contemptible.
Worse, the show was bad entertainment, based as it was on little more
than the usual white liberal obsession with black civil rights. The contents
included the founding of Washington, D.C.; Thomas Jefferson’s
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introduction of waffles and spaghetti into American cuisine; the War of
1812; the national crisis that led to the Civil War; the implication that
James Buchanan was gay; and the age of the robber barons. This was presented
as a minstrel show, just as in another musical with no plot, Lerner’s
Love Life. There was nothing of the opening of the west (with the genocidal
elimination of the Indian, not a major leftist concern in the 1970s);
the industrialization of the north; the expansion of the continent through
the railroads; or the arts world’s halfhearted attempts to identify an
American style in music, painting, and theatre in the late 1800s.
The show’s humiliating Philadelphia premiere found staff departing in
exasperation that the material—or the authors—proved so intransigent.
Director Frank Corsaro and choreographer Donald McKayle were
replaced by Gilbert Moses and George Faison. Set and costume designer
Tony Walton also left, taking his name off the posters. But his show curtain,
a blueprint of the White House, was retained even so, complete
with Walton’s initials, unmistakable in the lower right-hand corner.
With some flops, one regrets the wasted time—in this case, four years
of planning and writing. The Coca-Cola Company, 1600’s sole backer at
well over a million dollars, regretted the bad choice of PR and disavowed
the production.
But 1600’s participants must have regretted the loss of the music in the
feast-or-famine system operating at this time. For Bernstein and Lerner
created an astonishingly good score, even a synoptic all-American one,
with fanfare, march, waltz, blues. It’s Bernstein’s most classical work for
Broadway—more so than even Candide—with the expertise of the genius
musician. Perhaps Bernstein wanted to make his own mark in the Age of
(his onetime protégé) Sondheim, as in a number called “Sonatina”:
British Army aristos disdainfully pantywaisting around in the White
House dining room. Bernstein laid it out in the orthodox three movements
of sonata-allegro, minuet (on an English theme appropriated for
“The Star Spangled Banner”), and rondo finale. Bernstein also revived a
favorite trick, building much of the score on variations of an ur-theme.
The melody is used most purely as the first lines of the show’s anthem,
“Take Care of This House.” But it is heard throughout the evening, for
instance tootling blithely in the woodwinds as punctuation during a
scene between Washington and congressional delegates over where to
locate the new capital, “On Ten Square Miles of the Potomac River.”
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Of our three concept shows, 1600 exploited the form least fully.
Chicago’s vaudeville was “disguised” as character and plot numbers, a genuine
innovation, and Pacific Overtures’ Kabuki history was replete with
curiosities. But 1600’s concept eventually ran out of interest, especially
because the two black leads and their servants chorus had little to do
beyond reflecting the changes in racial integration and celebrating Lud
and Seena’s wedding in the irresistible “I Love My Wife,” set to a
Caribbean beat.
Still, every concept show does amend the catalogue of practices. There
was one arresting touch in “The Little White Lie,” when James and Eliza
Monroe, sleepless in bed, bicker over the slavery issue. Accusing Monroe
of accommodating racism, Eliza sings, “You knew it when you were
Adams”—and Jefferson, and Madison. This is something new, a character’s
expressing knowledge of the show’s non-realistic concept while
remaining realistically in character. Another touch brightened the very end
of the evening: as all but the two leads filled the stage for the closing
reprise of “Rehearse!,” the president and first lady entered upstage right,
perfect replicas of Theodore and Edith Roosevelt. A sight gag: and the
curtain fell.
The most lasting memory of 1600’s trompe l’oeil impersonations fastens
on “Duet For One,” possibly the only genuine showstopper to appear in a
show that ran but a single week. Ken Howard may have lacked the
magnetism to play, among others, George Washington, John Adams, and
Thomas Jefferson; but Patricia Routledge was a singer and comic of
dazzling gifts. “Duet For One” offered the presidential inauguration of 1877.
To bits of Rutherford B. Hayes’ spoken oath of office, the incoming Lucy
Hayes and the outgoing Julia (Mrs. Ulysses S.) Grant comment on the
controversial election of 1876.* Routledge played both women, jumping
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* Democrat Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote, but the Republicans contested results
in four states, stopping Tilden one vote short of victory in the Electoral College.
Irregularities in the final results for the four states could not be settled by application of
constitutional law, which was ambiguous on the matter. Ultimately, a compromise was
reached: the Democratic South was liberated of Northern occupying forces and got other
concessions; and the Republican presidential candidate, Hayes, was certified as the winner.
Note an arresting coincidence in that Bernstein and Lerner could not possibly have
guessed that their show would contain episodes relating to singular events of the millennium:
the impeachment of a president (Andrew Johnson; Bill Clinton) and a disputed
election (1876; 2000).
back and forth by flipping a movable part of her headgear. Routledge
didn’t merely change “hats”: she completely changed in look and sound,
from Julia’s catty mezzo to Lucy’s cooing soprano. The nine-minute number
builds so extravagantly that the last big statement of the waltz refrain,
“The First Lady of the Land,” thrilled the opening-night audience into an
ovation during the music.
The later history of our three shows is various. Chicago’s run was threatened
early on by what seemed to be the entire world’s refusal to give any
more praise to Bob Fosse after he won a Tony, an Oscar, and an Emmy in
the same year. Also, Chicago and A Chorus Line showed up almost simultaneously,
and the usual revolutionists trumpeted preemptive hallelujahs
for the latter show, not realizing that it is not revolutionary and that
Michael Bennett was the latest in a line that Bob Fosse had helped to
found.
Chicago got eleven Tony nominations (including Best Actress for both
Verdon and Rivera) but lost them all, mainly to A Chorus Line. However,
when Verdon suffered a throat ailment requiring an operation, Kander
and Ebb favorite Liza Minnelli stepped in as Roxie. Minnelli was at the
height of her powers and fame, and her nine-week stint put Chicago into
sellout, with the usual spillover, after Verdon returned, from those who
make a point of attending anything that sells out.
So Chicago eventually lasted 898 performances, though it never got its
due till Encores! tried it in 1996. Concept shows generally do well in concert,
because they seldom take place in specific locations and thus need
no scenery. William Ivey Long dressed everyone in variations on hot
black formal circuswear, Walter Bobbie and Ann Reinking staged the
show in Fosse style; and Reinking, Bebe Neuwirth, James Naughton, and
Joel Grey were excellent. Also, the cuts in the libretto were judicious
rather than, as sometimes at Encores!, disfiguring. With Fosse no longer
among us and sorely missed, Chicago was suddenly everyone’s favorite
show. Moved to Broadway, this concert staging became by far the most
successful revival in Broadway history, going on to international popularity
and a phenomenally successful film version.
Pacific Overtures, too, is better appreciated today. A relatively lavish
Off-Broadway revival in 1984 got much better reviews than the original.
(Those who couldn’t grasp it the first time adopted the alibi that the original
had been overproduced.) There was very little revision, mainly the
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dropping of two scenes, one in which the United States and Japan trade
gifts (ours are a ton of cultural keepsakes, from Audubon’s Birds of
America to a locomotive; theirs are tiny treasures fastidiously wrapped),
and one on the introduction of the rickshaw. The deletions help center
the work. But it isn’t written to be centered. It’s history’s “scrapbook,” as
Sondheim once put it.
This new staging, by Fran Soeder, strongly resembled the old one; is
there but one way to perform this show correctly? The Prince-Aronson
vision is virtually written into the text, and a 1987 production by the
English National Opera, pinchpenny spare, recalled the original even so—
though it was, surprisingly for an opera company, not at all as well sung.
Then, in 2000, and on tour in New York in 2002, a Japanese group
mounted the show in somewhat different style. Director Amon Miyamoto
sought to segregate the American input from the Japanese input in the
composition by using the hanamichi not simply for entrances and exits but
as a stage for the Western characters. Thus, the invasion of Japan is physicalized:
the strangers come aggressively out of the audience toward the
Japanese in the central playing area while a vast American flag unfurls
overhead. Further, the Reciter (Takeharu Kunimoto) was an outright
comic figure, lacking Mako’s advocating intensity.
The production was comic in general, even gimmicked. Many of the
original’s most picturesque moments—Mako’s grand-manner keening
when Kayama discovered his wife’s corpse, or the deadly quiet of
Manjiro’s tea ceremony while Kayama ebulliently flies on history’s wings
in “A Bowler Hat”—were gone. Apparently, the new cheap Broadway
obtains in Japan as well, for the original orchestration for twenty-two
players (not counting the stage band) was reduced to seven. They sounded
terrible, and “There Is No Other Way” in particular was ruined. Nor,
finally, was it useful to introduce World War II into the action* with a
simulation of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during “Next.”
We didn’t start that war. Japan did.
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* In 1976, given an already crowded evening, John Weidman (who was assisted on the
book by Hugh Wheeler) wisely dealt with this matter obliquely, in lines spoken by Lord
Abe: “We must appease the Westerners until we have learned the secrets of their power
and success. Then, when we have become their equals. Then, perhaps. Then, if we are
sure the time is right . . .” The belligerent threat is unmistakable, though of course the
usual idiots missed it.
Alone of concept musicals, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue lives on devoid
of its concept. As A White House Cantata, it is now less even than a concert
staging: a concert. The “Rehearse!” frame is gone, along with a pair
of numbers for the black singers. But virtually all the rest of the score is
retained, even “The Red White and Blues,” staged on Broadway as a
striptease for the chorus men in the try-anything panic before opening
night. An important duet for Lud and Seena, “This Time,” a casualty of
the tryout, has been restored, and the original scoring, by Sid Ramin,
Hershy Kay, and Bernstein, has been improved to keep a full-sized orchestra
busy. The work has even been recorded, with some cuts to hold it to
a single disc, so at least the best of this Bicentennial monster is preserved.
And that is all one asks of this project, after all. The novel format that
proved so intractable reminds us why so many producers fear novelty: it
can go so awry. They want a sure thing. Not a good idea. A used one.
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