(2 of 6)
"The new season will aim for the big hit by distilling familiar formulas: stars and songs. On a good night, Broadway will have more stars than there are in Hollywood. Elizabeth Taylor spent the summer in town with The Little Foxes, and this fall a quartet of grandes dames will lend their incandescence to the stage: Katharine Hepburn in The West Side Waltz, Claudette Colbert in A Talent for Murder, Anne Bancroft in Duet for One, Joanne Woodward as Shaw's Candida. And then, and always, there are the musicals. At least 16 have been announced, including one potential gem that begins previews next week: Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along, directed by Hal Prince and based on the 1934 Kaufman and Hart comedy. With Company, Follies and Sweeney Todd, Sondheim and Prince yanked the Broadway musical into the Age of Angst. This time they have dared to move backward—to tell a story in song of some ambitious young people in reverse chronological order.
Ever since Broadway rose from its financial sickbed, it has relied on the medication of music to keep it young. The musical has certainly done so, with long runs and hot stars. A Chorus Line has formed 2,544 times since 1975, and an orphanage full of Annies has sung Tomorrow for 4½ years, eight shows a week. The Pirates of Penzance is the flagship in a fleet of lively revivals. Lena Home prowls the stage like a liberated tigress, purring and growling out a couple of dozen standards in a voice as supple and gorgeous as she is, and proving that Broadway still needs her when she's 64. Some shows have jettisoned the libretto and returned to basics: all singin' (Ain't Misbehavin'), all dancing (Dancin'). all burlesque (Sugar Babies) or altogether (the revival of Oh! Calcutta!). Indeed, Broadway is almost only singin', only dancin': of the 26 shows now running, 17 are musicals.
Nothing sinister here; no conspiracy to impose the melodious common denominator. Like any thriving business, Broadway creates a product to satisfy a market. Just now the market—the tourist from Tokyo, the matron from Larchmont, the executive with a visiting client and some free time —appears satisfied to sample the easy pleasures of a revue, a revival, another ho-hummable show. "If you want to know why musicals do so well so long," says Neil Simon, "just walk down Fifth Avenue. All you hear are foreign languages. Musicals they can understand." Adds Joseph Papp, who as head of New York's Public Theater acts as the Shubert of the theatrical subculture: "Broadway is one big ice-cream factory."
Television, whose commercials have lured many young people to Broadway, has also shaped (or dulled) their tastes; anything alive and kicking may look like a masterpiece. There is no question that, as a museum of musical art, Broadway delivers. But the function of any popular art is to serve the intelligent heart as well as the expense account. The commercial theater should be able to do better. Many sympathetic observers believe it will. Surely, in the past, it did.