“There is no such thing as hell, of course, but if there was, then the sound track to the screaming, the pitchfork action and the infernal wailing of damned souls would be a looped medley of ‘show tunes’ drawn from the annals of musical theater.” Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

I took a six-week course at my residence, Topics in American Musical Theater. It was presented by a marvelous teacher, Dan Egan, who also teaches at Yale. We students were charged with watching a specific musical or two before each class and were also given some short reading. We started with Oklahoma!, the seminal show integrating music, lyrics, text, and dance.

The second week we moved on to Kiss Me Kate (by happenstance, the spouse is in a play-reading group making its way through Taming of the Shrew) and Guys and Dolls. I watched an online version of Kiss Me, which I had not seen before. Not my favorite. I also watched the movie Guys and Dolls, which I had seen before. The film is not the encapsulation of the stage show, since four or five songs were dropped from the movie, including “A Bushel and a Peck,” which I remember my mother singing when I was a tyke. When I first saw the movie, I thought Marlon Brando was miscast. This time I realized that Frank Sinatra was out of place, but I had seen a wonderful revival on Broadway with the always marvelous Nathan Lane. I came out, however, not humming any of his songs but singing “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat.”

The next week we considered West Side Story and Music Man. I had seen movie versions of both. Some years ago the spouse and I went to see a re-release of the 1961 West Side Story at a small theater in Brooklyn. Just before its start, a dozen male and female students from a nearby “elite” high school walked in. When the whistling and the finger popping and the crouched dancing began, the teenage-boy jokes started flying. The scene was easy to make fun of, and even the St. Anne’s students could think they were tougher than these 1950s dancing juvenile delinquents. The students, however, soon settled into watch. By the end, most were crying. Seeing it again this time, both the spouse and I were in tears, too.

I have seen the Music Man movie many more times since it was something the son watched over and over and over again at one stage of childhood. Because he liked it so much, I took him to a summer stock production of the musical. He came out critical. It did not have Robert Preston. It starred Gary Sandy, best known as a star of WKRP in Cincinnati. The production seemed more semi-professional than professional, and I learned that every presentation of a classical musical is not necessarily worth attending. Somewhat to my surprise, I have never seen a stage production of West Side Story.

I did not know that these two quite different musicals opened a few months apart and vied for that year’s Tony award with Meredith Wilson’s production winning in a controversial, close vote. The assigned reading maintained that the two plays showed different ways of dealing with America’s race or ethnic differences. Of course, West Side Story deals with those issues, but I was not convinced about Music Man. The thesis just seemed to be an academic overreach. I was pleased, however, that the instructor played a video of Larry Kert, the original Broadway Tony, singing. He had a marvelous voice. We did not discuss, however, the appropriateness of movies casting leads and then dubbing their singing as was done in West Side Story, or Natalie Wood’s attempt at a Puerto Rican accent.

I also felt as if I irritated the instructor that class. I had privately corrected him a week or two before. He was talking about Vaudevillian villains who twirled their mustaches and referred to such a person as Dudley Do-Right. As a devoted follower of George of the Jungle, I knew he meant Snidely Whiplash. Dan graciously accepted the correction. That was minor, but it felt more important when he labeled the Jets in West Side Story as W.A.S.Ps. I, privately told him that there was no way a gang on the west side in 1950s New York were white Anglo-Saxon protestants. In fact, there is a point in the production where ethnic slurs are tossed about and Tony, an original leader of the Jets, is called a Polack. I said the Jets were not high up on the social ladder, only a bit higher than the Sharks, and that was part of the reason for the intense bitterness between them. Dan maintained that in the literature the Jets are called wasps. I said that if so, those commentators were wrong. That seemed to irritate him, and I dropped the topic.

The “students” in the course were of my generation, and several repeatedly made the point that they did not like contemporary musicals because they were no longer musical. Many seemed almost hostile when we turned to Sweeney Todd, where hummable tunes were few but strident,  emotionally powerful singing plentiful. The instructor did a marvelous job explicating the innovative music and the remarkable lyrics. The repeated T sound in “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd,” for example, is brilliant, but so is much else in the show. I had seen a filmed version of Sweeney Todd with the always marvelous Angela Lansbury and George Hearn, and one Broadway production featuring Patti Lupone (she played the tuba), but I had not fully realized Sweeney Todd’s brilliance until I was led through it by Dan.

We finished with Hamilton. Time and again during the class I had heard how someone had gone to the show with their grandchildren, who loved it, while the grandparent had gotten little from it. Once again, however, the class opened my eyes and ears. I realized how remarkable Hamilton is, a truly transformative musical. Thanks, Dan.