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                                                            Sing, Sing, Sing, and Dance

               “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.

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It’s a Miracle

          For most of my life, I did not feel as if it were truly the Christmas season until I saw it again. In the many years before VCRs, DVRs, and Netflix, I would carefully examine the weekly TV lists in the Sunday papers until I found its time, for there always was at least one time that it was shown. Then I would plan my schedule to make sure that I could see it. This is why I have seen Miracle on 34th Street more than any other movie—the black and white version made in 1947. I was never disappointed. When I was a child, this Wisconsin boy liked what seemed to be real exterior shots of exotic New York City and footage of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade with balloons that now looked quaint.      

The movie, however, made me something of an activist. The film was colorized and that version, to my horror, was the only one I could find to watch one year. My distress increased because it had dropped a scene, a key one with a bit appearance by Jack Albertson in the post office sorting room. I dashed off a letter to the TV station decrying the bastardization. I am still waiting for a response, but, to my relief, I could find the original version in later years. (I know there is a remake, but I have not seen it. Why watch it when the original is close to perfection?)

          My seasonal quest was in place when I linked up with the spouse in my twenties. We sat down to watch it in our first Christmas season together, and I found out that she had not seen it. To help her grasp the magic of The Miracle on 34th Street, I told her that the actor playing Kris Kringle had made only this one movie, and she, with the wide-eyed trust of early love, believed my jest. (N.B.: I have never, ever tried in earnest to mislead the spouse, he protested too much.) When years later she saw Edmund Gwenn in another movie, she was, how to put it, put out, but our marriage somehow survived if only by the slenderest of heartstrings. (Gwenn, of course, was in many movies, but he got his only Academy Award for playing Kris.)

          I don’t remember when I first saw the movie, but I have a memory of having read the story in Scholastic or some other school magazine before seeing its depiction. However, I have not trusted the recollection. It seemed unlikely that a screenplay would have been part of my grade school reading. On the other hand, I have recently learned that the story was novelized when the movie came out and editions of it were being printed when I was a schoolboy. So, perhaps, it did get excerpted in something I read when I was ten or twelve.  (Valentine Davies wrote the story of Miracle, for which he won an academy award. Davies, who died at 55 in 1961, wrote the screenplays of many successful movies and a Writers Guild award is named after him.)

          I have tried to figure out why the movie appeals to me much more than other classics, such as White Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life, and A Christmas Carol, all which—and many other holiday films—I have enjoyed. Of course,  Miracle is well acted with heavyweight Hollywood stars in the lead roles—Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, Natalie Wood, and, of course, Gwenn—with actors in the character roles whose names I did not always know but I recognized from many films and TV shows. It has some touching scenes. When Kris speaks in her native language with the little, WWII-displaced Dutch girl who has come to see Santa, I invariably tear up. That said, the movie, in my opinion, does have one major flaw—it’s pro-suburban bias. The cute-as-a-button little girl and the aspiring lawyer want to move out of New York City to, of all places, Long Island. I can’t imagine how any sensible person would have wanted to give up their apartments overlooking the parade route and Central Park, especially when, in those days, apartments were hard to find and might have been rent-controlled.

          However, I have always overlooked this gigantic flaw in the plot, and on my twentieth or thirtieth watching, I started again to wonder why I was especially drawn to this Christmas classic. I realized that this movie was different from the holiday films that have the characters overcoming obstacles so that loved ones (and family) can celebrate the joyous times, films such as White Christmas, and Home Alone, and the various rom-coms where lovers have to learn they are right for each other in time for Christmas.

Miracle is also fundamentally different from the films of personal transformation or even resurrection, such as It’s a Wonderful Life or the many adaptations and derivatives of A Christmas Carol. (At least one of the actors of Miracle on 34th Street, the marvelous Gene Lockhart, who plays the judge, also appeared in a filmed version of A Christmas Carol, playing Bob Cratchit.) Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara) does change in the course of the movie, but it is not the result of supernatural beings or forces as in many other Christmas movies. She instead gets a renewed appreciation of life that grows out of human interactions and observations that all of us could experience. But even though Doris’s new outlook is important to the film, it is not really the core of the movie.

(concluded December 8)