"The most beautiful corpse." The Broadway musical.

Musicals aint what they used to be. Their songs used to fill in the hit parade, and fly out of the shops. Now, it’s a niche market. Even mega hits like Hairspray and Wicked contribute nothing to the charts. Who above the age of twenty-five can name a song from High School Musical? No, musicals as shapers of popular culture and music have had their day, like operetta and opera before. Nothing wrong with them, they will still find audiences, new ones will be written but one can’t but help feel their best days are behind.

Such is the theme of Mark Steyn's 1997 book Broadway babies say goodnight and it’s difficult to disagree with him. The current great of Broadway, Stephen Sondheim, is over 80 years old now. His last show, Road Show, was a flop, and even his popular shows have always had difficulty finding an audience. Don’t get me wrong, I love his work but then I’m part of the theatre crowd, which along with his fellow Manhattanites, tends to be his biggest fans. Sondheim preaches to the converted. Indeed, apart from the operattaish Lloyd Webber and Schonberg shows, Broadway musicals are having a tough time finding audiences around the world. Big hits like Spamalot and Xanadu, entertaining shows with good music and one would think a built-in audience, died undignifed deaths in Australia.

Steyn is an intelligent, perceptive and funny writer. Sadly, he writes more these days about politics than music.  That said, he has a good idea of what makes a show, or a song work. Someone once said a critic is someone who knows the way but can’t drive the car. Steyn is a skilled map-reader, with a great eye for observation. He tells of the writers of A Chorus Line once toying with the idea of a sequel – what were all those characters doing ten years later – until they worked out of course, they were still doing A Chorus Line. Such is today's Broadway.

Broadway babies say goodnight is an irreverent well-informed history of seven decades of musicals. Steyn’s discussion of the first word of the first integrated musical Showboat reveals much about the history of the musical, the United States, and PC language. ‘Niggers’ became ‘Coloured’ became ‘Here we'. The last great revival by Hal Prince, which made its way to Australia, solved the problem by making the first reveal of the set so spectacular that audience applause covered the tricky phrase. All of which ignores the fact that Oscar Hammerstein II chose the word deliberately to make the audience uncomfortable for a moment, in a show that exposed the prejudice that was common in his middle-class audience. But if we ever went to musicals to be challenged, we don’t anymore. Which may be Sondheim’s problem. He is both muscially and lyrically the heir to the greats, Kern, Rodgers, Gershwin, Porter and Hammerstein. So why don’t the general public turn up?

As Steyn, and Sondheim say, the music means a show will last, the book means that it works. And Sondheim’s books are problematic. They deal with among some topics US-Japanese relations, the Florida land rush of the 1920s, canibalism, irrational obsessives, and pointillism, toe-tappers all. Others are more mainstream – fairy tales, marriage - but all are delivered with a smart-ass New York attitude. Steyn calls Sondheim’s ouvre all flawed masterpieces; a generalisation but somewhat accurate. Performers love doing them, but popular he aint.

Steyn quotes a writer saying Sondheim has also never produced a standard, a song that can be reinterpreted, jazzed, sped up, slowed down or in some way fooled around with. Singers all sing Sondheim with the markings he wrote. This is I think due to the fact he took the ideal of musicals to its apotheosis – writing songs and lyrics that are true to the character and to the moment. Earlier writers were writing songs aimed at the hit parade and hung on a thin story, such was the working aesthetic, and produced the great American song book. More modern writers who attempt the same – think ‘This is the moment’ from Jeckyll and Hyde – come up with bland vague lyrics and bore us to tears. I’d rather Sondheim.

The second volume of Sondheim’s collected lyrics Look, I made a hat: Collected lyrics (1981-2011) with attendent comment, amplifications, dogmas, harangues, digressions, anecdotes and miscellany, is out and I grabbed it. The two books were orginally planned as one volume and certainly Volume 2 had me darting back to Volume1.  Sondheim is not afraid to step on toes. He once considered Sunset Boulevard as a musical, but Billy Wilder insisted it should be an opera to fit the size of the characters. Sondheim maintains he was right. Steyn, coming from another direction, comes to a similar conclusion. The big sets on the Broadway stage made Norma Desmond small, and the director kept pushing her further and further back. “I am big” seems ironic, even silly, rather than gloriously, if deludedly, defiant.

These two, the critic and the practitioner, would have a fantastic discussion on the state of the art, if they ever got together. (See Sondheim Vol II for the difference between a ‘critic’ and a ‘reviewer’) They both sometimes reveal the effort they put into their work, which they would prefer to avoid. Both are sharp on lyrics, with definite and strong ideas on what makes a good lyric and what makes a bad one. And both oddly don’t like W S Gilbert. Well that’s unfair. Styen calls him a versifier rather than a lyricist, limiting Sullivan’s music in tight rhyme and rhythms, rather than using the music as a springboard for the lyric. Sondheim seems to hate his work findng it arch and forced, and says his pastiche of Gilbert in Pacific Overtures does Gilbert better than Gilbert did.

Both books will provke thought and argument, and both make you want to go back to the shows. The Broadway Musical may be dead, but the wakes are fantastic.

"Is there a doctor in the house?" Dr Seuss

They say, or someone said, that a writer is formed in their childhood. Which makes me worry, as my childhood was safe and happy. Where’s the capacity for art in that? Darn my parents for being reliable and loving.

Mind you Ted Geisel’s parents were loving and reliable too. His family went broke when Prohibition destroyed their brewery business, and he was once publicly humiliated by Teddy Roosevelt of all people. Being of German descent, he was chased by other kids during the First World War, yelling ‘Kill the Kaiser!’’ with real violence on their mind. So he had enough. Enough to make to make him the greatest children’s author of the modern age.

Ted Geisel is better known as Dr Seuss (which I believe he pronounced to rhyme with ‘voice’ rather than ‘juice”. Ah what would he know about pronouncing his own middle-name?) Dr Seuss revolutionised childhood literature and as such may be one of the great influences on modern western society. Not to blame him – many of us old children have forgotten his simple, powerful and sweet messages or imagine they cannot be applied. Dr Seuss is a force for good, more power to his work. He makes children want to read, and nothing can be better than that.

Anyway I don’t have to tell you about Dr Seuss, or Ted Geisel for that matter. The quality of his work and its importance (and continuing popularity) are a given. His life is of interest though.  I’ve just read Theodor Seuss Geisel by Donald E Pease. As the title might imply, this is a simple and straightforward telling of his life and work, engaging  without being compelling. There are other, bigger, biographies extant but this is a satisfying way to start.

Lewis Carroll’s childhood, according to Virginia Woolf, lodged in him entire. Dr Seuss’ did something similar. His first children’s book And to think I saw it on Mulberry Street was named for a street from his hometown. If I ran the circus takes place on a vacant block in the same town. But Seuss’ world was wilder and more wide-ranging. He created a character, the Grinch that for Americans and others I suspect is as big a part of Christmas as Santa. How many writers have pulled that off? Dickens may have been the last. He took on prejudice, politics, war, the environment, personal responsibility, society, aging, even death itself, and made them whimsical, lovely and memorable.

His adult life is not without interest either. He worked as a propagandist during WWII and some of his later work he said was to counteract the racist slurs he made against the Japanese and the Germans in that time. He then worked in advertising before finding his milieu in children’s literature. His relationship with his first wife Helen is an extraordinary story, ending in tragedy.

The other day I was reading this book and someone asked me if it was true that Dr Seuss hated children and only wrote books to shut them up. She was quite serious.  I said no, he wrote books because he thought children needed better books to read. But why would such a story start? I can only put it down to modern cynicism. It’s a cynical idea, and it allows those that have heard the story to ‘know something you don’t know’.  It made me sad to think of it. Trying to find pictures for this entry I came across pictures of the Cat in the Hat doing bongs and so on. Who are these people that feel that is funny? Or in any way needed?

They have yet to make a good movie from a Dr Seuss book and why would they? They have to expand a simple but powerful story and so fill up with fluff, poor slapstick and poobumwee jokes, because that’s all kids get. That’s where the cynicism is.

As long as we persist in having children, and expect them to read, so long will we need to put the call in for the good Dr.

"Shtarker! This is Kaos!" The history of Israel

I mentioned Margaret Thatcher as a good argument starter. Israel is another cracker. (Both in the Australian slang sense as ‘very good’ and in the sense of explosive.) People in Australia protest outside a Jewish-owned chocolate shop, which is owned by another company that owns another company that sells chocolate to the Israeli army, and chant Hamas phrases calling for Israel to be wiped from the face of the earth and wonder why other people get upset. It’s a complex issue.

I thought Irish history both rewarded and was blurred by the long view. Compared to the Jews, the Irish are whippersnappers. And Jewish history too emerges from the mists of time and myth. Israel is condemned for the settlers in Hebron who forced out Arabs from the area, one of the most sacred Jewish sites in an area replete with them. But who condemned or even remembers the Arabs who forced the Jews out from Hebron before that? It wasn’t that long ago – survivors from that exile returned to force the Arabs out in their turn. And so it goes, tit for tat, this for that, an eye for an eye, back as far as you can see, and as far forward too.

Rich Cohen is an energetic vital writer. No prizes for guessing he’s Jewish. His 2010 book Israel is real: An obsessive quest to understand the Jewish nation and its history, the title taken from a tourist t-shirt, is an informal informative history of Israel from Abraham to the present day. It doesn’t excuse or condemn Israel but it does go a long way to explaining it. The great Israeli general Moshe Dayan, during the Yom Kippur war, which he almost lost along with the plot, called Israel the third Temple. Cohen agrees. His central thesis is that of the Temple, that was destroyed twice then transformed into an idea that could be taken anywhere. When Israel was created, the Temple became a physical object again, and again something that could be destroyed. 

The strongest characters in this book are the shtarkers, the Jewish tough guys from antiquity to today. (Some will remember Siegfried’s somewhat Nazi, wholly incompetant sidekick of that name from Get Smart.) And of all the shtarkers, Ariel Sharon is the exemplar, not only of the type, but of the history of modern Israel itself. A dashing commander in the 1948 Arab Israeli War who became the hero of the Yom Kippur War when he split the Egyptian army and against orders crossed the Suez Canal and saved Israel, it was he who as Prime Minister started the settler movement to protect Israel and he who later tried to stop it for the same reason, before being struck down by a stroke. It’s almost a three act play - a tragedy.

Cohen is no blinkered true-believer, nor is he a blinkered anti-Zionist. Israel is real and he tries to understand what this has done to those Jews who live there, and the others as well. He sums up the present impasse in a single sentece: We will stop building when you stop attacking and we will stop attacking when you stop building. Where’s the off-ramp of that roundabout?

Cohen uses anecdote, myth and history to weave an entertaining and thought provoking book. If you are interested in the topic at all, you could do a lot worse than reading this. 

"And justice for all." The trial of Richard Hauptmann

Here’s an odd phrase you still hear: positive discrimination. Those who use it imagine that putting a positive word in front of a negative one cancels out the negativity. In practice, I don’t think this is so. If someone is appointed to a position in part because they are black, female or part of another minority, it just brings out the same accusation as good old fashioned discrimination does: favoritism, people promoted beyond their abilities because of who they are, and mates looking after mates. It is supposed to force people and organisations beyond their prejudices, but often just reinforces them, regardless of the qualities of the person appointed.

Here’s another one you may not be familiar with: noble corruption. This is a phrase, I believe, invented by Ludovic Kennedy, to describe the process when police and other law enforcement agencies use the tools of old-fashioned corruption – faked evidence, forced confessions, mistreatment of prisoners – to do good; bring about the conviction of someone who they know to be guilty but cannot otherwise prove it. It’s a tempting idea, a clear case of the end justifying the means. But what if they are wrong? And what if, having done it once, they take the easier way more often, and with less noble aims? Noble corruption quickly loses its adjective and becomes plain old corruption.

It is not for any of us to look into the hearts of police officers, lawyers and judges and see if they are doing what they think is right, or doing what they think is wrong. Which is why we need to cling to due process. It has taken us a long time to develop our legal processes, with the aim to protect the innocent, even if it means letting the guilty go free. Not that it always works. Innocent people have suffered punishment before and may well do so again. This is regrettable with fines, but repayable. Prison time may result in financial compensation but where is the lost time going to come from, or how are we to repair the life? And if we have killed the man, the woman, what then?

Bruno Richard Hauptmann was a German immigrant (illegal, not insignificantly) who was convicted and executed for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr, the infant son of the famous flier. And according to Ludovic Kennedy, and others, he was innocent, railroaded by men who perhaps thought they were doing the right thing. To read The Airman and the Carpenter by Kennedy is to be outraged by the corruption of the American legal system. If Hauptmann was not guilty this is a travesty of justice. The important thing to remember though is if he was guilty, it still is.

Hauptmann was caught with a significant amount of the ransom money, and lied to the prosecutors on several occassions. But this is balanced against his alibi for the night in question, buried by the prosecution, the lies told by witnesses on the stand with the encouragment, and even the simple bribery,  of the prosecution, faked evidence (by police and journalists), bullying of the prisoner, and abuse of the system. At most Hauptmann could have been convicted of receiving stolen money. As it was, he was convicted of being the sole kidnapper and murderer. To even do that, the State had to forget their own witnesses, including Lindbergh himself, dealing with mulitple people from the kidnappers’ gang.

Corruption is insidious, and no-one is immune.  Lindbergh embellished his evidence, claiming he could recognise Hauptmann’s voice based on two words he heard two years earlier:“Hey doc!” He said he noticed a German accent, so the words got changed to “Hey doctor!” to make that more plausible.

Nor is this being wise after the event. At the time, knowledgeable people such as Clarence Darrow said the evidence was insufficient to secure a conviction. But the public were desperate to have someone to blame and so, I would say and more understandably, was Charles Lindbergh. Even Haputmann’s lawyer was convinced of his guilt. (He was being paid by the Hearst newspapers, likewise convinced.) The Governor of New Jersey lost his subsequent election after he tried to have Hauptmann’s sentence commuted to life. To quote Bob Dylan, the trial was a pig circus, he never had a chance.

Ludovic Kennedy, a British journalist, was well known for his championing of those he saw as wrongly convicted. His book 10 Rillington Place was instrumental in seeing Timothy Evans get a posthumous pardon. This book, written in 1985, has been less successful in that regard. And there are those who argue that Hauptmann was involved in the kidnapping. But what this book makes clear beyond all doubt is Hauptmann did not receive a fair trial. That is what our system is there for, to give all of us a fair trial if we should end up within it. Neither public men nor cheering crowds should affect it. It’s almost ninety years since Hauptmann was electrocuted to death, but these issues still affect us. Like peace, the price of justice is eternal vigilance.