"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.