Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

and Hammerstein, Sondheim’s one-time collaborator and long-time mentor, respectively. Sondheim’s shows depart from the Rodgers and Hammerstein models stylistically and dramaturgically, especially in their subject matter and in their use of time and space. But at least from Company on they preserve the concept of the integrated musical. As with Rodgers and Hammerstein, the morethan-occasionally compromising characters in a Sondheim musical sing lyrics and music that reveal their essences and nuances and move the drama, narrative or non-narrative, uncompromisingly forward.

Sondheim, like Seurat and his modernist musical counterparts, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, has long since demonstrated his ability to move on, to learn from the example of his mentor Hammerstein who wrote “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and to give the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition renewed life in “No One Is Alone.” Throughout his more than fifty-year career on Broadway, Sondheim has successfully combined the musical trappings of musical modernism and created works that encompass an extremely broad dramatic range. Like Beethoven, who radically reinterpreted the classical style without abandoning its fundamental principles, in a larger sense Sondheim’s modernism might also be construed as a reinterpretation rather than a revolution. Nevertheless, despite this allegiance to the innovative but traditional principles of Hammerstein and Robbins, Sondheim’s music is more dissonant and less tonal than his predecessors’—with the possible exception of Bernstein’s tritone-laden West Side Story—and his characters are usually more neurotic and even occasionally psychotic.

Like Seurat and the modern George, Sondheim is willing to rethink his theatrical legacy to say something new. The ingenious incorporation of past models in the pastiches of Follies would reappear in subsequent shows, most extensively and literally in Assassins.102 In this respect, Sondheim’s shows are very much analogous to Show Boat, On Your Toes, The Cradle Will Rock, and West Side Story, to name only the musicals discussed in the present survey that prominently display popular and classical allusions. Sondheim succeeded in moving the Broadway musical to a new phase through words and music supported by imaginative solutions to perennial dramatic problems. At the same time, Sondheim’s approach to the musical can be placed firmly in the great tradition from Show Boat to West Side Story. The Broadway musical from the 1920s to the 1950s could hardly ask for a worthier heir or more enchanted evenings.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

The Reigning Champion of Broadway

The Lloyd Webber Problem

The composer’s career was thus marked by popular success and critical doubt; in the years since his death, these motifs have remained central to his musical and musicological reputation…. For some time his works remained objects of contempt, and even when he was not openly derided, he was often conspicuous by his absence, failing to merit more than a cursory mention in many supposedly “comprehensive” studies of the American and British musical.1

The above panegyric, purposely misquoted, contains one important omission that should be cleared up without delay. In place of the anonymous “composer’s career,” the author of the passage, Alexandra Wilson, put forward a particular composer. The composer named by Wilson in her critical reception study The Puccini Problem is actually Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), who composed operas rather than musicals and received little more than “cursory mention in many supposedly ‘comprehensive’ studies of twentieth-century music,” rather than in “studies of the American and British musical” as misstated in the passage. Instead of the anonymous “composer’s career,” try to imagine the name Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948) at the outset of the excerpt. Aside from the not unimportant fact that Lloyd Webber, at the time this second edition of Enchanted Evenings is written (2008), is only sixty years old and still quite active in the musical theater domain, the parallels in reception history between Lloyd Webber and Puccini are arguably present, perhaps uncannily so. The composer of The Phantom of the Opera has, in fact, like Puccini, so far endured an unresolved dissonance between high popularity and great wealth on the one hand and relatively low critical stature and recognition on the other. Before resuming our focus on the critical contradictions that surround the remarkable career of Lloyd Webber, it will be useful to review its well-known highlights.

While still a teenager, Andrew, the talented son of a prominent composer and teacher at the London College of Music, William Lloyd Webber, teamed up with Tim Rice to write a fifteen-minute staged cantata based on the biblical story of Joseph and many brothers for the students of a boys’ school, Colet Court, in 1968. A slightly longer version was recorded and then expanded still further into a full-length musical that was performed in London in 1972 as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. By that time, Lloyd Webber and Rice in 1970 had produced a two-record concept rock album based on another biblical theme, the last days of Christ told from the perspective of his betrayer Judas Iscariot. Jesus Christ Superstar, a stage realization of this album, significantly sung throughout, became a modest hit in New York in 1971 and a major hit when it opened in London the following year.

Andrew Lloyd Webber in 2004.

After the failure of the first version of the more traditional Jeeves (1975; revised as By Jeeves in 1996) with the playwright Alan Ayckbourn, the following year Lloyd Webber and Rice produced another two-record concept album in a mixture of rock and Latin styles based on the stormy life and early death of Eva Peron, the controversial and charismatic wife of Argentina’s authoritarian leader Juan Peron. Under the guidance of Harold Prince, Evita, first in London (1978) and the next year in New York, developed into another successful through-sung musical (i.e., with minimal spoken dialogue) on a provocative political theme. In retrospect, it is clear that Evita, the longest running imported musical until that time, was the true launching pad for the second British musical theater revolution (the first being the comparably earth-shaking arrival of Gilbert and Sullivan exactly one century earlier). By the time he was thirty, Lloyd Webber thus had created three