Posted 6:19 PM by Gene

I'm going to write about musicals again, and though I know I must be tiresome on the subject the death of that form speaks to the death of our culture. Today I've been perusing through Kevin Brownlow's amazing anthology of production and publicity stills from Mary Pickford's movies, and I've long thought the ideal musical would be the story of her epochal romance with Douglas Fairbanks Sr. In the perfect world this would be the perfect show: two larger-then-life figures in a fascinating business, making movies as they were being born and maturing, who knew and worked with larger-than-life figures: Chaplin and D. W. Griffith for starters; two people with large flaws -- Mary's alcoholism, Doug's roving eye. It would of course have an unhappy ending, somewhat violating the genre's laws, but it would be magnificently funny and stirring and touching, all the things that make for great art. One might protest that could it be done if would have to be a show with music rather than a musical; it must have production routines centering around their most famous parts, which of necessity would be a kind of ballet. But this is a trifle -- it would be superb, utterly enthralling spectacle.

Now who would write it? Oscar Hammerstein could do the book, assisted by Neil Simon for the gags. Or maybe Arthur Laurents; he knew show-biz. But who would do the music? Jerome Kern, perhaps; as excellent as he and his colleagues were he was the only one who could write consistently "big" songs. Victor Herbert would have been right if he only he'd been tuneful. Possibly the great movie scorers; but so far as I know not one among them ever wrote an opera or musical. I've always thought the best choice would be Leroy Anderson. He seems to have written his superlative tone poems for a show that never existed; they have a unifying thread of bigness and eloquence and quaintness that would be just right for a big, eloquent, even a little quaint story. (Anderson did write a show about silent movies -- a 1958 affair with Jean and Walter Kerr called Goldilocks; but it had no really good ballads, and it flopped.)

Now, to reality: a BILLY JOELY SHOW with cliches and $1.5 million in advance bookings; A ROCKIN' ROLLIN' DEAD-MAN SHOW WITH ELVIS TUNES; and bus-and-truck companies recycling fifth-rate shows and stretching out longer than the proverbial truckin' CONVOY.