[Mb-hair] NYTimes.com Article: Series Looks at Broadway as a Prism for History

Tue Oct 19 07:54:02 PDT 2004

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Series Looks at Broadway as a Prism for History

October 19, 2004
 By DINITIA SMITH 

"Broadway!" cries Adolph Green. "Da da da dada doo," he
says, snapping his fingers to an imaginary tune. "Broadway
is life! It's glamorous. It's dazzling!" And so begins
"Broadway: The American Musical," a six-hour documentary
series, to be broadcast over three consecutive nights on
PBS starting tonight. 

"Broadway: The American Musical," is a pageant of music,
dance and rare film clips of Broadway's most vibrant
moments. The host of the series is Julie Andrews, and it
has interviews with many of those who lived the history,
including Mel Brooks, Arthur Laurents, Harold Prince,
Stephen Sondheim, George C. Wolfe, Tommy Tune, John Kander
and Fred Ebb. 

The documentary is a valentine created by two unabashed
enthusiasts: Michael Kantor, a filmmaker, and Laurence
Maslon, a professor in the Tisch School of the Arts at New
York University, who is the series' senior consultant. They
wrote the show's companion book. 

Mr. Maslon is the kind of person who starts singing over
lunch, "I'm gonna love you/ Like nobody's loved you ..." 

Without missing a beat, Mr. Kantor (tenor) responds: "Come
rain or come shine ... Happy together ..." (from Harold
Arlen and Johnny Mercer's "St. Louis Woman"). 

The two have marked their lives in terms of Broadway
milestones. " '1776,' " Mr. Maslon, 45, recalled. "It was a
life changing experience. I was 9. I had never seen
anything so dramatic. I thought all musicals were about men
yelling at each other in wigs." 

"Anything with passion in it can make a great show," Mr.
Maslon went on. "I want the Declaration of Independence,
dammit!" 

"A friend says the first show you see marks you for life,"
he noted. 

Mr. Kantor, 43, a director and writer, was working on Ken
Burns's PBS documentary series "The West," a sweeping
historical narrative, when he had the idea for a
comprehensive film history of the Broadway musical. "I
thought it would be an ideal way into American cultural
history." He teamed up with Mr. Maslon, who wrote the
biography of Richard Rodgers for "American Masters" on PBS
and edited the Library of America edition of George S.
Kaufman's comedies. 

Their goal, Mr. Maslon said, was to show "the growth of the
musical from civic and urban events, how it was formed by
immigration, World War II." 

They applied for grants from the National Endowment for the
Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The
film ended up costing over $7 million and was a
co-production of Mr. Kantor's Ghost Light Films,
Thirteen/NET, NHK and BBC in association with Carlton
International. "The rights to all that material ain't
cheap," Mr. Maslon said of the music and film clips that
make up the film. 

Mr. Kantor said, "Our goal was the most honest and truthful
representation of Broadway." Although the film makers used
clips from movie versions, they said they tried to include
film of original Broadway productions, like "Cabaret," when
possible. "Many people know Liza Minnelli's Academy
Award-winning performance as Sally Bowles in the film," he
said. "But we're telling the story of Hal Prince, of Jill
Haworth as Sally Bowles. It was Hal Prince's first big
production." 

The series begins at the beguine, with Broadway's roots in
vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies. The girls were
beautiful, the shows exquisite, the curtains designed by
Erte. The producers filmed an original Ziegfeld girl, Doris
Easton, dancing and singing at the age of 99, to music from
"Mandy" at the New Amsterdam Theater, where it originally
played in 1919: "Mandy, there's a minister handy." 

But the Follies were also "an amalgamation of everything
that was happening in America," Philip Furia, a history
professor at the University of North Carolina, says in the
film. Ziegfeld introduced America to the Jewish immigrant,
Irving Berlin, the outrightly Jewish comedian Fanny Brice
and insisted on hiring the African-American comedian Bert
Williams over the objections of some cast members. "Go if
you want," Ziegfeld told them. "I can replace every one of
you except the man you want me to fire." 

It was Ziegfeld who brought the world "Show Boat" in 1927,
revolutionary for its time with its serious story about
miscegenation and its well developed characters. "The
history of the American musical is divided quite simply
into two eras," Miles Kreuger, an expert on the musical
theater who appears in the documentary, says. "Everything
before 'Show Boat' and everything after 'Show Boat.' " 

But if the series has one major theme, it's that the
Broadway musical has always been subversive, ahead of its
time in form and subject matter. Think of the "Daily Show"
with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, where cultural norms
and political foibles can be mercilessly mocked without the
censure of the Hayes Committee, which came to rule
Hollywood. For instance, "Of Thee I Sing," a bitter satire
of American politics in 1931 in the Depression, "was
probably never filmed because it was too potent to make
into a movie," Mr. Maslon said. 

There are those who would dispute that claim, arguing that
Broadway has become one of the most conventional and
risk-averse art forms around. 

But Mr. Kantor and Mr. Maslon are having none of that.
"People are saying right now it is just dead," Mr. Kantor
said. "But no one is forcing people to see 'The Lion King.'
It's grossed over a billion dollars. Try and get people to
come into a big theater. It's not easy." 

It's the magic of Broadway that entices Mr. Maslon and Mr.
Kantor rather than its financial, marketing or artistic
problems. Broadway is an experience like no other, they
say. First there's the show, of course. But "part of it's
the room," the theater itself, Mr. Kantor said. "It's 90,
100 years old." 

Mr. Maslon continued: "It's the smell of pretzels, the
newsstands at the subway, the drinks after the show. 

"Broadway is the sum of all its parts."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/arts/television/19broa.html?ex=1099197642&ei=1&en=80e12308551e5fbb

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