No sane man can compare Miss Saigon to Oklahoma! or South Pacific or Annie Get Your Gun’

RONALD REAGAN once said that he couldn’t read his official papers the previous night because The Sound of Music was on television. No wonder he swept the country! Here, plainly, was a politician with a proper sense of values. The Sound of Music, hated by curmudgeons but loved by almost everyone else, represents well enough the greatest American art form of the twentieth century, the musical play. Now, just fifty years after Oklahoma! opened on Broadway, is a suitable time to reconsider, in wonderment, the treasures we were given and how much we have lost.

The musicals of that golden age—plays and films—are not mere cult classics. Quite the contrary. What else has touched so many people with joy? We have only to hear the opening notes or glimpse a song title—“The Way You Look Tonight,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”—for the tunes to come flooding irresistibly back: and the words, as poetry should, have become part of the fabric of our minds. Such commonplace things as laughter across a crowded room or cigarette smoke in your eyes have been endowed, for us all, with an emotive, nostalgic meaning.

AL

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Anthony Lejeune

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RONALD REAGAN once said that he couldn’t read his official papers the previous night because The Sound of Music was on television. No wonder he swept the country! Here, plainly, was a politician with a proper sense of values. The Sound of Music, hated by curmudgeons but loved by almost everyone else, represents well enough the greatest American art form of the twentieth century, the musical play. Now, just fifty years after Oklahoma! opened on Broadway, is a suitable time to reconsider, in wonderment, the treasures we were given and how much we have lost.

The musicals of that golden age—plays and films—are not mere cult classics. Quite the contrary. What else has touched so many people with joy? We have only to hear the opening notes or glimpse a song title—“The Way You Look Tonight,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”—for the tunes to come flooding irresistibly back: and the words, as poetry should, have become part of the fabric of our minds. Such commonplace things as laughter across a crowded room or cigarette smoke in your eyes have been endowed, for us all, with an emotive, nostalgic meaning.