The Wonderful Musicals

Secret or public, every man has a love affair with the theater. As the house lights dim and the curtain begins to rise, he hugs his joy to himself, secure in the knowledge that no electronic magic can replace the moment when the first voices, brassy and projected as they always are, come across the footlights. But this very particular pleasure is multiplied if it is a musical comedy that he is to see. The orchestra has proclaimed the overture. The moment is here.

For the musical deals more purely with reality, with the true and the good, with the image and the dream, than serious drama or the problem play. The good musical is the sophisticated expression of the American folk—as sly, as witty, as the melodies and the legends that grew up along the great rivers of this singing, sorrowing land. The idiom is American as nothing else can be. It is urban and rural, mannered and direct, harsh and mawkish. Gilbert and Sullivan did less for England, Purcell but little more. Were Berlioz alive and American, he would be writing for Broadway—distilling the essence of Negro, Jew, and Western European in our culture—being of it and with it but never above it.

RT

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Ralph de Toledano

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Secret or public, every man has a love affair with the theater. As the house lights dim and the curtain begins to rise, he hugs his joy to himself, secure in the knowledge that no electronic magic can replace the moment when the first voices, brassy and projected as they always are, come across the footlights. But this very particular pleasure is multiplied if it is a musical comedy that he is to see. The orchestra has proclaimed the overture. The moment is here.

For the musical deals more purely with reality, with the true and the good, with the image and the dream, than serious drama or the problem play. The good musical is the sophisticated expression of the American folk—as sly, as witty, as the melodies and the legends that grew up along the great rivers of this singing, sorrowing land. The idiom is American as nothing else can be. It is urban and rural, mannered and direct, harsh and mawkish. Gilbert and Sullivan did less for England, Purcell but little more. Were Berlioz alive and American, he would be writing for Broadway—distilling the essence of Negro, Jew, and Western European in our culture—being of it and with it but never above it.