Broadway: El musical americano

This in-depth mini-series (6 episodes) took the story of Broadway musicals from the vaudeville age and Mr Ziegfeld's spectaculars right up to the present day with Wicked! On the way, in the capable hands of presenter Julie Andrews, we remember Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Kander and Ebb, Jerry Herman, 42nd Street, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Hair!, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Rent, and La Cage Aux Folles.

There are tantalising clips from rare TV broadcasts and films (perhaps a weakness of the series is that people TALK over the clips - who wants to hear someone remember a show when you can see John Raitt sing Soliloquy from Carousel?) which are well-worth seeing the series in themselves. Contemporary and archive interviews bring the likes of Jerome Robbins, Kitty Carlisle, Jerry Orbach, and Tommy Tune into the story.

For my money, the best episodes were the first two, for the rare footage shown. But you'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the toll of musical theatre back-room boys (and front-line artists) lost to AIDS.

A fantastic trip along the Great White Way - thanks to PBS for putting it together, and to BBC4 for airing it in the UK.

'Broadway: The American Musical' is a six-part series that's just what it claims to be: a documentary history of the American musical (although it doesn't start anywhere near the beginning: 'The Black Crook' in the 1860s). The basic structure is chronological, though there are a few odd deviations: 'Bye Bye Birdie' comes before 'My Fair Lady', 'The Pyjama Game' doesn't show up until the 1980s, and flamboyant showman David Merrick isn't mentioned until the 1990s.

Of course, the real fun of a show like this is the chance to see rare clips of performers and obscure shows. Necessarily, documentarian Michael Kantor is limited by the fact that most stage performances were not preserved. We see silent-film footage of Bert Williams while the soundtrack plays one of his gramophone recordings; the image and soundtrack don't match, because Williams never made a talking movie. Yet, within the available material, Kantor makes some bizarre choices. We see silent footage (taken with a home-movie camera) of George M Cohan singing and dancing on Broadway in 'I'd Rather Be Right'. After a brief tantalising glimpse of this rare footage, Kantor cuts to a long excerpt of James Cagney in the movie 'Yankee Doodle Dandy', which we can get at any video shop. We see a brief clip of Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson doing his famous stair dance ... but after a few delightful seconds, the documentary cuts to footage of a generic jazz band. We see clips from a couple of MGM movie musicals (not film versions of stage musicals) containing songs ABOUT Broadway.

I was delighted by one clever sequence: an audio recording of Fred and Adele Astaire singing 'Fascinating Rhythm' is played over animated cut-outs of the dancing Astaire siblings. Also delightful is new footage of former Ziegfeld chorus girl Doris Eaton, singing and dancing one of her old songs from memory, shortly before her 100th birthday! We also see rare kinescope footage of some major Broadway musical performances: Gertrude Lawrence from 'The King and I', Jill Haworth from the original Broadway cast of 'Cabaret', Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison from 'Kiss Me Kate'. What pleasures! One non-Broadway clip that I welcomed was a brief sequence of Michael Bennett and Donna McKechnie dancing on a 1964 TV show, long before they collaborated on 'A Chorus Line'. I was also pleased by home-movie footage of the original staging of 'Porgy and Bess', along with new interviews of the performers who played the title roles in that production.

Various talking heads weigh in with their opinions. Oddly, this documentary makes no attempt to offer the credentials of these people. John Lahr states that his mother was a Ziegfeld chorus girl, yet never mentions that his father was a major Broadway comedian. George C Wolfe comments on the 1944 production of 'On the Town' (which closed long before Wolfe was born), yet never mentions that he directed an acclaimed revival of this same show. Betty Comden and Adolph Green were in that original 1944 cast of 'On the Town' (in addition to writing the book and lyrics), so I was amused here when they sing one of that show's songs ... and get the words wrong! Other errors here are less happy. Cole Porter's Broadway musical for Fred Astaire was titled 'The Gay Divorce', NOT 'The Gay Divorcée' (that was the movie version). A narrator mispronounces the name of Cole Porter's home town. Mary Rodgers gets the title wrong for one of her father's songs. (Maybe because he only wrote the tune, not the words.)

Regrettably, much of this documentary caters for what audiences will find familiar rather than trying to interest them in the unfamilar. We get a clip of the Marx Brothers in the movie version of 'Animal Crackers'. The Marxes were giants of film comedy, but their importance to Broadway's history is negligible. We are told absolutely nothing about Busby Berkeley's work on Broadway, but we get a clip from one of his Warner Brothers movies about a 'Broadway' musical that couldn't possibly be staged in a Broadway theatre. And did we need to be told for the 21,937th time that Mary Martin was from Weatherford, Texas?

This documentary intelligently reveals how the musical theatre was affected by the arrival of the subway in 1904, by Prohibition, by World War Two, by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and by the arrival of Aids. The most moving sequence here is a tribute to Broadway figures who died of Aids ... not the obvious big names, but those whom one talking head calls 'the guys in the trenches': the talented minor figures who never got their chance at stardom. Less inspiring is a film clip of Gerald Schoenfeld of the Shubert Organisation: his two sound bites about the Times Square district seem to be addressed solely to its viability as real estate. A long tribute to the Disney corporation's efforts on Broadway seems to be intended more as corporate back-scratching than anything else. Fittingly, the series ends with an elaborate tribute to Al Hirschfeld, the caricaturist who documented Broadway's best for more than seven decades!

Despite some nitpicks, I deeply enjoyed this documentary and I learnt quite a bit from it. Anyone who wants to learn about the Great White Way will get a solid grounding in the American theatre's history from these six episodes. And anyone who just wants a good time watching some enjoyable musical numbers will get plenty of that pleasure here. I rate 'Broadway: The American Musical' a full 10 out of 10. Bravo!

This will probably be a valuable tool to educators through the years. I did not find it especially entertaining as it was very much "by the book" in the traditional PBS sense. I would have preferred that we had heard more from the actual people that were there rather than so many academics and relatives of those who it was about. Also, I know so many others have said it as well, but way too many movie clips and you never knew what you were looking at. People were not identified, etc. But, I applaud them for taking the time to make it and for putting it all down. Still better to have this than not to have done it.

NOTE: I thoroughly enjoyed the extra interview footage. It is actually more entertaining and enlightening than the actual series. I wonder what they must still have and what they might have done with it?

Greetings from California:

In your excellent review questioned why John Lahr did not mention is father Bert Lahr (Cowardly Lion in Wizard of Oz) In the 1950's I was friendly with John's brother and was told that only he was not overly close to his father, John was raised by his mother (not my friends Mother) & was a good deal younger than John, He hardly ever saw John & John hardly ever saw his father.

A closely knit family this was not.

John Lahr has written a book as well on his fathers life & times. I have forgotten the title, however.

For many of us, with only a passing knowledge of American musical theatre, this is a godsend. I always suspected that these composers borrowed freely from each other and was not surprised to find out that they were often each others mentors.

The section on the THE CRADLE WILL ROCK was an alarming history lesson in recent censorship and should be as much a part of school curriculum as prohibition or blacklisting. Perhaps New York would not be so quick to condemn other states if it faced its own history of oppression since the behaviour of the city has often been the forerunner of standards, including censorship, elsewhere.

The series captures the social and artistic effects of SHOW BOAT, OKLAHOMA!, WEST SIDE STORY, HAIR and A CHORUS LINE among many others and beautifully highlights the effect they had not only on audiences but also on the talent behind the scenes.

One surprising (and annoying) feature of this set is the misguided effort to highlight the contribution of African Americans by segregating black performances into sections. The final effect is an "us and them" result that will appear racist as the years go by. Surely the contribution of black talent is not any more or less important than that of any other minority in the melting pot and the series easily integrates Jewish, Irish and Hispanic contributions effortlessly. Surely there is no need to suggest that Ethel Waters brought more to the stage by way of personal baggage than Fanny Brice or Harvey Fierstein. One obvious and major contributing element that becomes an elephant in the room to anyone who has ever seen a Broadway musical is delicately footnoted. This element is the fact that these shows are usually, dare I say it, quite gay in every sense of the word. Perhaps this is a current mutation of the badly kept Hollywood secret that the studios were mostly run by Jews. Do the producers really think it unimportant or simply too obvious to address?