musicals

Ethics Lyrics of the Year: “Is a Puzzlement” From “The King and I”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein Jr. had many moments of great ethical clarity, as did his pupil and protege, Stephen Sondheim. I don’t think either topped this song, however, from the 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, “The King and I.” I’ve highlighted the key sections.

When I was a boy,
World was better spot.
What was so was so,
What was not was not.

Now I am a man—
World have change a lot:
Some things nearly so,
Others nearly not.

There are times I almost think
I am not sure of what I absolutely know.
Very often find confusion
In conclusion I concluded long ago.

In my head are many facts
That, as a student, I have studied to procure.
In my head are many facts
Of which I wish I was more certain I was sure!

[spoken]
Is a puzzlement. What to tell a growing son?

[sung]
What, for instance, shall I say to him of women?
Shall I educate him on the ancient lines?
Shall I tell the boy, as far as he is able,
To respect his wives and love his concubines?

Shall I tell him every one is like the other,
And the better one of two is really neither?
If I tell him this, I think he won’t believe it—
And I nearly think I don’t believe it either!

When my father was a king,
He was a king who knew exactly what he knew,
And his brain was not a thing
Forever swinging to and fro and fro and to.
Shall I then be like my father
And be willfully unmovable and strong?
Or is better to be right?
Or am I right when I believe I may be wrong?

Shall I join with other nations in alliance?
If allies are weak, am I not best alone?
If allies are strong with power to protect me,
Might they not protect me out of all I own?

Is a danger to be trusting one another,
One will seldom want to do what other wishes…
But unless someday somebody trust somebody,
There’ll be nothing left on earth excepting fishes!

There are times I almost think
Nobody sure of what he absolutely know.
Ev’rybody find confusion
In conclusion he concluded long ago,

And it puzzle me to learn
That though a man may be in doubt of what he know,
Very quickly will he fight,
He’ll fight to prove that what he does not know is so!

Oh-h-h, oh-h-h!
Sometimes I think that people going mad!
Ah-h-h, ah-h-h!
Sometimes I think that people not so bad!

But no matter what I think
I must go on living life.
As leader of my kingdom I must go forth,
Be father to my children,
And husband to each wife—
Et cetera, et cetera, and so forth.

If my Lord in Heaven, Buddha, show the way,
Ev’ry day I try to live another day.
If my Lord in Heaven, Buddha, show the way,
Ev’ry day I do my best for one more day,
But…
Is a puzzlement!

It sure is.

Random thoughts:

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Through A Rear-View Cultural Mirror: Ethics Observations on “Bye Bye Birdie” (1963)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In the weekend’s interview on The Steven Speirer Show, I explained the distinction between morality and ethics in part by noting that ethics, unlike morality, is constantly evolving over time, and thus requires constant reflection and reassessment. This was the theory behind my now defunct professional theater company in Northern Virginia, The American Century Theater, which revived older American plays and musicals now considered “dated” by the theater community. Old art is never dated, because we have to know where we have been in order to understand how we got where we are and where we are going.

A fascinating time capsule in this vein is “Bye Bye Birdie,” the 1963 film of the hit 1961 Broadway musical. That show, the “Grease” of its generation, was a current events satire of the rock idol phenomenon, inspired by the cultural uproar when Elvis Presley, at the peak of his first wave popularity, was drafted. The Broadway show launched the careers of Dick Van Dyke and Paul Lynde, and included several hits songs (“Put on a Happy Face,” “I’ve Got a Lot of Living To Do,” and others by Adams and Strouse, who later wrote “Applause” and “Annie”) as well as one of the most famous opening numbers in musical theater history, “The Telephone Hour.”

For a number of reasons, I was moved to watch the movie again for the first time since I saw it in a movie theater. Naturally, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I’ve got some other tools to evaluate performance art, but the ethical issues raised by the film are many.

Most notably, the casting of Janet Leigh in the role of Rosie DeLeon, struggling songwriter Dick Van Dyke’s long-suffering girlfriend, would be castigated today. The role on Broadway was played by Chita Rivera, and this was considered a break-through: no Latina had ever played the romantic lead in a musical before. Rivera was already a major stage star and was nominated for a Tony for her performance as Rosie, but while Dick Van Dyke and Lynde from the original cast were carried over to the film version, Rivera was replaced by Janet Leigh of “Psycho” fame, in an unbecoming black wig.

Leigh was a movie star and considered good for the box office, and Rivera was not movie close-up beautiful by Hollywood standards. Nevertheless, this would be called “whitewashing” today. Rivera was crushed by the decision, but such injustices in the translation of shows from stage to screen were and still are standard practice, one of the most famous being Audrey Hepburn taking Julie Andrews’ place as Eliza in the movie version of “My Fair Lady.”

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“Wicked”: A Review (Part I)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Trust me on this: the rave reviews you may have read about how wonderful the film version of “Wicked” is are the result of pure cognitive dissonance scale manipulation in action. It was cleverly engineered to be a love note to “Wizard of Oz” cultists, social justice warriors, Trump-Deranged fanatics and woke warriors, adding in the kind of people who listen to the Sirius-XM Broadway channel. It is not a great movie musical and arguably not even a good one. I wonder if its Hollywood architects and cast even realizes that the thing hoists itself on its own petard?

Allow me to get the artistic end out of the way before discussing the political and ethics mess in Part 2, Above all else, the movie is inexcusably bloated and long, and I say this as someone who has no problem with long movies if the time is necessary to tell a story, it is told well, and the director understands pacing. At two hours and 40 minutes, a film that covers the first act of the Broadway hit (“Wicked” is coming up on its 22nd year on Broadway) is just five minutes shorter than the entire stage musical. It is literally stuffed with gratuitous and pedestrian dialogue, extended scenes, CGI and show-off special effects.

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More Non-Traditional Casting Double Standards Hypocrisy: “Whitewashing ‘Little Shop of Horrors'”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Here is another installment of a frequent topic on Ethics Alarms: non-traditional casting, DEI casting, and and virtue-signaling stunt casting just to appear woke. The position here as a long-time stage director who has been responsible for some audacious non-traditional casting in my time (I once cast the role Cole Porter with a woman) remains unchanged: if it works and the audience enjoys the show as much or more than it would have with a traditional casting choice, then all is well. (Full disclosure: casting Cold Porter as female did NOT work. At all…)

The mission of any stage production is to be fair to the show’s creators and make the production as effective theatrically as possible, not to make political or social statements that get in the way. (Prime example of the latter: this.)

Curmie sent me a link to “Yes, You Can Whitewash ‘Little Shop of Horrors’, But Please Don’t” at Chris Peterson’s Onstage blog. I love the musical (my old high school doubles tennis partner, Frank Luz, co-starred as the sadistic dentist in the original off-Broadway production and the cast album) based on the wonderful 1960 Roger Corman camp movie classic. I thought its creators would revive the genre, but Disney snapped them up (“The Little Mermaid”; “Beauty and the Beast”) and then half the team, Howard Ashman, died.

Peterson cites the license-holders’ quite reasonable casting note:

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Straining To Smear Merrick Garland, The National Review And Conservative Lawyer Ed Whelan Beclown Themselves…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
fantasticks-archive-b0a32b1dd6

TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 2010 – The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis’ production of “The Fantasticks”. ©Photo by Jerry Naunheim Jr.

…because they don’t know what the hell they are talking about.

I, on the other hand, do.

Whelan, who is usually much better than this, writes in “Yes, Merrick Garland Found ‘Hilarious’ a Song About ‘Rapes for Sale’,

Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland, as a college student, wrote a review of the musical The Fantasticks in which he labeled “hilarious” a song that (in his words) “provides a shopping list of rapes for sale (e.g. ‘the military rape—it’s done with drums and a great brass band.’).” But the Breitbart account turns out to be accurate. (Here is Garland’s article from the Harvard Crimson’s archives.) I have no interest in defending Garland’s observation from his college days nearly fifty years ago,* but I will try to put it in some context. What a theatrical performance can make amusing is often difficult to fathom in the abstract, as Mel Brooks’s “The Producers,” involving a musical comedy about Hitler, demonstrates. I will note that “The Fantasticks” (according to this Wikipedia entry) ran, on and off Broadway, for 42 years (from 1960 to 2002), “making it the world’s longest-running musical.” So it would seem that many folks shared Garland’s enjoyment of the song. Not surprisingly, controversy arose at some point over the “rape” lyrics, leading lyricist Tom Jones to revise them—to eliminate the word “rape.”

It is hard for me to tamp down my contempt for Whelan’s piece, but I’ll try.

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Comment Of The Day: “The Hypocrisy Of Politically Correct Casting Mandates: Spielberg’s ‘West Side Story’ Virtue-Signaling Debunked”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This was a nice surprise! Just as I began discussions about doing a special presentation for the Smithsonian Associates on West Side Story to coincide with the movie’s release (or maybe the Broadway revival’s opening this summer, mplo issued this timely Comment of the Day on a year old post, “The Hypocrisy Of Politically Correct Casting Mandates: Spielberg’s “West Side Story” Virtue-Signaling Debunked.”

Here it is;  I’ll have one comment at the end:

In my opinion, it would’ve been better if Spielberg had just left the original 1961 film version of West Side Story alone and created his own film with a similar theme, an homage  to WSS, instead of trying to update and remake it.

I have seen pictures of the cast, examples of Justin Peck’s choreography of the dancing, and the scenery settings, and how colorful they all are. I don’t like what I’ve seen, at all.The backdrop scenes look far more like wealthier, tonier parts of the city, as opposed to the impoverished, rough-and-rundown parts of the city that served as a backdrop in the original. The colors are too jarring.

The Jets, the Sharks and their girls in Spielberg’s reboot/remake of the film “West Side Story” look far more like wealthy suburban prep-school kids who are dressed to the nines for partying all over town than two street gangs who are at war with each other. The Jets, the Sharks and their girls in the original 1961 film version of “West Side Story” look way rougher and tougher than the ones in Spielberg’s  movie.

Justin Peck’s choreography looks too hyper, and more like hip-hop or rap dancing. I’ve seen pictures of that. Simon Oakland’s Lt. Schrank, William Bramley’s Officer Krupke, and the late Ned Glass’s Candy Store owner, Doc, also look  rougher  than Spielberg’s Lt. Schrank, Officer Krupke and “Doc,’ who has been given a sex change in the new script. [JAM: This was a gimmick to get Rita Moreno, the original film Anita, into the movie] Continue reading →

How To Kill The American Musical

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I have directed musicals professionally in regional and amateur theater, and the shows were a great love of mine growing up. Sadly, the American musical genre is becoming increasingly isolated from the mainstream culture for many reasons, among them the death of the movie musical, the pop-infection of the music and its singing styles, making most Broadway scores (and all of the women) sound the same, the inflated price of professional theater tickets, and production costs and effects that put most modern shows outside the realm of possibility for high schools and colleges.

Another factor,  which it is impolitic to discuss, is that the male gay community has decided to make musicals its own special genre, has been discouraging any talented straight performers from venturing into the field, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not.

Emblematic of this trend is the Sirius -XM Broadway Channel, which is the only way any kids are likely to hear an excerpt from a cast recording other than buying the song online. The nearly exclusive host is Seth Rudetsky, a writer/performer of some note and obvious talent. To say that he is openly gay is an understatement. Rudetsky’s delivery, speech patterns and preferred subject matter would have once been criticized as evoking cruel anti-gay stereotypes. He’s an actor; Rudetsky could butch up he chose to, and if he cared about musicals continuing as an art form participated in and enjoyed by the whole society and not just a small segment of it, he would. Continue reading →

When Artistic Boldness Is Unethical: The “Merrily We Roll Along” Movie

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

In an epic and unprecedented project, auteur director Richard Linklater will direct a film adaptation of “Merrily We Roll Along,” the cult 1981 Sondheim musical fashioned from the 1934  George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart Broadway play.

The production, which will begin next year,  will take 20 years to shoot, so the actors can age with their characters. You see, the story in “Merrily We Roll Along” is told backwards, with the audience meeting the characters as jaded middle-aged adults, and then watching how they got where they are, until they are seen as idealistic young students preparing to go out into the world. Linklater is probably correct that this is the only way to film such a plot credibly, and he is a bold and courageous artist to commit to an artistic endeavor requiring such a long time commitment, extreme expense, and uncertainty.

He’s also deluded and irresponsible. The project will cost many millions of dollars, and tie up not only his talents but many others to varying degrees over 20 years. The film is quite likely never to be completed, and if it is, likely not to be any good. Even if it is good, it will have no market, and is guaranteed to lose money. Continue reading →

The Great “Les Miz” Bait-And-Switch

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

“Les Misérables,” the bloated faux opera based on the Victor Hugo novel, has been running continuously in London’s West End, the theater district, since December 1985.  It holds the Guinness World Record for the longest run of a musical in London. In the U.S., the musical held on for a somewhat less embarrassing  16 years, running from 1987 into  2003, closing after 6,680 performances.

It was always a cynical project, as so many Broadway musicals have become since the genre became a nostalgic invalid in the 1970s. The show itself is derivative crap, and obviously so to anyone who has a passing familiarity with its superior sources. The translated from French lyrics have the resonance of Hallmark cards; there literally isn’t a clever or memorable pack of words in the whole three hour extravaganza. What “Les Miz” has, or rather had, is spectacular stagecraft, thanks to the original staging by Trevor Nunn that mounted the series of scenes on a massive raked turntable that allowed quick transition and the illusion of excitement. The musical didn’t exactly disprove the old Broadway saw that “Nobody leaves the theater humming the scenery”—the TV ad jingle-like earworms in the score assured that—but it came close.

When I saw the touring company version of the show, I realized immediately that the production could never have a life in high school, college, community theater or even in regional professional theaters, because the turntable, and the special effects it permitted, were essential to the production. Not only are stage turntables extremely expensive, they are notoriously risky, since a mechanical breakdown means the performance must be cancelled. Sure enough, after the Broadway production closed in 2003, there were no productions of the show other than the three professional touring companies owned by the Broadway producers. Then the show’s owner had an idea: let’s see if we can eliminate the turntable and get away with it! Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/6/2019: Rosenstein, Barr, Green, And “Oklahoma!”

/ Jack Marshall / 56 Comments

Good morning!

Let’s make this an ethical week…

1 As we watch the desperate vilification of Attorney General Barr by Democrats…it is helpful to consider a recent speech by the now departed second in command at Justice, the ridiculously conflicted Rod Rosenstein. He said in part,

Rampant speculation here in D.C. is that Democrats are terrified that Barr’s promise of investigations of the Hillary Clinton inquiry and the process whereby the Trump campaign was surveilled will reveal serious misconduct in the Obama Administration.  This is, of course, mocked as a conspiracy theory by the people who just had their own conspiracy theory exploded. Here’s the usually reliable Kimberly Strassel in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall—sorry).

…Mr. Barr made real news in that Senate hearing, and while the press didn’t notice, Democrats did. The attorney general said he’d already assigned people at the Justice Department to assist his investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. He said his review would be far-reaching—that he was obtaining details from congressional investigations, from the ongoing probe by the department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, and even from Mr. Mueller’s work. Mr. Barr said the investigation wouldn’t focus only on the fall 2016 justifications for secret surveillance warrants against Trump team members but would go back months earlier.

He also said he’d focus on the infamous “dossier” concocted by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and British former spy Christopher Steele, on which the FBI relied so heavily in its probe. Mr. Barr acknowledged his concern that the dossier itself could be Russian disinformation, a possibility he described as not “entirely speculative.” He also revealed that the department has “multiple criminal leak investigations under way” into the disclosure of classified details about the Trump-Russia investigation.

Do not underestimate how many powerful people in Washington have something to lose from Mr. Barr’s probe. Among them: Former and current leaders of the law-enforcement and intelligence communities. The Democratic Party pooh-bahs who paid a foreign national (Mr. Steele) to collect information from Russians and deliver it to the FBI. The government officials who misused their positions to target a presidential campaign. The leakers. The media. More than reputations are at risk. Revelations could lead to lawsuits, formal disciplinary actions, lost jobs, even criminal prosecution.

Quick! Let’s impeach Barr! Continue reading →