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End of the Broadway musical

#1
C C Offline
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/s...59519.html

EXCERPT: What is America’s greatest contribution to the arts? Time was when many, perhaps most, people would have pointed to the Broadway musical as the likeliest candidate for admission to the pantheon. Theatergoers around the world have long rejoiced in the delights of the genre, including some whom one might well have thought too snobbish to admit its excellence. (Evelyn Waugh, who had next to no use for anything made in America, saw the London production of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate a half-dozen times, pronouncing it, according to one biographer, “ingenious and admirable.”) But big-budget musical comedy has been in increasingly steep decline since the 1970s, and 10 long years have gone by since The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the last homegrown musical to be wholeheartedly embraced by audiences and critics alike, made it to Broadway.

Since then, we’ve seen a parade of what I call “commodity musicals,” the slavishly literal throwaway stage versions of hit movies that now dominate Broadway, as well as a number of highly imaginative small-scale musicals that, to date, have failed to draw large-scale crowds. But the old-fashioned school of Oklahoma! family musical appears to be all but gone for good, killed off by the disintegration of the common culture that made it possible in the first place....


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