Broadway: The American Musical - An Interview with Laurence Maslon

Laurence Maslon authored the companion coffee table book to the recent hit PBS series, BROADWAY: The American Musical. For that special, he also wrote two of the episodes, and the accompanying booklet for the CD set. It seemed a perfect time to check in with this theater historian on the book, the TV special, and of course – about Broadway.

Michael Kantor, the filmmaker of BROADWAY: The American Musical, and Laurence Malson have known each other for twenty-years now, the last five of which they've spent on this project. It's an experience which he now looks back on fondly, once they decided on where to start. "We worked together, first trying to figure out what the point of view was going to be for this vast amount of material that we had to focus down to six hours. There are lots of books, documentaries and TV shows about the American musical, that focus on the musical aspect, but we wanted to focus on is the American aspect."

 

To that end, what the documentary and its companion materials did was to show how society reflected Broadway, and vice-versa over the years. "What it revealed about American culture, what it revealed it about how widespread the music is, and what forces fed into the creation of the musical, led us to a kind of discrimination process. A show couldn't just be included because it was a fun show, it had to represent some other larger forces at work to make it in."

What they did, was to then select groundbreaking shows, those that they felt demonstrated aspects of history, plus those that were innovative to Broadway, and that's what established the framework. The documentary, even if it had been its originally planned 90 minute episodes, could never have covered everything they wanted to and that's where the book and special fit together.

 

"There were definitely some things that we would have loved to have included from a historical perspective, and that's where the book comes in. It covers about 40% more than the series does, and allows us to cover a whole slew of shows that there just was no video footage of, like Golden Boy for example. It's not in the series because there isn't footage of Sammy Davis just putting it out there across the footlights, but how could we not include it?"

Malson describes the series as having followed in the footsteps of other documentaries on PBS like the ones on baseball, the Civil War, and jazz so from day one, it was expected to have ancillary items available as well. Unlike those other subjects, Broadway being Broadway offered a wealth of material. "If you're doing a series about baseball, there's less items that you can put together related to it, baseball cards perhaps? But with musicals, we were able to do the book, as well as a five CD, and single CD compilation albums."

"The book allowed us to do something unique which was to reproduce fourteen entire lyrics with annotations, and that's something else that has never been done before. These are the building blocks of the American musical. "Soliloquy" by Rodgers and Hammerstein, or "I Am What I Am" by Jerry Herman are important documents, and you can't stop a film documentary dead in its tracks and in the case of Carousel play an 8 minute song. The book allowed us to do that by including the lyrics, and many other items that exist better in paper form like maps of the theater district, and chronologies."

 

An additional bonus of the book, was the selection of 7 shows that weren't found to fit any particular trend, but were deemed worth including for their one of a kind nature. Shows like Cradle Will Rock, St. Louis Woman, and 1776 were then profiled for their very convention defying nature. It's shows like that which Laurence found the most interesting. "I don't care what other people thought about it, and sometimes they were and sometimes they weren't big successes, but as a historian and as a theatergoer, these were crucial."

Also included is a selected chronology which covers not just what year shows opened, but also in what order which adds a less conventional dimension to the mix. For the shows after 1948, they marked each Tony winner in red, a plan that almost got them into big trouble. "The book had to go to press the week before the Tony's this year, and I told my editor let's just put Wicked in red, and ship it out, and my editor said 'well, do you know Wicked has won the Tony award?' I said 'no, but all the papers have said it would, and it's the big box office champ,' and rightfully and impressively she said 'unless we know we can't put it in.' Thank goodness we didn't, because we would have been very embarrassed! When they say Broadway always surprises you, they're right, and the surprise was on me when Avenue Q won."

 

Wrapping up about the book, Laurence adds "It was conceived with the documentary at the same time, and if you take all these products together, you'll get a really rounded version of what Broadway's about, and I'm very proud of the fact that it tries to contextualize Broadway, and that it shows what a factor it's been in 20^th century popular culture."

Having gone through years of research to put this book together, Laurence is in a perfect position to weigh in on the current state of Broadway, in relation to its history, so I couldn't let him escape without discussing it.

 

"I think one of the threads that people forget totally, totally is that Broadway is a really cyclical thing, and people's memories are really lodged into the era they grew up, or the era that they started seeing shows, and they look at everything through that lens. If I told you in the middle of 1993 when you had 4 Cameron Mackintosh shows on Broadway, and a bunch of others imitating them, that in 2001 a show would open up that was a musical comedy, with funny jokes, show girls, 2 great vaudevillians in the lead, that was just silly and funny, you'd think I would crazy. Then comes the Producers though, and wins 12 Tony awards, which shows that you can't ever really predict what Broadway is."

"Now, here you are in 2004, and really only one of those Cameron Mackintosh shows is left standing on Broadway, but there's four musical comedies. So maybe 10 years from now it won't be musical comedy, it'll be full song pop versions of Great Expectations or other French novels, and we'll be back to where we were in the 80s."

"It's amazing that people say there's all these spectacle, spectacular shows, in the 80s, but back in the teens they were called extravaganzas, and that's why people went to see them. What goes around comes around on Broadway. I think it's far more elastic than anyone gives it credit for, and that it'll continue to change in ways that no one can possibly predict."

As to those naysayers that state Broadway is a dying art form, Laurence has some choice words for them as well. "I think Broadway is still where it always was in terms of importance. Just look at the film of the Lion King that made millions of dollars, and billions for the stage production. I keep hearing Broadway's dead, Broadway's not this or Broadway's not that, but financially it seems more than capable of sustaining itself in ways that even Rodgers and Hammerstein would have never dreamed." 

 

What does scare him however, are the rising ticket prices, which are making it harder for young people to see shows. "What worries me is not that ticket prices are $100 but that the cheapest tickets in the house are approaching $80. When I was a kid, and I came in from Long Island, it was 7-10 bucks, and I could sit in the back row and see all the shows. I don't know how kids see them today, and that's definitely not great.

No, this isn't the Broadway of 1962 right now with Frank Loesser, Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim, Zero Mostel and Carol Channing, and blah, blah, blah, but there's certainly been many less interesting times so I think people should really cut Broadway a break. It's still putting up great new shows."

 

Aside from BROADWAY: The American Musical, Laurence on his own has just released a book of comedies by George S. Kaufman, that's been published by the Library of America. After a favorable review by Woody Allen in the New York Times, it's entered its second printing. Next up for Laurence and Michael will be another couple of projects he describes as "also being about performance in America." Can't wait!