Corpsing

Ethan Mordden's fascinating and infuriatingly idiosyncratic series of books on the Broadway musical ends, chronologically, with The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen.  The title, which comes from the song "Cabaret," describes the era from 1980 to about five years ago.  His other books in the series take on the musical decade by decade, starting with the 1920s. (I'd recommend the series, though not as a starting point if you want to know about musicals.)

The guy certainly knows his stuff, and tells his story in a chatty yet erudite tone.  The introduction threatens that the book will be one long screed.  As he puts it, "this volume is a rant, in defense of an enlightened genre hijacked by pop.  Dreamgirls will leave you: with a cast of vapid kids phoning in sick as often as they can get away with."

Oddly, he doesn't follow through.  Looking over the past quarter century (in a fairly haphazard manner), he finds much of worth.  He even thinks highly of Dreamgirls.  Where's the rant he promised?

He sometimes attacks politically, which feels strange.  He's down with the Broadway agenda in general, but can sound like a cross conservative condemning how morality has fallen.  Actually, he's an old liberal disappointed in the morality of the new left.  In one of the more fascinating chapters, he looks at three shows that deal with killers (all with scores he likes). There's Paul Simon's The Capeman, a disgustingly amoral show about a horrendous murderer--all Simon cares about is the music, not what the guy did.  Next is Sondheim's Assassins, about a gallery of killers in American history.  The show has been attacked from the right, but Mordden recognizes it's trying to grapple with the subject.  Worst of all is Ragtime, based on the Doctorow novel, where it's assumed we'll sympathize with Coalhouse Walker, a character when looked at objectively is a relentless terrorist.

One thing that sets this volume apart--aside from the greater amount of years it deals with--is that past books in the series were about shows I knew, but never saw on Broadway.  This time around, I read about a fair number of productions I personally witnessed. (That's the difference between writing about theatre versus movies--for the latter, the author can assume the reader has had the same experience.) Alas, I agree with Mordden in general (though often not specifically) that musicals aren't what they used to be.  We're in a post-modern age, when musicals are self-conscious, even decadent.  Too aware of their place in history, rather than part of a thriving art form.

But people still write them. And sometimes they're fun.  That's still what counts.