Celebrating Broadway's Best

By Frank Rich

Musical Comedy Tonight, Oct. 1, PBS, 8p.m.

Without the American musical theater there might not be any American theater. Except for a very occasional O'Neill or Williams, the great writers of the U.S. stage have not been playwrights but composers and lyricists: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, to name but a few. Beginning with the first modern musical, Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's Show Boat (1927), these writers have created a durable and increasingly versatile native art form. Broadway musicals at their best fuse music, dance, drama and plain old show biz into total theater.

Musical Comedy Tonight is a serious attempt to explain just how the American musical grew up. The show's host and creator, Sylvia Fine Kaye, is a songwriter (for her husband Danny) and a teacher (at the University of Southern California and Yale). Her TV special is a canny amalgam of entertainment and history. Over 90 minutes the audience watches 14 numbers from typical musicals of different eras: Good News (1927), Anything Goes (1934), Oklahoma! (1943) and Company (1970). In between, Kaye describes the genesis and innovations of each show, augmenting her observations with demonstrations at the piano and interviews with Broadway veterans who helped create the originals.

The numbers are exceptionally well done. Rather than restage them for television--a deflating technique endemic to PBS's Theater in America series--Kaye shoots them on a proscenium stage, usually with the help of the original set designs, orchestrations and choreography.

At times she even enlists the original performers: Ethel Merman belts Anything Goes and Gemze de Lappe dances Oklahoma!'s dream ballet as if these shows had never closed. Bobby Van and Bernadette Peters, who were not born when Good News opened, summon up the sentimental performing style of the '20s so well that their rendition of The Best Things in Life Are Free is surprisingly touching. There is also an unexpectedly fine turn from John Davidson, whose Vegas slickness dissipates when he leads the chorus in Oklahoma! Only Carol Burnett and Sandy Duncan disappoint: their broad delivery blunts the wit and anger of two Sondheim songs from Company.

Kaye's enthusiastic narration packs in as many anecdotes as possible. She describes Rodgers' legendary composing speed (ten minutes for Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin') and nudges Merman into an unflattering reminiscence of Porter's voice ("He sang like a hinge"). With the aid of Choreographer Agnes de Mille, Kaye re-creates the excitement kindled by Oklahoma!, the first musical to integrate all its songs into a story. A few of Kaye's points are debatable. She sweepingly dismisses rock musicals, even though rock is not necessarily incompatible with musical theater. (Indeed, the Beatles sang a song from The Music Man on their first hit American album.) Kaye's list of ground-breaking shows ignores such obvious candidates as Porgy and Bess, Pal Joey, The Most Happy Fella, West Side Story and Follies. She should get around to these soon. Musical Comedy Tonight is billed as the pilot for a series. By rights, it ought to run as long as the great musicals it celebrates.

-- Frank Rich

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