Reviews by Brandon Judell
Broadway by the Year: The Broadway Musicals of 1933
Created, Written and hosted by Scott Siegel
Directed by Ray Roderick
Produced by The Town Hall Not Just Jazz Series
123 West 43rd Street
212-382-1875
One night only: March 18, 2002
Next in series: April 15, 2002, May 13, 2002, and June 10, 2002
Reviewed by Brandon Judell
A year ago I wrote, "a new tradition might just have commenced in the Big
Apple the other night." Nostradamus couldn't have been more correct.
The almost sprightly Scott Siegel, a well-respected cabaret, film and theater critic, plus co-author of a bio on Winona Ryder before her shoplifting escapades (talk about bad timing), initiated last year a series of evening soirees. Each spotlighted a specific year on Broadway. Held at the gloriously acoustical Town Hall, each featured several standout performers with theater and cabaret backgrounds singing songs from musical SROs and disasters from that specific 365-day period.
The initial outing focused on 1943. This meant A Connecticut Yankee, One Touch of Venus, Something or the Boys, What's Up, The Ziegfeld Follies of 1943, Carmen Jones, plus Oklahoma got their due. A more sating selection of familiar and obscure tunes could hardly be imagined.
This night the series jumped back a decade to 1933, a rather troubled year for Broadway and the world. But not for food. In a mere 12 months, we got our first tastes of canned pineapple juice, 7-Up, Sunsweet prune juice, V8, and the Waldorf salad. We also got Franklin Roosevelt as President plus the 20th and 21st Amendments. The latter ended Prohibition.
As for Europe, Hitler became chancellor of Europe and was greeted with glee by Walter Lippmann, one of America's top columnists, who insisted Hitler wanted peace and Jews caused their own suffering. The Christian Science Monitor reported that most Jews were not being "in any way molested." And Theodore Dreiser noted, "My real quarrel with the Jew is not that he is in efficient or ignorant or even unaesthetic. It is really that he is too clever and too dynamic in his personal and racial attack on all other types of persons and races." Dreiser went on to say the Jews could overcome their problems by gathering in a state of their own. Little did he know. And little has the anti-Semitism in the press changed. Well, maybe nowadays it's more enshrouded.
But Broadway in 1933, unlike Hollywood, was in financial and creative straits. (Only 13 new musicals opened. This was considered disastrous at the time.) This state of affairs didn't stop Siegel from coming up with a hugely absorbing, widely varied evening of song and wit.
On the stage again were the scintillatingly rhythmic musical director Ross Patterson on piano plus his The Ross Patterson Little Big Band. At the podium, Siegel held court with a well-turned narrative. Imagine a cute Ed Sullivan on a vitamin-rich personality IV. The audience adored him.
As for the night's songsters, there was the powerhouse comedienne Mary Testa from "42nd Street," the debonair George Dvorsky last seen in "The Scarlet Pi mpernel," the marvelous Mary Bond Davis, recently in "The Women," the understated Mark Coffin, and if you are a soprano fanatic, Anne Runolfsson (James Joyce's "The Dead").
A major highlight came from the Broadway flop, "Three Penny Opera." Yes, it flopped back then, no doubt due its unevenly translated lyrics. (We had to wait eleven more years for Marc Blitzstein to get it right.) Still, Marc Coffin took on this "The Legend of Mackie Messer," telling the tale of the vicious Macheath with a tantalizing restraint that made his take all the more diabolical. The crowd went wild.
From the Jerome Kern/Otto Harbach musical "Roberta," Testa insisted "I'll Be Hard to Handle." No one would even try to argue otherwise, she was that persuasive. And Runolfsson did well with "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," the teary ballad that Kern originally wrote as a tap dance.
Miss Davis had the Hall all a jitter with "My Cousin in Milwaukee" from the Gershwins' "Pardon My English." And the Gershwins got much applause also for their wry political send-up "Union Square" from "Let 'Em Eat Cake."
Other musicals represented included "Blackbirds of 1934," "Champagne Sec" with music by Johann Strauss, Sigmund Romberg and Irving Caeser's Melody, Irving Berlin's "As Thousands Cheer," "Strike Me Pink," "Murder at the Vanities," and "Hold Your Horses."
But don't hold your horses. Over a thousand series tickets have been sold already, leaving only a hundred or so seats available at the next three events, which highlight the years of 1940, 1951, and 1964. If you love Broadway past and present, these future events are a must-see. [Judell]
Copyright © Brandon Judell 2002
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