Give my regards to Broadway....sing 'em loud and sing 'em proud! There's no business like show business and damn it..no tunes like show tunes! It's time to man up with a fishnet chorus line of Broadway show tunes. Damn the Ethel Merman torpedos, full Sondheim steam ahead. Don't worry about masculinity atrophied or your wrist gone limp...it's Broadway, and your a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day! Roy Scheider danced up a storm in All That Jazz, and did hand to hand combat with Jaws himself! Afraid you won't be a man anymore because you have an urge to hum or sing a gay white way tune...don't worry..and don't ask/don't tell William. It's overture time This is it, the night of nights...It's time for Henry Higgins to come out of your closet to liberate the Liberace that lurks by candelabra light in all of us..yes, you too!
The Great White Way and marquees ablaze, your name in lights, the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of crowd, the chorus girls, and yes, effeminate chorus boys too, fishnet stockings, tights with bulges battling, sweet nutcrackers and Desond tutu's...spotlights and orchestra pits...backstage frolic with onstage follies. If you think this is Pansylvania, think again. The baddest badass of the gangster era cinema, James Cagney was a hoofer who could go toe to toe tap dancing circles around Mr. Bojangles just sure as he could fire a tommy gun in a cinematic gangland war or shove a grapefruit in a lady's face. He did it in two dance films...Yankee Doodle Dandy and the West Point Story. A real man can crush a beer a can with one hand and make Busby Berkeley have an orgasm with a display of flawless manly choreography ...one, two, three kick...all backed by a legendary backline of high kicking long legs with thunder packed thighs dripping with sensuous sweat, attached to a fantasy female with spangles and tassles that sparkle and dangle.
Before Sondheim and the teachings of Lerner and the highs of Loewe, in the backwaters and ethel waters of the old wild west, Lilly Langtree brought beauty and charm to the dusty outback of America in such towns as Dodge City and Tombstone where guns and whores were as plentiful as longhorn steers in Texas, but culture itself was atrophied, and to be honest, the local yokels of the times wouldn't know culture if it bit them on the ass. These traveling nightingales would tune up their vocal chords and let loose a volley of "Beautiful Dreamer" in the towns opera house..every town worth it's salt had one just to prove they had culture by the balls, or as in most cowtowns..by the horns.
As the old west began to fade and get settled and the last stagecoach had been robbed in the late 19th Century there emerged the popular minstrel shows where tap dancing and blackface was the norm, and the post-reconstruction era lawn jockey was still the iconic lawn ornament from hell. African Americans, or Negroes or whatever term was used back then, I can't keep track of the ever changing anthropological classification, were not allowed on stages to perform as they did on the old plantations. Instead those with white skin in blackface would pantomime their way through stereotypical bits and racist routines as old as a backwoods still in old Virginny, while the film industry allowed black actors to appear finally before an audience in the age of Stepin Fetchit cinema where Bo Jangles danced a lick and Stepin..well...he fetched it!
The blackface crowd soon drifted down the mighty Mississippi River of nostalgia as vaudeville with it's slapstick and rimshots hit the circuit with schtick and stick. The Irish and the Jew now replaced the blackface minstrel, and the vaudedillian families of the Foys and the Cohans were royalty...the Crowned Heads of theater entertainment they combined song and dance...hoofers and songbirds. George M. Cohan put stage theatrics into orbit with dazzling pre-Busby Berkeley extravaganzas of song and dance that told a story...the first live "videos" if you really stretch your imagination...what? A story told with song and emphasized with dance numbers? Unheard of...until George summed it up succinctly in "Give My Regards to Broadway" unleashing the floodwaters as the shows raced to the theatrical track faster then you can say Yankee Doodle Dandy while humming "It's a Grand Old Flag" to boslter the homefront during WWI!
After the rockets red glare of patriotism died down following the First and the Second World Wars, stage plays from Our Town to Pygmalion made a hasty retreat as the Broadway Musical was now ready to take Broadway by storm. Musical explosions emanating from the Great White Way attracted crowds by the thousands and those jaunty showtunes soon became familiar fare as they wafted through the air, a honeysuckle fragrance to the ears, catchy tunes that captured the heart and became as familiar as certain parts of our own bodies that we got to know intimately in the privacy of our bedrooms in the dark!
George Bernard Shaw, was a curmudgeon and socialist with a cutting wit (inherited by Paul Lynde later) during the Victorian Age. He wrote the play we are most familiar with called "Pygmalion" in 1912 based on a mythological tale about an artist that fell in love with one of his sculptures that came to life. Although Shaw's play was eventually turned into "My Fair Lady" on stage and screen..the original version was actually written in 1871 by W.S. Gilbert called Pygmalion and Galatea, and later a burlesque version called Pygmalion Reversed, well prior to Shaws satirical version was unleashed on an unsuspecting public.
Pygmalion spawned "My Fair Lady" which made it's stage debut in 1965 with pompous to perfection Rex Harrison and the enticing innocence of Julie Andrews, but it was based on the 1938 film version of "Pygmalion" starring Leslie Howard as Professor Henry Higgins..or is it 'Enry 'Iggins? Poor poor Professor Higgins..he makes a bet with Col. Pickering, played in the 1964 film version by Wilfred Hyde White that he can turn Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl into a lady. You remember, repeat after me..."The Rain In Spain..Falls Mainly on the Plain" a subtle undercurrent of Svengalism and dominance permeate the storyline, with Eliza finally realizing her own potential and power. But the songs..."Why Can't A Woman Be More Like a Man" and "All I Want Is a Room Somewhere" and not the least of my favorites..."I'm Getting Married in the Morning" sung by Eliza's dad portrayed by Stanley Holloway are definite crowd pleasers.
From the streets of Victorian-Jack The Ripper Londons East End, Broadway indulged itself with the flamboyant "West Side Story" where the urban battleground of two gangs - the blue collar Polish American Jets versus the immigrant Sharks from Puerto Rico were the backdrop for a Romeo and Juliet romance set amidst a stage of urban decay, switchblades and guns where Tony, the white guy, finds love in the heart of Maria, the Puerto Rican...a turf war threatens to keep them divided but as always...the Montagues and the Capulets could not stem the flow of the rivulet and the flood of passion between the two.
It won the Best Musical Award of 1957, the year it debuted, and no wonder, it was directed and choregraphed by jazzy Jerome Robbins, music by the inimitable Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Steven Sondheim. In the play and the film, Tony a former Jets gang member falls in love with Mario, the sister of Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks. Love wins over guns, and the gangs give a demonstration of lavish dance numbers that would make the Bloods and the Crips wince. It ran for over 700 Braodway performances before hitting the road and going on tour and ran even longer on the London stage. Once again, the yanks were coming, the yanks were coming! In 1961 the film adaptation hit the silver screen with Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, George Chakiris (A Greek actor playing a Puerto Rican) Russ Tamblyn and Rita Moreno. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won 10!
Russ Tamblyn could dance as though he were made of a composite of elastic and rubber, a gangland Stretch Armstrong and Rita Moreno doing her best skirt lifting leg showing steps was as fireball sexy Latina hot as they come...on fire causing a burning yearning sensation in a mans groin as she took gyrating and thrusting to a sexual plateau to the tune of "Everything's Free In America"
Other musicals of the era included "The Music Man", "The King and I" , and then...came the dawning of the age of Aquarius and the ultmate hip show...."Hair" with nudity and music...the two basic food groups of hungry Broadway theater goers...of course nudity goes with french fries as far as I am concerned so whereever I can get a taste..I'm in!
Speaking of Jesus Christ, Broadway witnessed a second coming of Jesus Christ or in this case Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer who could actaully walk on Broadway water, who dressed Joseph up in a technicolor coat and made Jesus Christ into a Superstar on a par with Ozzie Osbourne. Later the old Lon Chaney silent film"Phantom of the Opera" was given a musical makeover to augment the gruesome persona and the phantom was now socially acceptible and you could bring him home to mother. Weber also had Evita tell Argentina not to cry for her, and proved that Cats do indeed have memories and that the play Cats had more than nine lives.
Although the Broadway stage has been home to the somewhat traditional musical offerings there have been projects that appealed to the ka-boomer generation such as Tommy..the worlds first billed Rock Opera, Sweeney Todd, Rocky Horror Picture Show - where the audience is as much a part of the action as Tim Curry is in a bra and panties, and most recently the musical version of the cult classic "Reefer Madness"...and you thought culture was dead and buried...not on your life...it just inhaled!
All Hail Ethel Merman, and when Warner Bros. cartoon characters break out into song singing.."this is it, the night of nights..." grab your best pair of fishnet tights...and let loose a vocal volley...remember...don't ask..don't tell...but above all never mind what others may think of you and your manhood...just smile and keep a stiff upper lip...and be tall and proud as you show off your truly limp wrist!!! It's Showtime Gang...one..two..three...kick...one...two...three...kick!