Past perfect
Which do you prefer? The send-up or the source? The satire or the thing spoofed? I ask because of an extraordinary conjunction of events. One night recently I went to The Drowsy Chaperone at the Novello which had everyone, except me, giggling into their G ‘n’ Ts. The next night I was in Chichester for Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms which had the whole audience, myself included, dancing on air. The difference was incredible. The West End show invited superior laughter; the one in Chichester took us rapturously out of our selves.
Obviously there is room for musical satire. The late and much-lamented Dick Vosburgh and Frank Lazarus some years back did a smashing show called A Day in Hollywood, A Night in the Ukraine which re-created the madcap world of Marx Brothers movies. It played in small venues and loved what it lampooned. The Drowsy Chaperone, however, is a large-scale show caught in a vice of its own making. On the one hand, it suggests there is something a bit sad about lonely, cardiganed men playing LPs of forgotten musicals; on the other, it implies the kind of 1920s show the hero conjures up had a reckless gaiety we have long since lost.
I don’t want to bang on about a production many people enjoyed. My real point is about the attitude we bring to theatre. For me, imaginative immersion wins hands down over knowing self-consciousness. You could easily argue that Babes in Arms is just as dotty as the show satirised in The Drowsy Chaperone. It deals, after all, with a group of summer stock interns who rebel against a dire civil-war melodrama by devising a revue of their own. As in the famous Busby Berkeley movie, you wonder how they manage to create the choreography, costumes and sophisticated routines at a moment’s notice.
But the whole point about Babes in Arms is that it is based on something real. It originated when Rodgers and Hart were strolling through Central Park in 1936 and came across a group of kids in a playground making up their own games and rules. A defiant hymn to American youth and an assault on an inherited culture, it tapped into the idealism and optimism of the Roosevelt years. The show, which has never been seen in the West End, also exudes that Ecstasy that I recently claimed in this column was the supreme quality of the musical. How can anyone resist a number like “I Wish I Were in Love Again”, where Hart’s lyrics brilliantly define romantic passion by the friction it creates? Not even Sondheim at his best can evoke sexual tension quite as succinctly as Hart in a line like “the faint aroma of performing seals”. Couple this with a lilting Rodgers melody and the result is close to musical heaven.
“The past,” we are told in The Go-Between, “is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. Maybe so. But it’s a country I am happy to re-visit. So I’d like to put in a plea for the vintage period musicals of Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart and countless others. At the moment, the best chance of discovering them is in the admirable Lost Musicals series at Sadler’s Wells or in the annual summer show staged by Martin Connor at the Guildhall School. But I wager there is a non-specialist audience out there that would relish the chance to see these old shows. For proof, you only have to look at the triumph of Babes in Arms, which had people dancing out into the Sussex dusk brimming with celestial happiness.
