Lawrence of Arabia--the new Broadway musical

The opening line of one of Joe Queenan's culture commentaries is, “CATS is very, very, very, very, very bad.” And he's being generous. I saw Les Miserables in London and it was very, very miserable. I know better than to see Phantom of the Opera, Aspects of Love, Stardust Express and CATS no matter how much money they make for Andrew Paine Webber, I mean Andrew Lloyd Webber, I was thinking of his bank account. Phantom has done $5.6 billion, with a B. I can't object to Sir Andrew's golden touch, I just think the source of these musicals is wrong. They are built on a financial model. There are no “stars”, no memorable score, just high-priced tickets and buses unloading the middle-aged groups from the burbs. They're beautiful and dead, certainly joyless.These sort of pretentious productions were spoofed wonderfully by Mel Smith in his film “The Tall Guy” where, if you can believe it, they put on a musical of the poor crippled Elephant Man. Someone asked Stephen Sondheim if he didn't approve of these more operatic musicals and he said, “no, I don't, all that recitative with a song stitched in every now and then isn't the kind of musical I like...a song has to appear at precisely the right time with memorable music and lyrics.” By the way, it was Sir Andrew who called “My Fair Lady” the perfect musical. Now we have a London production of Lawrence of Arabia*. It's about an American girl, Sarah Lawrence who ventures into the desert to find her long lost lover Sandy Hill. It has a love song “Dancing Sheik to Sheik”; a light number “Put on a happy fez”and a rousing show stopper: “The camels are coming, hooray, hooray”. How stuff like Billy Elliott made lt in America I'll never know. It's about a foul-mouthed brat who wants to show off in dancing shoes. Nothing from over there can match the witty lyrics of Larry Hart or Ira Gershwin or the brilliant score of “West Side Story” or the score and lyrics of Frank Loesser.. While I'm at it I'll relate an incident from a toney Manhattan salon recital. I volunteered a story about Irving Berlin sending a note to Cole Porter on the opening of “Kiss Me Kate”. Turning one of his hit songs from “Annie Get Your Gun” inside out he wrote “Anything I can do you can do better”. The lady across the table from me smiled and said, “yes, daddy used to tell us about that”. It was one of Berlin's daughters echoing the immortal voice of the true Broadway. *At least in my mind.

You can't be a Catholic and a grownup

That's one of Orwell's “hard truths”. It's in the same vein as Marx's “religion is the opium of the people” and Freud's assertion that religious believers display a “persistent neurosis”. But hey, we must always look on the bright side as the Monty Python group sang. Woody Allen, a latter day philosopher said once, “traffic in midtown Manhattan is very congested today, is the Pope or some other show business personality in town?” So now we have the first Francis but it could have been otherwise. We could have had Francis Albert Sinatra. Don Rickles says that he and Dean and Sammy worked tirelessly to get Frank made Pope. “That way,” he said, “we'd only have to kiss his ring.”

You become what you behold

That ominous insight is from cultural guru Marshall McLuhan, and if true we are in big trouble. Our television and movie fare is red in tooth and claw now. Time magazine says that TV dramas have become addicted to blood. It is drowning in dumb, mindless violence. Cinemax's “Strike Force” has already stacked up 208 corpses in one season. Time also diagnoses the creative ways of the grim reaper: impaling, knifing, poisoning, stabbing and in “Game of Thrones” strapping buckets of rats to prisoner's chests, stolen from Orwell's torture scene in “1984”. The NY Times says that gore flows freely in both broadcast and cable. It also points out that it is absurd to pretend that a gun culture is unrelated to popular culture. Is this how we escape from boredom? The late Neil Postman said we were “amusing ourselves to death”. We're not amused. This is our living rooms we're talking about and I, for one, have disinvited these monsters into our home. The Times says that Americans love to watch death, even when it's real. “Some can gaze and not be sick, But I could never learn the trick. There's this to be said for blood and breath, They give a man a taste for death.” A.E Housman

A nicer sort of murder

In Orwell's essay “Decline of the English murder” he details how murder seemed to be changing and becoming an “ordinary” event. Murders had moved from poisoning, mainly by the middle class (see Agatha Christie) to murders done with the utmost callousness and brutality. No more deeds done for insurance money or marital affairs or just good old fashioned envy. In another essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish” he chronicles the descent from Raffles, the charming jewel thief, to poor Miss Blandish who is raped and killed in a cold-blooded way. He attributes this to modern events such as mass killing of innocent civilians, hostages, torture, flogging and treachery as normal and morally neutral events. Today these events are seen as admirable when done by the CIA. We now live in a country that worships guns, especially the weapons of mass destruction used in places like Newtown. They're consecrated in the Constitution, the same document that offers the pursuit of happiness. If you watch television today you are treated to a visit to the morgue or a ghastly autopsy with your dinner or late night snack. Too many corpses; too many sex crimes, too much Freud and Krafft-Ebbing without the redeeming things Orwell said these plots should be about such as real social wrongs, economic injustice and plain decency and justice. On the nightly news 6 year olds are gunned down and a pimp firing shots on the Vegas Strip kills 3 innocent people. I have found an escape from this dreadful drivel to a foreign language channel called MHZ. It features a cop named Brunetti in Venice, Maigret in Paris and DeLuca, a tenacious policeman who has to do his job in WWII Italy. There's even a detective priest named Don Matteo whose only weapons are compassion and human insight. The writing is better because the stories are from literature and always have a moral point of view, not the stuff the overhyped TV hacks serve up today. And the narrative is not constantly interrupted by commercials. These men have to walk down the same mean streets as Phillip Marlowe and Harry Bosch but the boulevards and canals are a lot less mean. These men have charm, intelligence and dedication to justice and they very rarely carry firearms. It's just a safer, saner place over there. So, if you hear an Englishman say, “I could murder some Chinese”, don't take alarm, it only means that he'd like to attack a plate of Moo Goo Gai Pan.