Limited

 I've come across three pieces that made me laugh, not with a 'that was good" laugh, but with that slightly out-of-control laughter that humbles as it delights. They were, in order of appearance, the movie 20th Century Limited, starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard; a documentary on Sid Caesar and Your Show of Shows; and in internet-viral fashion, Avenue Q, specifically the song "The Internet is for Porn."

I'd known about the Broadway play, but never seen the movie--it was Lombard's big break, and it was John Barrymore at the height of his powers. Barrymore was hysterical--but he played a self-aggrandizing, lunatic, manipulative figure who was at the same time really a great actor--something very different from a buffoon, and Lombard portrayed someone explosively similar. And on top of that it's a well-constructed play, with all sorts of wonderfully absurd business going on around the main action, and nice floridly drawn supporting characters. It's full of little surprises.  (neither Howard Hawks nor Ben Hecht hurt it a bit.)

The Caesar documentary was typically done, and well put together--with the difference that the old bits were hysterical. Not all of them, but most of the sketches just pinned me to the mat. I had seen some of them, but even the ones I had seen hit me again.

And as I was led to a really pretty amusing political video (the song 'One More Day' from Les Miserables set in the Obama campaign offices) I saw a a clip entitled The Internet Is For Porn - Harry Potter, which pushed my easily-amused button. The Potter clips were only moderately well synced, but the song was tremendous, leading me to the original, and discovering that the show (done with quasi-Muppets) had won the Tony in 2003.

Three pieces, all emanating, more or less, from the same now-ghostly source, reminding me just how important Broadway was.

Before I discovered Rock and Roll, the musical world was all show tunes. Sure, there were generic kids' songs and moderate exposure to classical pieces, and my older brother had The Kingston Trio, the Smothers Brothers and Johnny Horton, but what my folks had was show tunes and it was what I responded to. 

Growing up north of New York City, one thing I remember whenever I took the train into the city was that the posters on the platform were all (it seemed) for Broadway shows: from Fiddler on the Roof to She Loves Me to Promises, Promises to Tenderloin to  Cabaret to Fiorello! And every year there were 4,5,6 big new shows. We were struggling too much to go to see any of them (and we kids were not to be trusted anyway) but we got the Original Cast Recordings eventually and the sheet music The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd was denied me, but the music was a glamor by itself.

And by the time I was old enough to start writing musicals of my own, it was effectively over.

(That's not what prevented my stellar career: my first two musicals were pretty bad, although the music was decent. Halfway decent.)

Of course, Broadway was much more than musicals, and by the time of 20th Century Limited, Hollywood was inevitably taking over the mantle of glamor as well as the people. And both Broadway and Hollywood were romanticizing the transition. Stage actors were becoming movie stars and playing stage actors;  playwrights were turning into screenwriters adapting plays. It was wonderful.

For all the mass distribution of movies, Broadway was the center. It was not only wit and bravura, it was still glamor. Even though seeing a Broadway show was a simple impossibility for nearly all Americans, it was still the source of entertainment for America, and Hollywood ceaselessly evoked the sparkling dust of Broadway. 

One thing I realized while mulling all this over is that, while the Broadway stage enthusiastically wrote about the Broadway stage, and Hollywood wrote about the Broadway stage, Hollywood very rarely wrote about moviemaking. The life of Hollywood? Incessantly. But focusing on the actual process of the making of movies the way they talked about the physical stage, the curtains, the footlights, the rehearsals? Not really. The only major film that comes to mind that's really about moviemaking is Singin' In The Rain, and that's a weird movie in many ways. When Hollywood treated Hollywood, it was often adapting Broadway's jaundiced treatment of Hollywood with cockeyed enthusiasm. On the other hand, such magnificent movie-star movies as Cover Girl and Down To Earth (which I think of because of my hopeless infatuation with Rita Hayworth) are set on Broadway. When the Muse Terpsichore descends from Mr. Jordan's Heaven to save the day, she doesn't descend to Hollywood but to Broadway.

There's a reason for this, why Hollywood continued to reach to Broadway, both in mythology and substance--and that's because a Broadway show is a cohesive human act, while a Hollywood movie is an abstract technical phenomenon. (Singin' In The Rain was all about that artificiality.) Theater movies are like (ugh) sports movies, because a play performance is a real effort made in real time, that could succeed or fail, and it can end in glory. And almost all the effects of a stage play are human effects, while that's a lot less true for a movie. Ultimately, while the American people clearly prefer movies to plays, they envision most movies as plays. 

Broadway was always more elitist than Hollywood: citified, witty, elegant and sharp by turns--but it was also more grounded, more physical, more humanly active. Broadway was the distant cultural capital of America before America's cultural capital became nowhere--but anybody could do what they did. The distance between Broadway and No Corners , Idaho was that of the erudition and skill of an ancient art, the connection with old learning and current thought--but it was a difference of degree, not of kind. John Barrymore the Broadway Star was somebody you say and heard and therefore met in an attenuated fashion, but John Barrymore the movie star and Rita Hayworth and  Gary Cooper and  Carole Lombard were gods behind the screen. Hollywood was not really a place in California because going to the local Odeon or Lux or Strand or Palace theater put you closer to the movies than going to LA. Close physically but different in concept. And TV made our cultural capital nowhere at all.

It's inevitable that all this made the live theater of the Broadway stage a marginal thing. You know, the domain of snobs, academics, earnest young bohemians and homosexuals. But that's neither fair nor entirely true. To be sure, we've gotten out of the habit of going to live theater as a nation, and there are a lot of theater partisans who espouse it because it's not movies or TV--because it can't be shared. But the mass media still hungers for, and is periodically revived by, the skills that only come by real theater work in real time as part of a real bunch of awed primates huddled under the arch of a dark cave and all participating in the telling of a story. It's my cynical belief that the Broadway theater shrunk and partly died not because of television but because New York became that much less livable. ('Specially for poor actors.) You'll pardon my chauvinism, but theater in Chicago (where you could still live on a waiter's wages) not only flourished (and does yet) but energized the abstract media from Second City (which birthed both SCTV and Saturday Night Live--down to the stars emerging from the Steppenwolf theater company (like Gary Sinise, John Malkovich, Loan Allen and Glenne Headly) and the audacious productions staged by Robert Falls and Frank Galati.) 

We like our democratic ways, and we like our universal access. But if we refuse to go to the theatah or buy into the rarefied self-congratulating romance of the Big Cave, we still need what it does. We still need to be touched by means we recognize, by song and dance and snappy patter and pratfalls and clowning. And that means that Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca can walk in from the Catskills, or John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd barrel in from the stage over Piper's Alley, or a bunch of guys with Muppets start singing about porn and racism, and walk onto the mythic stage where the Barrymores once ruled America, and still be greeted with the applause of a grateful nation.