July 7, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon responds to Fred Schwarz’s unhappy reaction to watching a film of the musical 1776 (film version, 1972) by noting that most films of musicals are pretty awful. Mr. Gordon grants two exceptions, Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret (film version also 1972) and their Chicago (film version, 2002). I agree that those are both brilliant examples of musicals surviving adaptation to film, and I can think of some others (Marat/Sade, if that is not cheating, and the film of Guys and Dolls has its pleasures). In any case, Mr. Gordon tactfully avoids judging the question of how bad a musical 1776 is in its unfilmed version. Fred Schwarz notes that it “opened on Broadway in 1969 and ran for several years. . . . I had to wonder how such a pro-war, flag-waving musical could have been so popular. Were audiences supposed to see the plucky, underdog, guerrilla-fighting American colonists in the role of the North Vietnamese?” I have never seen the film and I do not know what I would make of the staged play if I saw it now, but I did see 1776 when it came out, not because it was thought to be a brilliant musical, but because my parents took us to see a fair amount of theater, musical and otherwise; they had both grown up in the city, and although they then lived in one of its suburbs, going to a lot of plays was still something a fair number of New Yorkers did. I do not remember hating the musical—I was much moved by “Mama Look Sharp,” which did not seem to be a gung-ho prowar effusion, since it was sung by a an actor playing a dying teenage militiaman crying out for his mother—but the play was indeed patriotic, and I do not have much confidence in my theatrical connoisseurship at the age of 17. Looking at a Googled list of song titles from the original cast recording, I can distantly recall only a few scraps of five out of the ten songs, nothing at all of the others, and none other than “Mama Look Sharp” with any emotion; in cold print, the lyrics of many of the songs look appalling. Then again, the lyrics of “Mama Look Sharp” aren’t much when read on screen, without the music, and neither, for that matter, are the lyrics to Mozart and Da Ponte’s “Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro” or “Piú docile io sono,” when compared with their power when sung. I have seen Beaumarchais, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, and Sir Kenneth Clark all credited with the remark that “what is too silly to be said can still be sung,” and it is true. I have been pondering Fred Schwarz’s wonderment at 1776 doing so well in 1969, and I think one explanation may be that in 1969 antiwar sentiment among the Broadway-supporting classes had not reached a pitch and intensity that would make too many theatergoers sympathetic to the Howard Zinn school’s take on the Founders. There would come attempts to reimagine Americans as the Viet Cong—one such attempt came from the right, in John Milius’s 1984 movie Red Dawn—but 1969 was in some ways an innocent and quite traditionally patriotic era. The early-1970s dorm room political culture I described in a previous post, and to which Fred Schwarz refers, was still a minority political culture, and in most respects it would remain one. What would disappear from our mass culture would be as broad and vivid a memory of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political history as is presumed in both The Devil and Daniel Webster and 1776.
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