Musical Hokum

The Same Old Jazzes in the Same Old Way

Within a month the annual Spring Drive of musical comedies will be at ts height. By the first of June the hot weather revues will have usurped the roof gardens, the showmen of the metropolis will have banished serious drama from the theatre on the ancient theory that winter is the only time of year when the public cares to have its mind stimulated or its emotions massaged. All of which provokes one to philosophize on the musical show as a form of entertainment.

Why is it that dramatic critics will spend a thousand words analyzing a bad play and dismiss the best musical comedy with a paragraph ? Is it mere snobbishness and highbrow affectation that makes them assume that no musical show, however good, is worthy of their heavy artillery? One is inclined to think that this is not altogether the case. Most musical shows are produced by men of stereotyped minds and artistic ignorance who follow the same formulae year after year in the same unimaginative way. Its resistance to change and innovation is stronger than that of a Buddhist Llama and its prevailing keynote is a dreary monotone. Not that the plot, libretto, " novelties," lyrics, jokes and chorus numbers of the same musical comedy that has been masquerading on Broadway 20 times a season for the last ten years under various aliases was not once pretty good stuff; the trouble is that it will not cease its "damned iteration." Consequently those reviewers who must witness over a hundred plays a season and are fed up with the sight of shopworn chorus numbers are compell-- to depend for amusement on the personality of the comedian.

That this is due to plain laziness and lack of ability and is not out of consideratioin for the demands of the somewhat mythical T.B.M. is demonstrated by the work of Florenz Ziegfeld and John Murray Anderson. The genius of these two gentlemen is responsible for raising the general level of musical revues in America far above that of any other country. They refused to subscribe to the trade dictum that people like the old jokes best, or that the old tunes can be polished up to look like new, or that stage sets designed by a scenic factory are for all practical purposes as effective as those designed by artists like Joseph Urban and Robert Locher. In short, they do not make the mistake of underrating public taste and intelligence.