The Great White Way has played host to countless tragedies and comedies. Only a small minority ever appear on stage. You would think 70 years of that would automatically make for exciting reading. Think again.
Brooks Atkinson was not only a veteran of many decades when he wrote this thick history about the Manhattan midtown mecca for theatrical entertainment. He was himself a Broadway institution, having given his name to a theater on West 47th Street. That he knew and loved so many of those he wrote about is part of the problem.
If you want capsule commentaries on some of the greatest dramas and dramatic actors of the first half of the 20th century, you could do worse than skim through Atkinson’s breathlessly hyperbolic prose. If you want to know what it was like some night getting a contact high from the bustle of musicals and comedies around you, you wind up feeling flat.
It is drama he celebrates, in its most elevated and somber form. A word he frequently uses is “taste,” which in Atkinson’s phrasing comes off as a codeword for people like him, the cultural elite.
All you need to know about this book is its author hates George M. Cohan, that Yankee Doodle Dandy himself. Too much of a showman, and not a pal of unions. Leave it to a New York Timesman to sneer at a beloved entertainer for his lack of progressivism.
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| George M. Cohan's famous statue on Times Square, as it stands today, irked Atkinson for celebrating Broadway mediocrity. He notes the irony that a much greater artist in his view, Oscar Hammerstein II, helped finance the statue's installation. Image from https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/george-m-cohan-statue-at-time-square-manhattan-broadway-new-york-manhattan-new-york-gm805515714-130697009 |
In his overview of 1900-1915, Atkinson loses few opportunities to remind us whatever Americans ever did wasn’t good enough:
At a time when English, European, and Russian dramatists were writing like men of talent and ideas, even the best American plays contained a large infusion of claptrap, and were accepted as art because they obviously had nothing to do with life.
With this, battle lines are set. For Atkinson, a theme emerges early and is repeated often; that Broadway has always been cursed by its pursuit of success and applause rather than elevating the tastes of its audience to the level of its creators. After a few chronologically haphazard chapters, the narrative devolves into a kaleidoscope of names and play titles with flashy superlatives affixed to each like tails on kites.
For Atkinson, the Broadway that succeeded too often isn’t the Broadway worth celebrating. His preference is for less escapism, more authenticity: “Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlights have to unite in making the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.”
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| For showman Flo Ziegfeld, nothing mattered quite like the women he put on stage, but the songs counted, too. "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody," introduced in 1919's Ziegfeld Follies, helped establish Irving Berlin as a prime contributor to the Great American Songbook. Image from https://hometownstohollywood.com/book-reviews/biographies/ziegfeld-and-his-follies/#jp-carousel-28157 |
For him, the best people on Broadway were not mere clowns or mechanics but noble of spirit, with their hearts in the right place. On S. N. Berhman, author of successes like No Time For Comedy and The Cold Wind and The Warm, he writes:
For the gayety and charm of his comedies are only the polished surfaces of a concerned American whose heart has never been as light, sophisticated, and good-humored as his literary style. He is a skeptic; he does not believe the slogans; he believes in a civilized behavior.
A more combustive personality, like Lillian Hellman, is rendered similarly stultifying by Atkinson’s stuffy prose:
In the valiant person of Miss Hellman, the depression and the brutal conquest by Hitler and Mussolini produced a major dramatist. She had the hatred and fearlessness, the clarity and independence, to deal with the major evils.
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| Joseph Holland as the title character in Caesar (1937), which introduced Broadway to the Mercury Theater and its young leader, Orson Welles. An immediate sensation, it left Atkinson cold. "No one questioned the plain vitality of the production, but many people were confused by its ideology," he shrugs. Image from https://ronfassler.medium.com/mercury-in-retrograde-c5e86879c9dc |
Time and again, Atkinson pauses over the career of some luminary’s misty legacy to ponder their good nature and liberal social beliefs, as if those alone lend the right luster to their corpus. He occasionally allows that a writer of uncommon left-wing zeal may have missed the mark by being too polemical; mostly he blames the Broadway audiences for favoring shows for their enjoyability quotient.
This despite evidence showing Broadway could welcome the works he prefers. Take Eugene O’Neill, a playwright Atkinson championed during his heyday reviewing shows for The New York Times. O’Neill’s Strange Interlude tested audiences with its five-hour running time, not including dinner break. Yet it ran on Broadway for 17 months.
For Atkinson, an emphasis on the inauthenticity of most Broadway success stories negatively colors his narrative: “Although American playwrights may have been intelligent and attractive people, they wrote mechanical devices that could be exploited by actors whose personalities and styles were familiar to the public.”
As far as the musicals were concerned, they were often duller in construction. “Nothing was unique in the American musical theater until Jerome Kern started to write his famous Princess Theater musicals in 1915,” he scoffs. All earlier musicals ever did in his view was serve as launching pads for songs while chorus girls pranced across the stage.
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| The arrival of Oklahoma! in 1943 - its titular exclamation point a sign of the producers' desperation, Atkinson notes - signaled a new era where musicals featured songs relevant to the characters who sung them. It also brought in another era - of blockbuster business. Image from https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/this-day-history-march-31-1943-oklahoma-debuts-broadway |
One senses a story Atkinson is ignoring, or Broadway would never have become so important to our arts and culture. Occasionally his starchy front slips to reveal more did matter to him. Vaudeville, for example, earns some surprising favor; it was variety-show theater, sure, but Atkinson recounts its ability to launch famous comics and other luminaries by serving as a harsh but constructive testing ground.
Other comics got their starts on Broadway musical revues, which Atkinson reviled. In 1924 what Atkinson calls “an awful musical comedy” called I’ll Say She Is introduced the Marx Brothers:
Inside the boxlike structure of Broadway stages, the buffoonery of the Marx Brothers was explosive. The standard musical show gave them a perfect setting. It was the right atmosphere for fantasy, and on Broadway they were fantastic.
At least when it came to the Marx Brothers, fantasy was enough. In most parts of Broadway, Atkinson can’t seem to get behind that concept.
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| Lynne Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, Broadway's first couple for decades, depicted by Al Hirschfeld in 1958. Atkinson found them admirable if bland: "In the sinful pranks on which they liked to squander their genius, the Lunts played their scenes together in the style of the chicken coop - balancing the strut of the rooster against the bland mischief of the hen." Image from https://ronfassler.medium.com/the-lunts-final-visit-83243d187cb2 |
His tired dogmatism even spoils appreciation for popular entertainments he liked. Carousel, the 1945 musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, is highlighted for ushering in an era of psychodrama with winning tunes. Other times, a great play does its best work by putting down the dross offered in neighboring theaters:
When Broadway was at its best, the awful plays were still in the majority. But they seemed more ridiculous in comparison with the best. After Desire Under the Elms, it was impossible to sit through three acts of Abie’s Irish Rose or keep from groaning at Love’s Call.
Atkinson’s cattiness can make for some entertaining moments, but it also drags down a 450-page reading experience with his overt snobbery. That he touts a lot of forgotten playwrights and actors can not be helped – this was published over 50 years ago – but his plush praises read more hollowly now, from a distance.
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| The new sensation on Broadway when Atkinson's book came out was Hair, which introduced theatergoers to rock music and full-frontal nudity. Atkinson approved: "Hair was populated with a harum-scarum band of hippies who turned out to be innocent and likeable young people." Photo by Larry Ellis from https://www.npr.org/2018/05/01/607339204/hair-at-50-going-gray-but-its-youthful-optimism-remains-bouncy-and-full-bodied |
At the time Broadway was published, Broadway itself was in rough shape. In the 1969-1970 season, Atkinson notes, there were only 11 productions and two hits underway. Nearly half of Broadway theaters had gone dark. He suggests it is only a matter of time before real estate values put paid to anything theatrical on the Great White Way.
One wonders how, then, it survived as long as it did. Or how it survives to this day. Atkinson sure loved the theater, but with all his brainpower he didn’t seem to have had a clue why Broadway ever mattered.
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