Andrew McKie

A right song and dance

The first Broadway musical that I saw, a quarter of a century ago, actually on Broadway, wasn’t, of course, actually on Broadway; it was on West 44th Street.

The first Broadway musical that I saw, a quarter of a century ago, actually on Broadway, wasn’t, of course, actually on Broadway; it was on West 44th Street.

The first Broadway musical that I saw, a quarter of a century ago, actually on Broadway, wasn’t, of course, actually on Broadway; it was on West 44th Street. It was 42nd Street.

The geography is confusing, but so is the history, and indeed the nomenclature. For 42nd Street was not, of course, a Broadway musical, but a musical film made in 1933, based on a novel about life backstage at a Broadway theatre, with staged setpieces — notably the title song — in Hollywood’s version of the style of Broadway musical theatre. It was only in 1980 that it became a Broadway stage musical, at the Winter Garden — which actually is on Broadway).

Its very successful run of almost 3,500 performances paved the way for the blockbusters which, as critics periodically complain, have driven out the straight play from Broadway (and West End) stages. The reason the show moved from the Winter Garden to the Majestic on West 44th Street was to make way for Cats — and it subsequently moved again, along the street to the St James’s, to accommodate the arrival of Phantom of the Opera.

Those through-sung shows, by our own Andrew Lloyd Webber, are not quite Broadway musicals either. Indeed, Larry Stempel seems to subscribe to Mark Steyn’s view in Broadway Babies Say Goodnight that Lloyd Webber’s shows and Les Miserables, which prompted responses like the Disney adaptation The Lion King and then compendium pieces like Mamma Mia!, may have killed off the traditional Broadway musical. If they haven’t, the most recent arrival, a $65-million adaptation of Spider-Man with music by Bono and The Edge, currently in previews, and by all accounts as lousy as it sounds, ought to do the trick.

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