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Wednesday, June 18
CREATURE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 18 Jun 2008 01:21 AM PDT
Cyd Charisse died on Tuesday at the age of 86. She was a powerful, elegant dancer in many of the great Hollywood musicals, with a technique grounded in her early ballet training.
She had an odd screen persona -- distant but also intimidating. She didn't have great range as an actress, but she also seemed to hold herself in reserve in front of a camera by choice, except when she was dancing -- and even when she was dancing, there was something held back. When she was at her sexiest she still seemed to be saying, "This is naughty, isn't it? But it's not for you."
She had the quality of a mythological creature, a female spirit incarnated, with a mystery that was never up for grabs -- not for sale at any price.
One of her greatest moments was a dance she did in It's Always Fair Weather -- in a boxing gym with tough-looking fighters for a supporting chorus line. The only tribute she would accept from the all-male crowd was abject worship. She looked tougher than all of them put together.
SUBLIME HOKUM: Part Two - THE AMERICAN MUSICAL
by
Lloydville
on Wed 18 Jun 2008 12:30 AM PDT
As I wrote in my first post on this subject, American show business has a surreal, incoherent quality which reflects the surreal, incoherent quality of American culture as a whole. It wants to synthesize elements which resist synthesis.
In some ways, vaudeville was the quintessential form of American show business, simply because its format allowed for incoherence. Dance, both high and low, ballet and tap, sentimental and comic songs, excerpts from classical plays, recitations of poems, acrobatics, juggling, animal acts, broad slapstick sketches, sing-along slide shows, rope and magic tricks, even, at the end of the line, movies, could all share the stage on a bill.
When something resembling the book musical appeared on Broadway, the vaudeville influence was great. Not only did vaudeville serve as a proving ground for the talents that created the modern musical theater -- musicians, songwriters and performers -- but it lent musical theater some of its grab-bag attitude.
The American book musical, a musical with songs interwoven into an overarching plot, was a kind of hybrid between European operetta and the vaudeville spirit. European operetta was very popular in America at the turn of the last century, but showmen intuited that a more American style, with pop songs and jazzier dancing would sell, too.
The books of book musicals still owed a lot to European traditions -- their plots tended to resemble drawing-room farces from the Continent, given a wise-cracking American twist. And the book musical didn't wholly dominate the New York musical stage until the 1940s. Revues, a higher-class version of vaudeville, competed for ticket dollars.
But even revues followed a path towards coherence. Vincente Minnelli, later perhaps the preeminent director of Hollywood musicals, became famous on Broadway for directing "themed revues" -- variety shows whose acts were tied together by consistent visual motifs. (Minnelli is seen above at his wedding to Judy Garland, a second-generation vaudevillian.)
When talkies opened the way for musicals on the big screen, the patterns of the New York stage were transferred to film. Lubitsch and Mamoulian created screen musicals that frankly imitated European farce -- they were, in essence, ironic, streamlined and faster-paced operettas. Actual operettas made their way onto film as well, along with "backstage musicals" -- technically book musicals but with built-in opportunities to feature just about any kind of variety number.
Alongside all these forms, the revue also survived, with screen variety shows featuring disparate acts tied together by the flimsiest of threads -- a radio broadcast, the high-points of a showman's or a songwriter's career.
And then there was Fred Astaire. On some level, Astaire changed everything. In the 1930s he appeared in musical movie revues and in book musicals, mostly with Ginger Rogers. The Rogers films were basically more sophisticated versions of the farce musicals which came into their own in the Princess Theater shows written by Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, starting in 1915.
The songs in the Astaire-Rogers films were usually integrated to a degree into the dramatic plot, moving it along and expressing character, but they retained the nature of "numbers" -- routines that existed for their own sakes. By contrast, the dances the couple did together, and those Astaire did alone, weren't "numbers", mere Terpsichorean interludes, in any sense. The pas de deux were masterpieces of erotic suggestion, of complex romantic emotions. They transported the characterizations of the dancers, the subtleties and the depths of their romantic engagement, to another level. They were both lyrical and profound. They also suggested a mature synthesis of European elegance and casual American wit beyond anything the American musical theater had ever seen.
Americans had never encountered Astaire's aw-shucks grace and style anywhere except in sporting events -- in the balletic beauty of a well-turned double play, for example.
This opened a door onto a whole new way of thinking about American musicals, a whole new expressive range for the form -- and it was Arthur Freed who led the Hollywood musical through that door.
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