Our Sondheim

The Times has a general hard-on for panels of experts and goes out of its way to praise the apolitical, the bipartisan, and the unbiased, as it perceives them, whenever and wherever they may be found. This week: the nominating committee for the Tony Awards. Regarding the relative merits of the panel, the panelists, and their selections in any given year, others may opine. My complaint is made from another altitude altogether. The Tonies are terrible because Broadway, especially The Broadway Musical, is the greatest failure of art and entertainment in the entire world, ever. If forced to choose between spending the rest of my life in a dark auditorium somewhere in the Forties listening to some overamplified and undersupported singer belting gaudy tunes with all the musical complexity of a Duncan Sheik number or spending it chained to a chair with an image of Vin Diesel slumping in his space-throne at the end of The Chronicles of Riddick laser-tattooed onto my retinas while Trout Mask Replica plays unceasingly at 457 dB, then I am taking the latter. And by the way that first example is a real thing that happened. There has never been a good musical. Revisit the classics, the old Rogers&Hammersteins, the WestSideStorieses, and what you find are uniformly tacky songs driving plots so clunky they make The Magic Flute look like it was scripted by Chekhov while performers who are neither capable actors nor skilled dancers nor trained singers but some sort of Island-of-Doctor-Moreau genetic portmanteau of all three hoof clumsily across the deck yowling like ghouls. Last year the Tony for Best Musical went to Billy Elliot the Musical, which would seem like an embarrassingly debased commercial choice for a genre that considers itself a quintessential American art form were it not that its competitors, nominated by the Times-praised committee o' experts, were Rock of Ages, which is no-joke an 80s hair-band review, Shrek the Musical, which is a 30-minute merchandise kiosk with a 120 intermission feature attached, and a show called Next to Normal, which was the Serious choice, as it is about The Consequences of Living with Depression. Clearly the critics' choice, it lost because everyone knows the tour is going to fold after the requisite year-and-a-half, having made the producers a little money and otherwise undersold every market from Newark to Nebraska by 30% against budget projections.

Non-musical drama hardly fares better. Last year's winner was another entry in the Yasmina Reza franchise, in each of which a minor disagreement between well-heeled people escalates into An Important Insight Into The Nature of Human Nature. The year prior an even more embarrassing excretion took the prize, in that case a drama by Tracy Letts called August: Osage County, in which cliché tropes of disaffected academia, family dysfunction, and drinking are hauled out of the hamper one after another and beaten to death with a life-sized, inflatable Edward Albee sex doll over a total running time approaching the aggregate duration of the complete and unexpurgated works of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Other than the occasional revival of Shakespeare or Chekhov or what have you, which always originated elsewhere anyway, there hasn't been a decent straight play on Broadway since Copenhagen, which was nonetheless a trifle, and nothing truly noteworthy since Angels in America, which is seriously beginning to show its age--a play once hailed as timeless that now creaks helplessly under the crushing weight of its own insistent timeliness.

If you want to appreciate Broadway's hilariously, titanically disproportionate self-regard as an art form, I urge you to listen to Terry Gross interview Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim is supposed to be the thinking-man's musical-theatrician, about whom opera lovers are forever saying, "Well, I don't really like musical theater, except for Sondheim." I've got news for you, you queens. Sondheim is a hack. Marvel as Terry suggests that he's been influenced by jazz and he harrumphs that he wasn't influenced by jazz, he was influenced by the Gershwins. Oh, yeah? Well, I don't care for Italian food; I much prefer spaghetti. The whole thing plays like Forest Gump interviewing Benito Mussolini for a hostess job at the nearest Applebee's. These people take themselves very, very seriously. Nice work if you can get it, assholes.