Musical Comedy

But we should not, in our proper new enthusiasm for husbanding the energies of the exceptional students in mass education, forget that the recording boom can also give us new avenues of communication with our mediocre and poor students. This is particularly true of the maturing genre of musical comedy. We ought to have room in our classrooms, not only for many levels of taste, but also for many degrees of seriousness.

Indeed, in a musical comedy like Li'l Abner (Columbia OL 5150, 1-12" LP) the comic muse is used with great effectiveness to say some serious things about moral and intellectual soft spots in contemporary America. "What's Good for General Bullmoose" is not fair (nor were reporters) to Charlie Wilson, the wonderfully forthright ex-Secretary of Defense, but it is still a good spoof of spurious patriotism. And "The Country's in the Very Best of Hands" is Herblock set to music. "Progress Is the Root of All Evil" runs lightly over the political scene since the New Deal in an unreconstructed way.

And "Oh, Happy Day" (when everyone will think, act, look, inhale, and exhale exactly alike) is the best satire of pseudo-scientific progress and conformity culture that I have heard in a long time. This specific satire of contemporary life, by the way, is something impossible to come by in the classics; one must turn to popular culture for it--The Mad Reader, Humbug magazine, the Stan Freberg radio show on CBS (Sunday, 7:30 p.m., E.S.T.), and of course a paperback like The World of Li'l Abner (Ballantine, 350), in spite of John Steinbeck's rather strong introduction.

A useful color essay about the musical appeared in Life (January 14, 1957). And, if you can read it with few reservations about its solemnity, useful, too, is "How to Read Li'l Abner Intelligently," by Arthur J. Brodbeck and David M. White, in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, $6.95), an important landmark in the criticism of popular culture-to be reviewed here next month, along with other new books on popular culture.

The most "traditional" paperback-recording combination is the Rex Harrison-Julie Andrews My Fair Lady (Columbia 5090, 1-12" LP) and the Penguin edition of Shaw's Pygmalion. A curious thing happened when I taught this combination as the culmination of a Shaw centennial unit to college sophomores: they expressed amazement at how little they had understood the juke box songs from the musical before they read the play. In other words, it took the printed text of the Shaw play to bring the disparate record hits into an integral artistic experience. Other natural combinations are the Kathryn Grayson-Howard Keel Kiss Me Kate (MGM Record E3077, 1-12" LP) and an edition (hardcover) of The Taming of the Shrew; the Carol Channing-Eddie Bracken archy and mehitabel (Columbia OL 4963, 1-12" LP) and Doubleday's inexpensive edition of the "flea verse" of Don Marquis' indomitable cockroach and his ungenteel cat friend.

The big news from Broadway is that Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurent, Jerome Robbins, and Stephen Sondheim have an exciting new musical on the boards, a Romeo and Juliet story set in the slums of New York's upper West Side where two juvenile gangs--the Polish-American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks--engage in tragic conflict.

For background see the Life color spread (September 16, 1957) and several reviews--Walter Kerr's in the Tribune (October 6, 1957) and Atkinson's in the Times (October 6, 1957), Wolcott Gibbs' in the New Yorker (October 5, 1957), T. H. Wenning's in Newsweek (October 7, 1957), and Louis Kronenberger's in Time (October 7, 1957). Columbia's LP of the show is at the pressing plant at this moment.