The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen Quotes

“And this is not Fosse. Yes, he made it: but it turns on one of those stupid frauds that American show biz can’t get enough of, that “You haven’t lived until you’ve played the Palace,” that “You’ll never make the big time because you’re small-time in your heart,” that MGM dream of a culture made entirely of show biz, for which Mickey and Judy filmed manuals for do-it-yourself stardom while, behind a prop tree, little Jackie Cooper was fucking Joan Crawford. It’s naïve—a condition that has nothing to do with Bob Fosse. Yet, came Fosse’s third act, there was “Mr. Bojangles,” again from Dancin’, and another risibly sentimental number. Fosse wasn’t a romantic; Fosse was a satirist. Fosse was enjoyable, of course, and a thrilling showcase for the dancers. But it was an incorrect piece, not dishonest but concentrating on rather a lot of irrelevant material.”
― Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical

“There was virtually nothing from some shows in which Fosse developed his history—the erotic Dream Ballet from New Girl in Town (1957), for whose integrity he had to fight the entire production team; the “Uncle Sam Rag” from Redhead (1959), in which Fosse embodied the music’s counterpoint in groupings of “counterpointed” dancers; “Coffee Break” or “A Secretary Is Not a Toy” from How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961);2 “Rich Kids’ Rag” from Little Me (1962).”
― Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical

“Jane Eyre, Thou Shalt Not, and Thoroughly Modern Millie typify currents running through the musical today: one, the extra-musical musical play that encroaches on opera; two, the rehabilitation of dance after years of neglect; and, three, the musical-comedy revival.”
― Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical

“Legrand shares with his predecessor that rare ability to joke in music just as his librettist jokes in words. The composer has in fact termed Amour “an opéra-bouffe”—Offenbach’s own form.”
― Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical

“Unlike Grand Hotel and Titanic, but like The Wild Party and Sweet Smell of Success, our last special show was a failure. However, the previous two titles at least ran a few months. Amour (2002) lasted two weeks. This is a historically instructive show even so in its return to first principles, as a modern version of what Jacques Offenbach was doing when he invented musical comedy in the 1850s and ’60s: not in his format but in his spirit.”
― Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical

“Like Oscar Hammerstein, LaChiusa knows that characters express themselves in their own wording as well as their own music.”
― Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical

“Not simply every number is tuneful, as in, say, The Boys From Syracuse. Not even every number exhilarates character, as in My Fair Lady. Rather: every number makes the experience so vivid that we are reminded that music theatre is our highest—our most complete—art.”
― Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical

“Swados’ sound was no more ingratiating in the more commercial Doonesbury (1983), which Swados wrote with Garry Trudeau, the creator of the familiar comic strip. The comics have been singing on The Street for a century—Victor Herbert and Harry B. Smith turned Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo into a musical in 1908, and Maggie and Jiggs of George McManus’ Bringing Up Father provisioned a series of shows in the following decade and into the 1920s, though few were seen in New York. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat went not to Broadway but Town Hall, as a ballet-pantomime, with scenery by Herriman, in 1922. More recently, Li’l Abner, Peanuts, and Little Orphan Annie have had notable success as musical theatre. Doonesbury, which lasted three months, was seldom theatre and never musical. This pop material might have worked as a television series or a comedy disc; nothing of what made the strip amusing was transformed into what makes musicals amusing. Li’l Abner came to Broadway in 1956 in the form of a fifties musical with fifties musical-comedy talent, the whole made on Al Capp’s characters and attitudes. Doonesbury played Broadway but never came to it in any real sense.”
― Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical

“Those who see Show Boat as the progenitor of the form mistake its epic grandeur for its essence. No: most of Show Boat inheres in the zany frivolity of musical comedy, though revisions have been stamping out much of the fun since 1946. Still, the comic nature of Captain Andy and other leads and the use of dance as decoration rather than interpretation place Show Boat in a category of its own.”
― Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical