Another outbreak of old-fartism

[TC Chris]

As I've been announcing lately, I try to avoid the "things were better in my day" mode of operation. But I'm not always successful. Here goes.

Our public radio station has a local weekly program on Broadway musicals. I just listened to it. Tonight was Meredith Willson's The Music Man. And what a treat it was. I've got the LP, but so much music,so little time, and all that. But here it was on the radio, just one great tune after another.

There was a kind of golden age from the mid-forties through the 1950s. We got Oklahoma! and South Pacific and Carousel and My Fair Lady and Music Man and West Side Story. These are the giants, to my ears. Then there are some outliers like Show Boat and the Gershwins' shows. An underrated one was Meredith Willson's The Unsinkable Molly Brown. After the 1960s it was all downhill in my view. But there in the '40s and '50s we received the gift of wonderful music, shows that make me sing along.

One way I appraise music is to ask whether anybody will want to listen to it in 50 or 100 years. The current music that the NPR folks swoon over is pretty insubstantial as I hear it. Nobody is going to listen to it next year, never mind the next decade. But when Ezio Pinza sings "This Nearly Was Mine" or Harve Presnell does "Ill Never Say No," I just have to song along. This is music from 65-70 years ago. It's as tuneful and compelling as ever.

OK, end of this installment of "things were better in my day."

Chris Campbell

[Firedome]

Lots of good Broadway well into the '60s too: Fiddler on the roof, Hello Dolly, Man of Lamancha, Funny Girl, Cabaret, Mame, and more. Then of course Andrew Lloyd Weber took over, and various Sondheim-related shows later had their moments. But yes, 1947 to about '67 seems to be the peak.

I was lucky enough to see Robert Preston in the lead of "Music Man" at Painter's Mill Theater in the Round outside Baltimore in 1964. He WAS The Music Man in that role, no one better. It was an experience I still recall vividly almost 60 years later, a great "young fart" (I was 14) moment for sure! Our family friends the Dawsons took us in their brand new (first-year) Vista Cruiser... a stellar experience all around!