CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

THIRTY FIVE
You often will hear New York theater types –
meaning producers, managers, actors, and especially
playwrights -- bemoan the British presence on
Broadway. The complaint is seldom regarding the
quality of the presentations. More often, it is a general
lamentation that goes something like this: How are our
playwrights or directors or whoever supposed to develop if
we allow the Brits to dominate our stage? It’s a disgrace.
This never would have happened back in the golden era of
Broadway.
Well, I am here to tell you that as long as the
commercial theater has existed in this country, it was
dominated by British imports, and I am not talking
only about Shakespeare.
Thinking back to when
David Belasco was a powerful force on Broadway, I
would guess that close to ninety per cent of the shows
presented in New York City were from London.
And the year before Belasco was born, the
same was true. The Anglo-Irish Dion Boucicault was
the leading dramatist in the English speaking world,
which included America, of course. Boucicault wrote
The Vampire, a terrible play full of garish emotion and
based on the ludicrous ideas of Lord Byron and John
Polidori as presented in the story Vampyre, which was
credited to the latter gentleman. In truth, the story
came into existence as a result of the effort of the great Romantic poet. Byron’s draft was written in the Villa Diodato in Switzerland the same weekend that Mary Shelley wrote the first draft of Frankenstein.
I saw Boucicault’s play and was fascinated then, as I am now, by how wrong people can be about vampires. Nonetheless, Boucicault’s The Vampire was a huge hit. Almost everything from London was then, as it is now.
The same cannot be said for vampires in Broadway musicals. In this young Twenty First Century alone, while faux vampire lore thrives on television and in the movies, there have been three major musical flops along the Great White Way. Dance of the Vampires was the first, at the Minskoff Theater. The New York Times lists it as the largest financial failure in history. Twelve million dollars was lost on this campy, goofy show. That was followed by the musical version of Dracula – at the Belasco, of all places. Then there was Lestat, based on the popular series of novels by Anne Rice, with music by Elton John himself. Oddly enough, this show was rather successful when it first ran Off Broadway. It landed with a thud on the street of dreams. Perhaps theater producers have learned their lesson. Needless to say, I had nothing to do with any of these disasters.
The reason for Anglophilia in the American theater is simple: Brits are better at creating works for the stage. This is also why the ratio of British imports here is so disproportionate to American imports on the West End. Couple that with the fact that the population of England, while far fewer than the American citizenry, buys a larger number of tickets on an annual basis. The result has to be more entertaining and compelling work. Audiences are essential to theater, knowledgeable audience members even more so.
Americans are lazy about their entertainment and corporate media knows this and exploits it to the fullest degree possible. Most Americans are capable of spending every evening watching terrible reality TV shows and even worse cable “news” programs. Brits know when enough is enough and it is time to get out for an evening. Make no mistake about it -- by all accounts reality TV is big over there, too. However, there are also talk shows that feature writers and thinkers as guests, rather than an endless parade of actors and actresses touting their latest movies. There are still some genuine entertainers – people who can sing, dance, act, play an instrument, tell a joke or story -- over there; whereas here the last of that breed are fading fast.
Is this the result of the “it’s all about me” culture? I believe so. Why would anyone be interested in someone who can sing songs, tell jokes, and maybe do a little soft shoe when they can watch themselves on YouTube or update their status on Face Book? Entertainers have been replaced by preening nobodies, and even worse in many case, celebrities.
In the old days the elite of New York did everything possible to keep their names out of print anywhere other than the Social Register. Now, you have children of the upper class displaying their absolute lack of talent for all the world to see, and the corporate suits giving these consummate personifications of “sweet breath and no brains” their own television shows. Why? These dimwits do it on the cheap so that when they walk into this or that fashionable watering hole all heads will turn their way. It is a pathetic state of affairs.
Nobody cares about audience anymore, and as a result, soon there will be no audience. It is being replaced by a ubiquitous self-absorbed populace traipsing around with portable electronic gewgaws that are marketed as personal communication and computing devices but which are in fact the individual reflecting pools of the Age of Narcissism. And everyone knows what happened to Narcissus, right?.