By Walker Joyce
I made my living in Show Business. I began as a producer of one-night entertainments, known generically as Club Dates (not nightclubs but clubs in the sense of private groups), my late, great father’s niche. The Stage bug bit me as a kid, so I spent 30 years as an actor. I naturally progressed into Directing and finished as the Artistic Director of my own theatre.
Actors get pigeonholed just like people in other fields, and as my baptism came through musicals, I specialized in that category. Others pursued Shakespeare and Classical Theatre, and some went directly into Film and Television.
But as an actor who could sing and who fell in love with Broadway in 5th grade, I was drawn to the quintessential Book Musicals, i.e., shows with a spoken libretto (the “book’) combined with a song and dance score.
This genre was America’s main contribution to World Theatre. While it’s evolved just like everything else, the standard fare created in the 20th century by Rogers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Lowe and others remain Evergreens.
Here, in no particular order, are my picks for a Top Five.
SHOW BOAT—This 1927 smash first combined all three pillars of a modern musical: great tunes, dialogue and dance. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein (before his partnership with Richard Rodgers) tell a story of racial issues in 19thcentury America, a signature change from the kind of glossy revues presented by Flo Ziegfeld, who also produced this!
CAROUSEL—Rodgers & Hammerstein’s masterpiece, and their follow-up to their first mammoth hit, OKLAHOMA! In another departure from “sunny side up” shows, it tells a tragic love story sprinkled with fantasy. Every song became a standard, including “If I Loved You” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” It was my high school debut and it set me on the path of my career.
THE MUSIC MAN—An unabashed valentine to Americana, its combination of small-town charm and post-war exuberance was the perfect capstone to Eisenhour’s era. It made a mega-star out of Robert Preston, who turned in the greatest performance by a male in Broadway history. Thank God it was preserved in the film version, which was another personal talisman.
WEST SIDE STORY—The prior show’s main competition for awards in 1957. Leonard Bernstein wrote the soaring music, and in his first Broadway job, Stephen Sondheim penned the lyrics. It’s ROMEO AND JULIET transposed to 20th-century gang warfare in Manhattan, and its tragic ending was the polar opposite of MUSIC MAN’s, as were the erotic overtones.
FIDDLER ON THE ROOF—An enormous hit and another triumph for Jerome Robbins, who conceived of WEST SIDE seven years before. The winsome score by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock ranges from the comic (“If I Were A Rich Man” and “Tevye’s Dream’) to the joyous (“To Life”) to the poignant (“Sunrise, Sunset” and “Do You Love Me?”).
1776—My personal favorite, the show that solidified my plan to become an actor when I saw the original as a teenager. Peter Stone’s book (the script) is the greatest ever written and could stand alone as a legitimate play. It takes a dubious premise, the origin of the Declaration of Independence, and offers more belly laughs and suspense than anyone thought possible.
There are so many others I could’ve cited, but these will suffice for the proverbial desert island.
