Bigger Keeps Getting Worse

When I first started writing about the dance, during the second half of the Sixties, it did not take long for me to discover the musical films for which Busby Berkeley had created the choreography. Berkeleys résumé took in a prodigious number of movies produced between 1930 and 1962. Most importantly, however, is that his work began shortly after the beginning of the Great Depression. While he may have begun as part of Hollywood’s effort to provide distractions from economic hard times, it took Berkeley little time to realize that it might be better to confront those dire conditions directly.

That confrontation is particularly evident in what might be called the “core trilogy” of Berkeley’s works, 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, both created in 1933, and Gold Diggers of 1935, which appeared two years later. These three films remain some of the best models for how the medium of cinema could allow a choreographer to conceive dances that would go beyond the confines of a stage in a theater. I would go so far as to say that, whatever background he may have had in the study of mathematics, Berkeley understood the full breadth of constructs in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional geometry, along with a mastery of projective geometry through which the depiction of the latter could be effectively mapped into the former.

A clip from the 42nd Street movie showing Busby Berkeley’s skill at projecting three dimensions into two (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

As a result, there were dance sequences in all three of these films that never failed to get even the best of choreographers to drop their jaws. Unless I am mistaken, none of those instances ever involved solo turns. Rather, they were elaborate studies in just how much could be expressed through the innovative combinations afforded by bringing a skilled corps de ballet before a team of equally skilled cinematographers.

Ironically, however, each of these films went beyond what the choreography could express. In an effort to confront the impact of the Depression, rather than distract from it, each film concludes with a dark “punch line.” As a result, audiences from that time would be uplifted by the razzle-dazzle of Berkeley’s choreography; but they would also leave the theater with some sense that they were not alone in their plight.

Back in the Sixties all three of those films basically enjoyed “cult” status. One had to know about film societies and “specialty houses” if one wished to see them. However, the word gradually got out that “revival screenings” of these films could be as popular as revivals of Fantasia. After that it was only a matter of time before someone would consider recreating one of these films on a Broadway stage. That “someone” was David Merrick, the leading producer of his day; and the staged version of 42nd Street opened on the Great White Way at the Winter Garden Theatre on August 25, 1980.

I have to confess that, on a subsequent trip to New York, I decided to check out the fruits of the labors behind the show, particularly the direction conceived by Gower Champion, who died of a rare form of blood cancer ten hours before the opening-night curtain. I went in with low expectations and was not disappointed; and there was value in experiencing the final exercise of Champion’s prodigious skills, even if the overall visuals would never match Berkeley’s designs. Ultimately, my real delights came from seeing Tammy Grimes as the aging star Dorothy Brock, the closest figure to a villain in the narrative, as well as Jerry Orbach as the director Julian Marsh, whom I had not yet seen on the stage at all. (I had seen Grimes in Philadelphia during the “tour on the road” that preceded the opening of The Unskinkble Molly Brown on Broadway.) I also accepted that the original narrative was altered to accommodate musical numbers from other Berkeley films and that the “parting shot” was far more optimistic than the conclusions of those three Berkeley creations.

I came away from the Winter Garden feeling that I had concluded a “Fuji experience.” For those unfamiliar with that phrase, it comes from a Japanese saying that there are two kinds of fools: those that have never climbed Mount Fuji and those that have climbed Fuji twice. I was more than a little surprised to see the extensive chart of revivals on the Wikipedia page for the musical, most in the United States and the United Kingdom with one in Paris. The most recent of the British revivals took place at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 2017; and that production was captured on video that was subsequently aired as part of the PBS Great Performances series of programs.

I figured that, with the revival of my interest in the performance of dance, it would not hurt for me to give this video a try. I figured wrong. Before fifteen minutes had elapsed, I found myself recalling how The New Yorker had reviewed the Winter Garden production. It described the Busby Berkeley film as “silly wonderful” as a set-up to declare that the staged version was just plain silly. As can be seen above, I was a bit more sympathetic; but none of that sympathy spilled over into the 2017 production. It was as if absolutely no one on the production team believed that there was such a thing as excessive, while the performers did their level best to keep up with expectations.

In addition I realized that this version prompted feelings I had never before experienced with this show: feelings of boredom. The running time of the original film was 89 minutes. Doing some simple arithmetic to account for those portions of the video I had saved that did not show the performance itself, I concluded that the Drury Lane version added at least another half hour to the duration. That might not sound like much, since, as I had previously observed, song-and-dance routines from other Berkeley films were added; but the overall beginning-to-end experience felt like it went on forever, including the relatively spare episodes of “straight” dialog.

The good news is that my xfinity subscription will allow me to watch the original 1933 movie free of charge, and I now feel a great urge to see if the Berkeley magic still rubs off on me.