Spring break is upon us and the students are leaving in droves.  I have a couple of hours before I leave campus with my colleague (not to Fort Lauderdale I hasten to add), and this may just be long enough to finish my rambles on the common man in classical music and musical comedy.  I don't mean this little series to be a compendium of musical theatre history; nor do I have it in mind to thoroughly analyze each opus from overture to reprise.  My aim is much more narrow: to look at the depiction of the working class and to some minor extent, the middle class in select but somehow typical productions of their era, and to muse about what the work seems to be saying (or not saying) about social class in America.  My thesis is economic progressivism has declined across the years, and, added to a rightward shift in other media, has left a diminished platform for progressive socio-economic ideas.

Rushing to a conclusion, I'd like to consider four more works-apologizing if I omit something dear to anyone's heart.  These are A Chorus Line (1975), Working: The Musical (1978), Ragtime (1998) and Les Miserables (1985, UK, 1987 USA), if I were to honor chronology, I should reverse the last two-but as the song goes, in the case of Les Miz, "I'm It's still here".   

A Chorus Line is probably too familiar to most to require a synopsis.  A Chorus Line was one of two shows I've seen from standing room only positions.  We watch individual aspirants for a position in the chorus demonstrate their dancing skills and expose their innermost secrets to the probing questions of the choreographer.  Seeing as he's going to roboticize them by the end,  which should he humiliate them by probing their dysfunctional families and their private sex  lives?  And we see them transformed from unique human beings to cookie cutter clones of each other.  The symbols of aspiration and "success" are interesting to me.  As aspirants the dress and dance individually.  Success comes in the form of glitter and glitz, spangles, and Top Hat, White Tie and Tails-Putting on the Ritz, but in the flimsiest of gold lame.  (For sheer fun, I don't think one can beat the Young Frankenstein version of Putting on the Ritz).

The Dancers Before:

go out and tell the story.
let it echo far and wide.
make them hear you.
make them hear you.

how that justice was our battle and how justice was denied.
make them hear you.
make them hear you.

and say to those who blame us
for the way we chose to fight
that sometimes there are battles
which are more than black or white.

and i could not put down my sword
when justice was my right.
make them hear you.
make them hear you.

my path may lead to heaven or hell
and god will say what's best
but one thing he will never say
is that i went quietly to my rest.

go out and tell our story
to your daughters and your sons.
make them hear you.
make them hear you.

proclaim it from your pulpit.
in your classroom with your pen
teach every child to raise his voice
and then, my brothers, then

will justice be demanded
by ten million righteous men.
make them hear you.
when they hear you
i'll be near you again

Powerful, yet from the lips of one soon to be dead at the hands of the representatives of the power structure, and the show concludes with a "what happened to them" scene replete with oppression and dreams denied.  Ragtime was a beautiful show, lavishly staged (quaternary fair warning...I've not seen it live).  It ran 834 performances, a not unrespectable run, and won a fistful of awards.  But I'm wondering why it isn't running still, a foolish and unanswerable question.  You can tell I'm heading to another fair warning, can't you?  I'll let you count this one yourselves.

The question leads me to the last musical I want to bring up for discussion, Les Miserables.  I'm a cockeyed optimist and an incurable romantic.  I love Les Mis.  I've seen it at least a half dozen times in London.  Every time I conducted a student group I put the show on the agenda.  The Les Mis cup sits in a proud place in my kitchen, when it isn't holding coffee at the computer.  The book and the musical are full of take-to-the-streets revolutionary fervor and resentment against the oppressive upper class.  There are interesting parallels between Les Mis and Ragtime.  Jean Valjean, now a respectable factory owner, joins the students on the barricades.  Younger Brother joins Emma Goldman's crusade and spends the rest of his life fighting for the under class.  And compare the lyric of the finale reprise in Les Mis with the Ragtime lyric above::

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Courfeyrac:
Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free!

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

Will you give all you can give
So that our banner may advance
Some will fall and some will live
Will you stand up and take your chance?
The blood of the martyrs
Will water the meadows of France!

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

Startlingly similar, both noble, both calling to action.  Here's my query.  Why does Les Mis go on and on and on and on, and why didn't Ragtime do the same?  I'm going to pose a few tentative answers, aside from any question of comparative quality of the productions.  (One source implied that Ragtime was too lavishly expensive in its mounting to succeed financially-yet Les Mis requires equally lavish resources, so that doesn't seem to hold water).  Critics called Ragtime "awash with nostalgia," as if the same wasn't true for Les Mis.  Here's a few possibilities.

• American radicalism is too scary for Americans in the latter years of the 20th century.
• Americans have been cozened into believing a right-wing meme: poverty is the fault of the poor.
• Americans love the downtrodden-as long as they're exotic, and far far away.
• Americans had their revolution in 1776, and it was so perfect America doesn't need to contemplate another.
• The French on the other hand, are kind of crazy anyhow-they can't get revolution right so they have to have them over and over again. 
• All of the above
• None of the above.

Anyhow-Is it fair to say that leftist politics and musical comedy are more estranged from each other now than they were in the days of Yip Harburgh and Finian's Rainbow?   I would argue so, and not to the benefit of the left. 

Next time-maybe an introduction to Ralph the Repairman and Reggie Van Gleason III.  What do you think?

But before we pass from the sublime to the ridiculous, One Day More! so I can wet another kleenex. 

1. What I Did for Love
2. One Singular Sensation
3. What I Could Have Been
4. Make Them Hear You
5. Do You Hear the People Sing?
   
6. One Day More