‘Musical Comedy Tonight’ A Joyful Celebration
The News and Courier – Sep. 28, 1979
By: Jerry Buck
LOS ANGELES (AP) – “Musical Comedy Tonight” is a joyful, affectionate look at four Broadway shows, typifying 50 years of musical comedy.
Each, in its way, illustrates a change in the theater, and scenes from the four are brought to life just as they were originally presented on the stage. The shows are “Good News” from 1927, “Anything Goes” from 1934, “Oklahoma!” from 1943 and “Company” from 1970.
For one show, “Anything Goes,” Ethel Merman from the Broadway cast recreates her own scenes.
“Musical Comedy Tonight,” which airs Monday night on PBS, was first titled “Four
Runs, Four Hits, Four Eras” by Sylvia Fine Kaye, who conceived the idea, put the
show together and provides the on-
“Each play was selected to represent a major change in musical comedy,” said Mrs. Kaye, who married one of the performers from her own first Broadway show, “Straw Hat Revue.” After that, she and Danny Kaye merged careers and she wrote most of his songs and was involved in the production of his movies and television specials.
“‘Good News’ was of the ‘20s. It represented the spirit and feeling of the times, although it wasn’t necessarily the best play,” she said. “It was the first musical with really broad, mass appeal.
“‘Anything Goes’ I picked because Cole Porter brought a sophistication to the theatre, a kind of open sly kind of sexual and social satire,” she continued. “The show was a social satire masquerading as low comedy.
“‘Oklahoma!’ changed the theater, then there wasn’t any real change until ‘Company’ came along. In ‘Oklahoma!’ for the first time the lyrics of the songs were very much a part of the story, and ‘Company’ was a turn. It was the bitter, cynical, cold look at society rather than individuals that typifies the ‘70s.”
Among the stars appearing in the 90-
The show got its start indirectly the year Mrs. Kaye conducted a seminar in musical comedy at Yale. Many of the faculty—and even Irving Berlin—wanted to come to the class and listen.
“I thought to myself if there was such widespread interest, maybe it should have a larger audience,” she said. “And one day in class, one of my brighter young men asked me why I said that Ethel Merman was such a great musical comedy star. He said, ‘I’ve listened to her records and her voice isn’t that much.’
“I said there are some people who are born with a magical quality—because I believe stars are born. I said it’s something you really have to see. I thought to myself, ‘If I could just take them all by the hand into the theater.’ And that’s really gradually how this evolved.”
That was the easy part. It took years to get a grant to pay production costs of nearly
$700,000 months of patient negotiation to secure rights and months more of detective
work to find long-
It took less persuasion to get the stars, Mrs. Kaye said. “All the stars worked for scale. I got the people that I wanted and it never occurred to me I wouldn’t get them. Friends of mine in the business said I was dreaming. They’d never go on PBS, they’d never do it for scale, and even if they wanted to, they’re too busy.
“So I called the busiest one first. I called Carol Burnett. She’d evidently heard about it, and she said, ‘When and where do you want me?’ She said she’d love to play Ado Annie in ‘Oklahoma!’ and sing ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Cain’t Say No.’”
Mrs. Kaye said she was guided partly by the words of Fred Astaire, who told her, “’For heaven’s sake, don’t make fun of us., We were doing the best we could.’ I said, ‘You were not only doing the best you could, there were some marvelous things.’”