The Melody Lingers On

“The song is ended but the melody lingers on…” wrote Irving Berlin. He was talking about the ongoing presence of lost love, but it works to paraphrase it a bit when watching American musicals—“The play/ film has ended, but the melodies linger on.” Helped, of course, by all the jazz and popular singers who recorded it beyond the actual play/ film production—Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, for starters. On through Jo Stafford, Peggy Lee, Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Dinah Washington, Johnny Hartmann, Nancy Wilson, Blossom Dearie and more. And still going strong with Mary Stallings, Diana Krall, Dianna Reeves, Kurt Elling, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Cecile McClorin-Savant, Samara Joy and more. Not to mention all the jazz instrumental performers who continue to re-invent the rich repertoire of the Great American Songbook that was mostly used in musical theater.

 

All of this certainly helped lodge these exquisite melodies in our musical memories, but it was more. The fact is that these tunes by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hart/ Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, many of which were used in both Broadway and Hollywood musicals, had a melodic genius that got us whistling them on the way out of the theater. Take The Sound of Music as just one small example. Hum a few notes and many will burst into the songs, Do a Deer/ Edelweiss/ My Favorite Things/ Climb Every Mountain. In fact, SF’s wondrous (and now tragically dormant) Castro Theater would often have Sing-a-longs based on the conviction that people would know and be able to sing the tunes. Some of the favorites were The Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Wizard of Oz.

 

Why am I writing about this? Because we just took the grandkids to the wonderful Baghdad Theater in Portland (similar to the Castro) to see Wicked and yes we all enjoyed it. But I defy anyone in the theater to whistle any one of the songs sung. Even a phrase. They couldn’t do it. I can virtually guarantee that if a movie theater 10 years down the line tried to host a Wicked sing-a-long, the results would be pitiful.

 

So while I still believe that artists and art is still evolving, the musical theater song style since 1965 or so, in my humble opinion, has taken a sharp nosedive into melodic oblivion. On the surface, these songs qualify as melodies, but they are sorely lacking something in their structure that makes them eminently singable, memorable and just plain beautiful. Maybe I should get a hat made; “Make American Musical Melodies Great Again” as I lament the passing of a bygone era. Of course, there’s no going back. Styles change, tastes change, American musicals are different. But still I would hope that their “melodies might someday linger on.”