“Musical Comedy Programs Lauded”
Waycross Journal-
By: Dick Kleiner
HOLLYWOOD – Don’t go anywhere on the night of Feb. 11, if you like musical comedy, except to the best seat in the house, right in front of your TV set, which must be tuned to your local PBS channel.
That’s when Sylvia Fine Kaye – Mrs. Danny Kaye – presents her second potpourri of musical comedy numbers. It is called “Sylvia Fine Kaye’s Musical Comedy Tonight – II.” That is to distinguish it from “Sylvia Fine Kaye’s Musical Comedy Tonight,” the original which ran on PBS last season and was a dandy.
This one sounds like it could be even dandier. And, as Mrs. Kaye explains it, this one has a bit more of a unifying theme.
Both of these programs – and any that may, hopefully, follow – are outgrowths, of courses she taught at both the University of Southern California and Yale, courses designed to stimulate interest in the musical comedy form among young people.
She believes it is important to bring new life to the medium, which is really the only true art form that has been totally created in America.
“The way things appear at the moment,” she says, “musical comedy’s finest years are behind us.”
That, happily, is not an irreversible statement. But, before it can be reversed, new interest in good musical comedy must be created in the young and creative people.
Her theory is that musical comedy stumbled when Broadway priced itself out of the
reach of young people. And those young people, who could no longer afford to see
the great, polished musical comedies of Broadway, turned instead to off-
“Plus, of course, there was the decline in the quality of pop music at about the same time.”
She says that rock musicals proved to be a fleeting form – too much cacophony, too much repetition. “It was like watching a show that was all sambas – it was all the same.”
She is hopeful that her courses – and now her TV shows – will kindle a new enthusiasm for musicals among young people, and that they will turn creative as they mature.
The first show, roughly a year ago, was divided according to decades. She had excerpts from the musicals of the ‘20s (“Good News”), ‘30s (“Anything Goes”), ‘40s (“Oklahoma!”) and ‘70s (“Company”). There was nothing between the ‘40s and ‘70s, because she believes everything in those intervening years was modeled on the concept of “Oklahoma!”