My parents’ musical tastes crystalized sometime right around 1960. Folk music filled the metal rack that held their portable record player—and by ‘portable’ I mean that if you wrapped both your paws around the handle and really put your back into it, you could probably move the device a few inches without needing a furniture dolly. (Do it twice and you wouldn’t have to work out the rest of the week.) Odetta and the Kingston Trio knocked boots with the Limeliters, and they all cowered before the mighty typhoon that was Harry Belafonte.
But they also had a great appreciation for show tunes. If earnest folk music took up half their collection of LPs, what they called ‘soundtracks’ filled the rest. “Original cast recordingsssss,” I can hear some Broadway queen hiss, anxious to show both his fangs and his 45th Street cred. Whatever. To my parents they were soundtracks, and the soundtrack of my youth was equal parts songs about holes in a bucket and hammering in the evening all over the land as well as considering yourself part of the furniture and blossoms of snow blessing my homeland forever.
When the cast album of 1776 came out, it intersected so neatly with my parents’ profession as history professors that they wore out the vinyl. We were the first household I knew to own the concept album of Jesus Christ Superstar; when it came out the recording was regarded as blasphemous in traditional circles, but it was fairly de rigueur among a certain type of academic intellectuals. My mother had a soft spot for My Fair Lady. My dad was more of a South Pacific kind of guy. Both of them, however, regarded The Music Man as a high point in the American musical theater. When the first cast album I ever bought with my own money turned out to be the original Broadway version of Evita, my mother sniffed a little and said it was all right but no Fantasticks.
There was one show, however, that was absolutely forbidden from my parents’ household. Cast album, soundtrack, or symphonic interpretation—they were all banned. In fact, so thorough and effective was the prohibition that it wasn’t until I was thirteen I knew the show even existed. My seventh-grade language arts teacher was a weedy little man with a wispy Benjamin Franklin ‘do who’d wanted to be a professional poet in his youth. Sadly for him, his only backup career was teaching literature to ungrateful little public school kids. His big bid for ‘relevance’ was to have us read first Romeo and Juliet over the course of two weeks, and then compare it in the next two to West Side Story.
And I was all like, West Side Whaaaaat?
I honestly hadn’t ever heard of it. Leonard Bernstein I knew. We’d played the Candide overture in citywide band. But while a couple of the girls in my class instantly were able to warble out strains from “Tonight” and “Maria” when they heard about what we’d be doing, I was totally in the dark. The teacher, when he wasn’t grabbing remnants of the lank long blond hair that still clung stubbornly to either side of his otherwise bald skull and saying private prayers to a stone-faced God who’d condemned him to harsh penance at Henderson Middle School, seemed to assume that we all knew the gist of West Side Story. And he was probably correct to do so. A good twenty-one years after its premier, the musical certainly wasn’t as current or hip as he seemed to assume, but just about everyone had seen the movie on TV at some point and knew it had that lady from The Electric Company in it. West Side Story was simply a part of the culture at the time.
Except my culture, of course. I went home and looked to see if my parents happened to have a copy of it among their soundtracks. No such luck. On my own initiative, I took the bus to the Richmond Public Library and checked out the original cast album from the music library. I’d just put the needle into the overture and pulled out my paperback combining Romeo and Juliet with the screenplay of West Side Story when my mother came home.
She gave me the coldest stare I’d ever gotten. “What,” she intoned frostily, “is that.”
I told her it was West Side Story.
“I know what it is!” she barked. “Don’t you know that’s banned from this house?!”
With astonishment, I had to tell her that I didn’t even know West Side Story was a thing until that week, so how could I know it was banned? She told me not to be mouthy. Once I’d convinced her that I wasn’t trying to be all teenaged-defiant on her by bringing proscribed Broadway tunes into our Presbyterian household and that I genuinely had a curiosity to know what the songs sounded like that we were discussing in language arts class, she set her lips into an unamused line, marched over to the file cabinet where we stored miscellaneous items, and returned with a pair of over-the-ear headphones.
It was the nineteen-seventies. The headphones were more cumbersome than the biggest gem-bedecked headdress ever donned by a showgirl at the Ziegfeld Follies. They were so heavy that if I didn’t sit up perfectly straight and keep my neck rigid, I’d find myself thrown off-balance and sent sprawling down to the floor. Once she’d planted them over my ears, I saw her lips moving with warning.
I had to remove the headphones to hear what she’d said. “What?”
She glared at me. “Don’t let your father find out.”
I found out later that the ban wasn’t for political reasons, like our family’s boycott of Volkswagen. Nor was it like the family ban on tuna because of the high mercury content and what the fishing industry did to those poor dolphins. My parents simply didn’t want West Side Story in the house because during their early twenties, the album was so heavily played, and its songs so relentlessly covered by every popular artist imaginable and on every radio and television channel, they reached a point of saturation from which they still hadn’t recovered. My mother said listening to “Maria” made her sick to her stomach. Which, considering her Crohn’s Disease, probably wasn’t hyperbole. She really would hug her midsection and stumble from the room, feeling unwell.
And it’s a reaction I understand as an adult, since I have my own West Side Story. It’s Godspell. Please. Never play any of its songs in front of me. Not unless you want to see me clutch my tum-tum and run for the bathroom with a sour face, while I pass copious amounts of gas. Seriously.
My distaste for Godspell arises from the period in the early nineteen-seventies when Biblical stories suddenly became fodder for mainstream musicals. Jesus Christ Superstar hit like an earthquake, but its counterculture leanings and anti-government undertones were too dark in texture for any of it to be included in church services. Even its gentler songs, like “Everything’s All Right” or “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” would have had the older and crankier members of our church banging their canes on the sanctuary floor and grumping about demon rock-and-roll. A couple of years later, though, my church youth choir was romping singing the softer, playground rock of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and more especially, Godspell.
The church I attended was down the street from both the Union Theological Seminary and the Presbyterian School for Christian Education. The first was the more serious school for aspiring ministers; the latter was the more laid-back institution for full-time future Sunday school teachers who loved construction paper craft projects and the scent of paste glue. Both, in the early nineteen-seventies, were havens for post-college youth with long frizzy hair, conscientious objections to the Vietnam War, and unreasonably optimistic upbeat visions for a Coca-Cola future in which children of all races clasped hands and sang about wanting teach the world to sing in perfect har-moh-nee.
Because we were the closest Presbyterian church to these two Presbyterian educational institutions, our Sunday school classrooms overflowed with these stinky hippies. To a one, every single seminary kid came in convinced that with-it new approaches like folk-rock services would keep us kids interested in that cool cat Christ, so hey, let’s do the lotus position on some bean bag chairs and rap about The Big Guy. Jesus Christ Superstar was too dangerous to bring into the sanctuary, for several years Godspell was the pablum we were fed multiple times a week.
Oh, it was dreadful. I shudder when I think about how many Sundays we youth pranced around our sanctuary with false smiles painted wide, hands extended into jazz fingers that Bob Fosse would’ve envied, chanting endless choruses of “Day by Day.” I am quite certain that the nursing home citizens upon whom we inflicted the fake enthusiasm of our “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord”, though they pretended to nod along, were in reality praying for a swift and merciful death. Every semester, when a new batch of the permed and denimed seminary students would invade the hallways of our education wing, they’d arrive with Big Ideals and Bright Ideas and construction paper and a copy of that god-damned LP of Godspell under their hairy, stinky armpits. The first thing they’d want to do would be to tell us to join hands, close our eyes, and sway back and forth while we sang a few rounds of “Bless the Lord” together. And I would want to throw up all over again.
I honestly can’t listen to Godspell today. I reached the saturation point during the Nixon Administration and forty years hasn’t erased the stench. Just hearing a few bars of that crap sends me instantly back to a place where all the bean bag chairs were of a particular shade of orange I’ve never seen since (thank The Big Guy) and where even the most well-ventilated room couldn’t eradicate the funk of stinky hippie sandal feet. I had to sit through a high school production of the show a few years back and my stomach was in such turmoil that by the time the kids were beseeching me to learn my lessons well, I was convinced I had appendicitis.
Christ, I can’t even see a Superman T-shirt without foaming at the mouth.
You might be wondering what’s prompted me to reminisce about Godspell. It’s simply that recently we went to see the revival of Pippin on Broadway. You might’ve heard about this production. Basically it landed at the Music Box and immediately began crapping out Tony and Drama Desk awards for itself. Everyone kept telling me it was the best Pippin ever. And my reaction to that statement was to recoil in horror and turn up my nose, much as if someone had offered me a big banquet plate of liver and onions and assured me it was the most scrumptious urine sponge I would ever put in my mouth.
Because basically I equate Pippin with Godspell, Stephen Schwartz’s other score doomed to countless bad college and community theater productions. (Perversely, I like The Baker’s Wife.) Both are earnest as hell. Both are relics of the hippie era. Both employ jazz fingers.
But when I got cheap tickets to the current production, I went with an open mind. You know what? It probably is the best Pippin I’ve ever seen. It’s colorfully staged, and energetically performed, and peppered with great performances. I loved Rachel Bay Jones as Catherine. The sets are eye-popping.
Yet I still dislike the musical itself, and it all boils down to the character of Pippin. My personal tolerance is low for watching a young hero whine—through hummable Stephen Schwartz songs—for three hours that a meaningful life hasn’t simply been handed to him on a velvet pillow. To Bob Fosse and anyone under the emotional age of fourteen back in the day, all that adolescent angst might’ve been fascinating. I simply find Pippin’s never-ending dissatisfaction to be a drag. The show might as well have been entitled White Male Entitlement: The Musical!
Pretty as this new production was, it still left me wanting to stand up in my seat and shout STFU, PIPPIN! Quitcher bellyaching, PIPPIN. Rivers might belong where they can ramble and eagles might belong where they can fly, but assholes belong in a pair of Hanes, PIPPIN. And the damned show still has jazz fingers.
Then the circus performers would come out again and do some fire-breathing tricks and distract my irritation at the source material. That’s probably the way I like my Pippin: with as much diversion as possible to keep me from remembering what show I’m watching.
Still. At least it isn’t Godspell.
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