Ignore the Sourpusses. Go See Camelot.

It made me sad to read a lot of sour reviews of Camelot this morning after being so thrilled and moved by the show only 2 days ago. I feel like what most critics have forgotten, or maybe never knew, is that what makes these great 20th century musicals great is that they are open-hearted, and they are only legible if you go in with your own heart open.

I also didn’t realize until recently (in a conversation about Bartlett Sher’s last revival of a golden age show, My Fair Lady, where I expressed a preference for Alan Jay Lerner over Sondheim) that there’s such a big contingent of Lerner haters out there. I had to smile reading the Times critic (who worships Sondheim) mock Lerner for triple rhymes —he called them “show-offy.” I’ve come to love (a late, qualified love) much of Sondheim, but one thing that still irritates me in his lyrics is all those gratuitous triple, quadruple, quintuple rhymes. 

Camelot is about the power of idealism, about faith in compassion and fairness and justice, in virtue, to transform humanity. This revival with its revised book makes that theme more explicit, but it’s always been about that. Ask Jackie Kennedy. It’s about a steadfast focus on the moral arc, on the future effect of our deeds, in the face of meanness and violence and greed for power in the present. I’m sure for professional critics it’s not easy to reopen the aperture, after a few dozen musicals about teen social anxiety, wide enough to take in such a sweeping theme.

These midcentury shows spoke to and about, not just aging vaudevillians or ambivalent urbanites, but all of us. That’s why they were so popular. We need to constantly re-visit them not just because they are great works of art but because they do something the form has mostly forgotten how to do: ask big social questions which boil down to one question: how do we live together in the world? Maybe critics now, in our contentious, defensive, solipsistic age, don’t think that question is answerable. That conclusion feels so, so bleak to me. “One brief shining moment” indeed.