Used to be, when a new musical opened on Broadway to critical praise and strong box office, the cast found itself in a recording studio within a week to make the original Broadway cast recording. But in the case of 42nd Street, which opened on August 25, 1980, nearly three months passed before RCA Victor Records finally called the cast in to immortalize their performances on disc. Maybe that's because Broadway cast LPs don't sell like they used to, or maybe it's because, although 42nd Street is, technically, a new musical, all the music is actually old. In any case, in between the opening and the November 16 recording date, 69-year-old arch-conservative Republican Ronald Reagan was elected president. It is always dicey to read a political theme into what succeeds in the popular arts at a given time, but the coincidence of Broadway's biggest new musical hit being a throwback like 42nd Street and the country's turning to a throwback like Reagan was hard to ignore. Indeed, the president-elect, a former movie actor, almost could have appeared in one of the 1930s movies on which the show is based. 42nd Street the film, released in 1933, restored the fortunes of the movie musical, with its backstage story of a Broadway producer putting on a show that made a neophyte an overnight star, set to songs written by composer
Harry Warren and lyricist Al Dubin. Those songs, including "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me," "Young and Healthy," and, of course, the title tune, were retained for the stage musical version 47 years later, with the score augmented with interpolations from other movie musicals of the ‘30s, also with music by
Warren: "Shadow Waltz" and "We're in the Money" from Gold Diggers of 1933; "Dames" from Dames; "Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935; "About a Quarter to Nine" and "Go into Your Dance" from Go into Your Dance; "Sunny Side to Every Situation" (lyrics by
Johnny Mercer) from Hard to Get; and "Getting Out of Town," a slightly rewritten version of "Gotta Go to Town" (lyrics by Mort Dixon) from The Laugh Parade. (Also performed on-stage, but missing from the album, is "I Know Now" from The Singing Marine.) This music, familiar to audiences of the ‘80s from countless late-night TV broadcasts, is performed by a talented cast led by veterans
Jerry Orbach and Tammy Grimes. It is notable that, campy as it may seem to re-create the style of a ‘30s movie musical on-stage in 1980, the show is not, as it might have been in the ‘60s or ‘70s, played as a satire. It is, rather, a nostalgia fest for people longing to be taken back to an imagined golden age in which troubles could be tapped away by smiling chorus girls (even if that time was actually the Great Depression). At the start of the ‘80s, that seemed to be what people wanted in Washington as well as on Broadway. ~ William Ruhlmann