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Christmas on Broadway

One of the most effective Broadway Christmas songs is the opening of "Godspell," which has John the Baptist singing, over and over:

Prepare ye the way of the Lord.

Short and sweet and to the point.


You see Christmas again, on Broadway, in "Promises, Promises," in a more secular form: a party, where the chorus sings "Turkey Lurkey Time."

Bock and Harnick handle Christmas in a smarter, deeper way--no surprise--and it's striking that the authors of "Fiddler on the Roof" would also have crafted a memorable Christmas scene. (But, then, Irving Berlin wrote "White Christmas" .....) Bock and Harnick use Christmas to make some sociological observations, in "Twelve Days to Christmas," from "She Loves Me": Workers in a perfume shop note the different personalities among shoppers, and these personality differences are underlined by setting. A person who shops for gifts on December 1st is different--in, maybe, every way--from a person who waits until December 23rd.

Jason Robert Brown has brought Christmas into the musical theater world at least twice: with "Christmas Lullaby," from "Songs for a New World," and also with the endless "Schmuel Song," from "The Last Five Years." (It seems to me that "Schmuel Song" is not JRB's finest hour, and the actors in the movie adaptation actually seem to be making fun of the song as they perform it. But perform it they must. It's the "Schmuel Song"--!)

"Meet Me in St. Louis" was a movie before it was a stage show--but it did *become* a stage show, and, in all versions, it features one of my beloveds, the sad, quiet "Have Yourself a Merry Christmas."

But do you know who made my favorite Broadway reference to Christmas? Do you? Take a guess. It's Stephen Sondheim.

In "Assassins," Sondheim focuses, sometimes, on Byck, a man who sent long, rambling letters to Leonard Bernstein, and who once tried to fly a plane into the White House, to murder Richard Nixon. Byck famously appeared at a protest in a Santa suit--so Sondheim has him featured in dirty red North Pole garb throughout "Assassins." Hard to imagine a weirder, more arresting image of madness. With that soiled Santa suit, Sondheim seems to be saying: "Nothing human is alien to me."

And that's my tour of Christmas on Broadway.

Happy holidays to you!

P.S. RENT!

P.P.S. Let's not forget Tony Kushner: "Santa comin? Caroline! Hark the Herald Joy Divine! Jingle bells drift through the pine......"
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