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Another Golden Age of American Theater?

Culture Chronicle

Welcome to NYC's Hidden Golden Age of Theater
The Village Voice - May 18, 2010
By Michael Feingold

In New York theater today, what's not imported is what's underrated

Some colleagues were chatting lately, yet again, about a Golden Age of American theater. This time, they meant the years just after World War II. People seem to enjoy believing in a magical time, usually just before they came along, when everything was splendid. Such talk makes me uneasy, because I have the terrible habit of accumulating theatrical facts. I know the aureous wonders of the late 1940s, but I also know its turkeys. No Golden Age arrives unalloyed.

Hence my unease. Talk of Golden Ages always makes me hear, echoing in my brain, the voice of Barbara Cook, who embodies the phrase in two senses, being both an icon of the Broadway musical's great past and, though over 80, still displaying her expertise on Broadway today. Not many years ago, during her solo show at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, she warbled a succession of memorable songs from that gilded past, and then reflected, "They tell me now I was living in a Golden Age. I didn't know I was living in a Golden Age." And then she cocked her head quizzically at the audience and asked, "Do you think we're living in one now?"

Do you think we're living in one now? That's what echoes in my brain when I hear people picturing the past as a Golden Age. You see, Cook's rhetorical question had stuck with me. Like everyone else who spends endless hours seeing theater, I often get the glooms from what seems to be the unremittingly gray cloud of our current theatrical era. To notice that the gray cloud is displaying a lustrous gilt edge requires more effort. That's the trick time plays on us: Decades from now, the gray clouds will have dissipated from collective memory, leaving behind only the golden glory that they currently seem to overwhelm. For the full article, click here

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