Boomer nostalgia invades Broadway: Fractured nostalgia spurs recent blitz on Broadway

By Sid Smith

Apr. 20, 2008 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) --
Our endless political season regularly slurs the Baby Boomers big time, hinting at an obituary on their relevance.

The rise of Barack Obama is seen by some as a final shift from the Boomer-ish battles of the '60s, the emblematic Jane Fonda versus John Wayne debate. Time magazine's Joe Klein has said: "Everyone's sick of the Boomers. I'm sick of them, and I'm one of them."

Not so fast. Pop culturally, the Boomers are easing into what might be called their Lawrence Welk years, when their cherished hits are finding their way into the entertainment equivalent of the rocking chair. Where once Welk's music charmed seniors watching PBS (to Boomer derision), now it's the Eagles or retrospectives on the Mamas and the Papas showing up during pledge week.

Nowhere is this development more notable--or odd--than on Broadway, where Abba made a once unimaginable comeback, and, stranger yet, John Waters, 61, that trash poet of cinematic sex deviance and scatology, seems on the verge of channeling David Merrick. He already inspired the runaway hit "Hairspray," and now comes "Cry-Baby," a new musical opening Thursday in New York.

Closer to home, a non-Waters Boomer-set show, the London and off-Broadway hit "Shout!" begins performances April 30 at the Drury Lane Theatre Water Tower Place, featuring songs by Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield, Lulu and other '60s British invasion songs from Boomers' sunnier, pre-Woodstock years.

The trend, more like another invasion, says a lot about Broadway as well as Boomers adaptability in recycling their collective past. As easy rider Dennis Hopper suggests in TV commercials, they are not going so gently into that good night.

"Can two be a genre?" Waters jokes of his Great White Way streak. "People ask if I'm amazed, and I want to answer, 'Look, it's not like I was an idiot savant.' I was reading Variety at age 13, and my parents made me go to the theater at 7.

"But I think I've stayed the same and the world has changed," Waters adds. " 'Cry-Baby' is a show about a girl who wants to be bad. It's about class. 'Hairspray' is about race. They're closer to 'Airplane!' than 'The Color Purple.' It's satire, like all my films. We're making fun of all the excesses of Broadway."

Boomers bring their disdain--they sneered at musicals in their youth as they sneered at Welk. But they also bring their bucks.

"It's a marketplace thing," says Jay Falzone, director-choreographer of "Shout!" here. "Boomers make up over 50 percent of the GNP. They have the most capital to spend. You create products for the people who have money to spend, which explains Lawrence Welk in his day."

Subverting conventions
The Boomer Broadway blitz begins with the jukebox contingent: "Mamma Mia" set to ABBA, "Movin' Out" to Billy Joel, "The Times They Are A-Changin' " to Bob Dylan, "Jersey Boys" to the Four Seasons and "All Shook Up" to Elvis Presley. The trend spread from stage to screen with the likes of Julie Taymor's "Across the Universe" to those Boomer poet laureates, the Beatles. But, lately, songwriters are writing brand new songs that ape Boomer past: "Cry-Baby" is retro '50s (with new songs by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger) and "Hairspray" is an homage to '60s pop.

"We're working within the conventions of the form and making fun of those conventions too," Waters says. "I can't remember a show with a song lyric like 'I want to kiss you with tongue,' " a refrain in the new show.

Waters seems to embody changes in attitudes Boomers helped accomplish.

"John Waters, once this gay iconoclast, is now mainstream," notes Phillip George, co-creator (with David Lowenstein) of "Shout!" "Waters was always the ultimate outsider looking at life in Baltimore. Now, the role of a man playing a woman goes to John Travolta in the movie."

Fractured nostalgia
These works strive to appeal not just to one age group, even if it's the largest ever. The original film versions of "Hairspray" and "Cry-Baby" date from 1988 and 1990 respectively. "Shout!" director Falzone is 33 and says those Waters' movies helped form his sensibility. The score for "Cry-Baby" comes from a post-Boomer team: Javerbaum, 36, executive producer of "The Daily Show," and Schlesinger, 40, bassist and songwriter for the band Fountains of Wayne.

There's a fractured nostalgia too. The original "Hairspray" and "Cry-Baby" were retro to start with, an '80s glance at the '60s and '50s. And they're not so nostalgic. They're limned with Boomer cynicism.

"I hated the '50s," Waters says, distancing "Cry-Baby" from any fond remembrance. "They were incredibly rigid. To me, listening to rockabilly or reading about juvenile delinquents was freedom."

Waters' musicals invert American mythology instead of saluting it. The hero of "Cry-Baby" is a James Dean-like outcast. The bikers, not the squeaky clean set, dubbed the Squares, get all the sympathy.

"In 'Hairspray,' the fat girl gets the guy," Waters notes. "She never gets the guy traditionally."

'Age of irony'
Waters' evolution has been gradual. He followed up his early, radical shockers, notably "Pink Flamingos" (1972), wherein drag performer Divine eats dog feces, with "Polyester" (1981), "Hairspray," "Cry-Baby" and "Serial Mom" (1994). But those movies retained his iconoclastic swipes at the middle class--"Polyester" offered that kinky effect Odorama--just as "A Dirty Shame," from 2004, depicted Chris Isaak hit on the head by feces from an airplane.

"People come and visit Baltimore and then tell me they realize my movies were actually documentaries," Waters says of his aesthetic. That droll vision mixed with graphic honesty and horror is zeitgeist today, Broadway included. Mel Brooks, the pre-Boomer behind "The Producers" and "Young Frankenstein," may be most famous for the flatulence scene in "Blazing Saddles," a 1974 movie Boomers embraced.

"We're living in the age of irony," says George. "Look at 'The Producers,' 'Spamalot' and 'The Drowsy Chaperone.' My friend calls them meta-musicals. They reflect on themselves and show business."

At 46, George is closer in age to Obama than Boomer Hillary Clinton, but his role in "Shout!" illustrates how the trend bridges generational gaps.

"I grew up listening to the '60s music in our show," he says. "My parents were old hippies in a way, and they played Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and these British songs too. They never played Rodgers and Hammerstein, though they did take me to my first musical, 'Hello, Dolly,' starring Carol Channing."

"Shout!" itself looks on the '60s with critical distance. Subtitled "The Mod Musical," it follows five women as they move through the decade from girlish repression to feminist independence. Clark's candy-coated "Downtown" sums up the time's conflicting trends, sweetly melodic but urging elusive fulfillment--get out and go someplace. It doesn't really claim that place is in the arms of a man, unlike so many "The Man That Got Away" ballads. "Shout is a magazine offering personal and beauty advice," Falzone says. "By the end, the women realize, that's not as important as discovering who you are."

Boomer manifesto
These shows go down easily, but a Boomer manifesto peeks through, especially in the Waters vehicles: Question authority. Flout convention. Be yourself.

"Someone once said that Ginger Rogers gives Fred Astaire sex appeal, and he gives her class," says Mark O'Donnell, 53, co-author of the books for both "Hairspray" and "Cry-Baby." "I think John similarly brings edginess and independence and outsider-ness to Broadway, and Broadway brings bright colors and splendor to John.

"He's uniquely American, Broadway's uniquely American and together they form a synergy," O'Donnell adds. "People who hate musicals like him."

On St. Patrick's Day, after a preview, Waters, the show's creative consultant, lingered in the back row, greeting well-wishers, some young, some Boomers and some clad in bright green hats with shamrocks. One of the gutsiest filmmaker of our time smiled and shook hands, evoking avuncular Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS) (NYSE:DCQ) as much as anybody. On whom, it should be noted, the Boomers cut their teeth.

"You can see my characters clearly from the back row, they're all bigger than life, they're exaggerated," Waters says. "In everything I do, the good guys and the bad guys from when we were growing up are reversed. I always thought the good guys were boring, and they didn't dress as well. So I just switched the parts."

sismith@tribune.com

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