The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [54]
The crusade against burlesque, later mocked and memorialized in The Night They Raided Minsky’s, was fueled by fears that Broadway was sinking beneath a mighty wave of trash. Fiorello La Guardia’s license commissioner, Paul Moss, whose brother B. S. Moss was an old nickelodeon operator who had become a producer and movie house owner, devoted himself to cleaning up burlesque; when that proved hopeless, on May 2, 1937, he revoked the licenses of all fourteen of the city’s burlesque houses. “This is the beginning of the end of incorporated filth,” said the mayor. And it was—for the nonce. The houses were reopened under regulations prohibiting the striptease. Clean burlesque was, of course, a contradiction in terms, and by 1942 the brief reign of burlesque had come to an inglorious end.
As burlesque waned on 42nd Street, so did legitimate theater. By the mid-1930s, the only house still showing plays on 42nd Street was the redoubtable New Amsterdam. In January 1937, Walter Huston starred in Othello; and that would be the last play mounted on 42nd Street for over forty years. In July, the New Amsterdam reopened under new ownership as a movie theater. The first feature was A Midsummer Night’s Dream— the very same show which, in a different medium, had inaugurated this art nouveau castle in 1903.
IT SEEMS A STRANGE irony that the quality of theatrical writing improved markedly as the cultural power of theater declined; but perhaps it’s no irony at all. As Broadway lost its status as the proving ground for national culture, where plays were hatched to be distributed to the hustings, theater became an increasingly local medium, needing to please only a local, and of course, sophisticated audience. Movies took on the burden of suiting the lowest common denominator. And as the grip of Broadway culture on the national imagination weakened, or perhaps as viewers counted on the movies to glorify that magic world, dramatists began to look far beyond the confines of Times Square for their subject matter. Few of the leading playwrights of the thirties were themselves Broadway figures, as George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly and Moss Hart were; they were biographers, essayists, advocates, novelists, and whatnot. Some of them, like Elmer Rice, professed to despise the theater as a thoroughly compromised medium of expression, while others tried their hand at plays to earn their keep while doing something they deemed more important, like crusading for justice. The 1930s was the era of Depression and the onset of war, and thus of intense ideological mobilization, at least within the intelligentsia; the drama of the time was exalted, and sometimes banalized, by those profound concerns.
There can be little question about the difference in quality. Very few plays from the 1920s or earlier have made it into the semiofficial canon of school anthologies and beloved revivals, but at least a dozen Broadway shows from the 1930s have achieved that status. The list includes, but is scarcely limited to, Maxwell Anderson’s High Tor, William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess— almost certainly the greatest musical work mounted on Broadway up to that time. In the 1933–34 season, when 42nd Street was stealing Broadway’s thunder and the number and profitability of shows was dropping like a shot, theatergoers could attend O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, Sidney Howard