The 1991 Broadway season has been widely excoriated as the thinnest, the driest, the weakest, the saddest of recent times. The lam entation is part of an annual New York lit urgy: with spring in bloom, the dying theat rical winter is reviled and scorned, heaped with ritual abuse, and driven whipped into the desert; then second thoughts are had; a metanoia occurs just in rime for the award ing of parsley crowns and goatskins in late spring. The old man of the winter is hauled back from the wasteland and feted with Tonys.
One ought, though, to beware of too ag nostic or disdainful an attitude toward tra ditional liturgies. They are often expressive of truth. This was a stinker of a season. I have already expressed my reservations about the insufficiently digested topicalities of Six Degrees of Separation, the season’s succès d’estime, and my enthusiasm for the auda cious humors of The Big Love, one of the season’s quick failures. It remains to have a look at some sample fare: two spectacles about Western intrusiveness into the Orient (Miss Saigon and Our Country’s Good) and two New York-based coming-of-age com edies (Lost in Yonkers and I Hate Hamlet).
The phenomenon of Miss Saigonis curious. It is the work of two French songwriters, Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil, who have made a career of transposing history, mainly French history, into musicals. Their first collaboration was in 1973,
