It was the playhouse in which George
M. Cohan scored his first success, back in 1904: in Little Johnny Jones, Cohan, a brisk,
cocky flag-waver, offered marching songs for both his country (“I’m a
Yankee Doodle Dandy!”) and his profession (“Give My Regards to
Broadway”). Instead, the present owners of the Liberty Theatre have
decided to flip the finger to Broadway. As part of the current “renewal” of 42nd Street, the Liberty is destined, it seems, to become an “interactive video arcade.” Since the Yankee Doodle boy
departed, the theater has seen Fred and Adele Astaire in the
Gershwins’ Lady, Be Good!, and Adelaide Hall introducing “I Can’t
Give You Anything but Love” in Blackbirds of 1928; but, even in
its more recent incarnation as a porno house, its clientele of sad,
old, masturbating losers were, in a very real sense, far more
“interactive” than the video patrons will prove to be. Indeed,
strolling along the newly Disneyfied 42nd Street, you’re painfully
aware that these sparkling emporia require nothing from us other
than utter passivity. I’m not yet ready to wax nostalgic about the
hookers and hustlers, pimps and pushers of the old 42nd Street, but,
if our only weapon against the depraved excesses of so much of
modern life is bland, homogenized, unfelt, synergized-to-the-hilt
multinational “product,” we’re in big trouble. The latter is just
as degrading and enfeebling, and even more insidious. T. S. Eliot’s
line, in the Four Quartets, about being “distracted from