The Kids Are Alright: Post-Fifties Musicals and the Rise of Youth Culture

January 31, 2010 - February 28, 2010

West Side Story, February 13

The musical was always the entertainment choice of your parents. In the forties and fifties, before the youth market proliferated, you took what you could from the fogey-fixated fare—a song or two from Guys and Dolls, or South Pacific, or The King and I. But the tunes were never truly yours; they remained a product of parental proclivity. By the sixties, as the clout of youth culture consolidated, the musical was irrevocably altered by new interests and audiences: rowdier scores appeared, along with pop storylines and an attitude that reflected current culture. With Bye Bye Birdie, West Side Story, Hair, Absolute Beginners, and others, the musical became a medium of contemporary kid-culled values. The Kids Are Alright charts the not-so-hostile takeover of the genre with ten musicals made since the early sixties. Meanwhile, there is another idea in play: the films are arranged not by year of origin, but by era depicted. In this way, a submerged history of youth’s ascension surfaces, proceeding from the anarchic Gold Rush of Paint Your Wagon and the “trouble in River City” of The Music Man, to the widening generation gap of Bye Bye Birdie, Hair, and Pennies from Heaven, and finally to the emergence of the “rock opera” with Pink Floyd The Wall and its conceptual cohorts True Stories and Fruit Fly. Not necessarily the musicals your parents adored, these youth-yoked films get louder, ruder, and ready to roll.

Steve Seid
Video Curator

Sunday, January 31, 2010
3:00 p.m. Paint Your Wagon
Joshua Logan (U.S., 1969). Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, and Jean Seberg are unlikely musical comedy stars, but here they are, belting out the Lerner and Loewe tunes as they form a frontier threesome in Gold Rush–era California. (166 mins)

Saturday, February 6, 2010
5:30 p.m. The Music Man
Morton Da Costa (U.S., 1962). Huckster Robert Preston prescribes a musical cure for teenage “trouble” in this classic piece of Americana, its sweet Iowa corn laced with commercial con. (151 mins)

Sunday, February 7, 2010
3:00 p.m. Pennies from Heaven
Herbert Ross (U.S., 1981). In the American adaptation of the classic Dennis Potter serial, Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters take refuge from Depression-era Chicago in the magical realm of pop culture. (108 mins)

Saturday, February 13, 2010
4:00 p.m. West Side Story
Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins (U.S., 1961). When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way: the vibrant Leonard Bernstein/Jerome Robbins musical reinvents the Romeo and Juliet story for New York City. (155 mins)

Sunday, February 14, 2010
4:15 p.m. Absolute Beginners
Julien Temple (U.K., 1986). Temple’s look back at budding British youth culture circa 1958 audaciously melds sixties mod mania and eighties punk aggression. With performances by David Bowie, Ray Davies, and others. (108 mins)

Friday, February 19, 2010
8:30 p.m. Bye Bye Birdie
George Sidney (U.S., 1963). An Elvis-esque singer, about to join the army, visits a small town to bestow a “last kiss” on one lucky girl—the nubile Ann-Margret—in this boisterous showbiz sendup. (112 mins)

Sunday, February 21, 2010
5:30 p.m. Hair
Milos Forman (U.S., 1979). Made a decade after the original play opened on Broadway, this adaptation is a full-tressed tribute to the spiritual transcendence of late-sixties counterculture. (121 mins)

Thursday, February 25, 2010
8:35 p.m. Pink Floyd The Wall
Alan Parker (U.K., 1982). Bob Geldof’s burned-out rocker inhabits a lurid fantasia of grim memories, psychic torments, and fascist ecstasies in this full-on audiovisual adaptation of the chart-topping LP. (95 mins)

Saturday, February 27, 2010
8:35 p.m. True Stories
David Byrne (U.S., 1986). Byrne offers an affectionate musical tour of the mythical town of Virgil, Texas, home to an array of American eccentrics played by John Goodman, Swoosie Kurtz, Spalding Gray, and others. (88 mins)

Sunday, February 28, 2010
5:30 p.m. Fruit Fly
H. P. Mendoza (U.S., 2008). H. P. Mendoza in person. A Filipina performance artist tries to make it on the San Francisco scene in an infectious, unstoppable film by the writer and star of Colma: The Musical. (95 mins)

Thanks to H. P. Mendoza, true musical maven, for his advice on this series.