Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 7)

A Quick Side Trip to New York

What can I say except...this is the way I write about things. Organizational structure implies some kind of fixed route from here to there, some idea that the world is structured in a way that I have come to believe is not really possible. So, this side trip to the theater in New York, to two musicals: one from when I was young and in love with theater; the other from today, when I am growng old and remain in love with the theater:

Do you know what's worth fighting for?
When it's not worth dying for?
Does it take your breath away
And you feel yourself suffocating?

I have often thought about the questions asked in Green Day’s fine song “21 Guns”—both while I was in Vietnam (long before the song was written) and afterwards. But this is not about that. I was listening to American Idiot again today and thinking about the two musicals on Broadway that were pretty much emblematic of my generation and our war: Hair and Jesus Christ, Superstar. Broadway musicals have not often reflected the major concerns of the young–people who, almost by definition, cannot afford the ticket prices for the big shows. But some of them do reflect their times and the zeitgeist of the current culture.

West Side Story, and I love the music but consider the whole thing dated, yes, even the version I saw last year with the Puerto Rican songs translated into Spanish, now seems terribly dated. I don't think that's true of a musical like Hair. I saw both musicals in New York last year. And on that trip into musical theater also saw the revival of another musical set during a time of war, South Pacific. I suspect that musical will never be "dated" even though HBO's The Pacific shows us a so much more realistic view of that war.

God knows there have been plenty of patriotic, pro-war musicals in Broadway’s history, usually when the war being fought was popular with the general populace. Think, just for a moment, of George M. Cohan. His songs went to war with the doughboys of the first world war. “Over There” was a classic derisively satirized in the seventies: “And we’ll all be over / when it’s over over there.” But there have not been many antiwar Broadway musicals: Off Broadway, yes, and Off-off Broadway definitely. But on Broadway? No, not really.

It took wars like Vietnam and, now, Iraq/Afghanistan to produce anti-war shows that could make a buck and stand for a whole generation. Songs like “The Age of Aquarius” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” are beautiful ballads that could have existed in any musicals, not just anti-war musicals. But Green Day’s “Jesus of Suburbia,” “21 Guns,” “St. Jimmy” (more about the millennial drug culture than the war) and other songs are not the normal fluff that Broadway gives its public.

Hair shows us how the sheer joy and exuberance of youth can suddenly give way to the deadly serious (if not equally frivolous in nature) concerns of the adult world. Tunny, in American Idiot returns from Iraq, like BD in Doonesbury, as an amputee.

We saw the same thing, I think, in the progression of films about Vietnam: from unabashedly pro-American war films like The Green Berets to an almost immediate response by Burt Lancaster in Go Tell the Spartans to real art in a film like Apocalypse Now. In theater, we went from Barbara Garson’s MacBird to the plays of David Rabe (When PBS showed his play, Sticks and Bones, the local affiliate refused to show it because San Antonio was “military town, USA). Art reflects the current culture. Even musical theater does not always show the culture of the political and power elite but can sometimes make room for the culture of youth.

“Summer has come and past / the innocent can never last” Green Day sings and writes. “Wake me up when September ends….” Youth and its innocence, its fervor is merely a waking dream, a brief moment, and then, after September, an old and lasting metaphor, reality plunges its knife into us. This little overwrought series of vignettes from memory reinforces that for me. I am impressed, though, that Broadway can mount a production like American Idiot and, mostly, that it can succeed, be nominated for a Tony as best musical and win two lesser Tonys.

I just realized I had not yet talked about Jesus Christ, Superstar and wondered why. Perhaps because it’s something of an aberration and does not deal directly with youth culture and the deepening culture of war. I am reminded a bit of that musical by Johnny’s role in American Idiot. Johnny is the “Jesus of Suburbia” who gets addicted to heroin (“St. Jimmy”) and plunges deeply into the heart of darkness as his friends cope with reality: one going to war, one getting his girlfriend pregnant. “I’m the son of raging love! Jesus of suburbia,” he sings. And, for his generation, he quite probably is.

But in Jesus Christ, Superstar, Judas and Mary Magdalene have all the good songs, not Jesus and Peter. I particularly love Judas’s “ Do you believe what they say you are” and the Magdelene’s “I don’t know how to love him,” a song reprised later in the play by Judas. As much as the songs on American Idiot, these songs reflect the zeitgeist for some people.

I'll make more detours from the zig-zaggy narrative of the "memoir" in the future because memory does that, travels back and forth in time, sideways onto different roads. If that's confusing, I apologize. Well, no, not really.