Anyone who knows me knows I have a great fondness for musicals. They were a source of joy and escape throughout a fairly tough childhood.
However…I don’t like all musicals.
For instance, I specifically like shows that are optimistic and full of life and joy.
I like plots about how people are basically the same underneath, how families are to be cherished, and how truth and honesty are things to be prized.
I like storylines and songs that speak to my heart and inspire me.
I value shows that present a more idealized vision of a world that “could be”, rather than a harsh reflection of the world that is.
I guess you could say what I love most are the classic musicals. At heart, I’m a traditionalist.
Classic shows tended to be about those things I listed above. But newer shows have a tendency to be more cynical. For instance, I’ve seen several contemporary shows that have a character singing the F-word in full voice for an easy laugh. Shows like The Book of Mormon playing off of the idiosyncrasy of hearing a character joyfully singing foul language. Extra points if a child sings something that’s not age-appropriate.
It’s not that I can’t enjoy darker shows; sometimes I do. But I prefer a show that lifts me up to ones that make me feel like I need a shower.
Right now, I’m watching the Apple-TV show Schmigadoon, which is a satire of those old-fashioned musicals I love. The plot has a couple accidentally wandering into a turn-of-the-century town right out of The Music Man or Meet Me In St Louis. Much fun is made of the traditions of those times, especially the lack of respect for women and minorities. True, those relics of the past deserve our reproach.
What the series can’t seem to do is find anything positive in the traditions of those days. The townspeople are presented as uneducated, smiling simpletons. Their glassy-eyed stares look inhuman, like something out of The Stepford Wives.
And of course all the religious people are either hateful hypocrites or sexually-closeted.
While I’ve enjoyed parts of the show, underneath it all there’s a palpable arrogance. They seem to think this present generation is the first to be enlightened. Everyone before us is treated as a mindless neanderthal.
Underneath their grin is a superior smirk. It appears they really believe thousands of years of civilization got everything wrong until we just happened to be born. Thank goodness this generation showed up in time to straighten everyone out!
This is the zeitgeist of our culture now, as tears down much of Western Civilization often based only on race and victimhood. Certainly great injustices occurred in the past…just as they continue to occur today worldwide. But just because an epoch in history got some things wrong doesn’t mean the “baby” should be thrown out with the bathwater.
Within the dirty bathwater of our imperfect history are found Shakespeare and Dickens, Bach and Beethoven, the Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta. The fact that one culture produced them does not make them wrong. We don’t succeed in including the disenfranchised by excluding the ones already recognized for greatness.
Inclusion is not a binary choice. It shouldn’t have to be either/or. It should be both/and.
I believe we should hold fast to the things from our past which are precious, while exposing the things that were evil. The fact that evil existed then does not invalidate our past. It only proves there were flawed people back then just like there are now.
One of my favorite musicals, Fiddler on the Roof, opens with a song called “Tradition”. Throughout this great show, tradition is the underlying theme. We watch as the Russian/Jewish milkman Tevye gives up some of the traditions of his faith and gives in to the wishes of his daughters. His girls first forsake the matchmaker Yente, then eventually marry outside their faith.
As the play progresses, Tevye’s values are undermined bit by bit. With our contemporary mindset, we argue that his traditions are backward, exclusionary and that he’s right to give them up. However, those traditions continued to disintegrate as Russians and Eastern Europeans immigrated to America. Today, many American Jews embrace secular atheism as a result. The ones who held to tradition are the exceptions to the rule.
As a Christian, I look at that disintegration and wonder what is to come for my own faith. Like Tevye, some of the traditions I was taught were merely products of the time. The prohibition against dancing my parents were taught kept them out of the bars at night so they could work their way out of the Great Depression by day. Tevye’s marriage traditions were intended to keep women from being impregnated and then abandoned. Likewise, his prayer shawl was to remind him to have a daily habit of focusing on God.
While those traditions limited some freedoms, they provided a structure to life and community.
We need to understand that while some traditions are temporal and belong only in a certain time, some are eternal and based on the character of God Himself. While it’s ok that my wife and I freely dance at wedding receptions now, there are other traditions of our faith to which we still hold firmly and will teach our children to honor.
We don’t hold to these out of fear or the closed-mindedness of Schmigadoon’s townspeople. We hold to them because of the things we value most: family, kindness, respect, purity, and integrity.
Maybe that’s why I like those old musicals. As unrealistic as they are, I see in them a naive purity and gentleness I miss.
Frankly, I’m nostalgic for a time when people believed in those things so much, they would burst into song about them. That’s one thing people today make fun of about musicals the most: the spontaneous singing. Maybe we’re too cynical and insincere to burst into song anymore, except in the occasional flash mob at the mall.
Or maybe what we need today is a little less smirking and a lot more singing. Maybe a world like a joyful, classic musical is a world where everyone would truly want to sing and dance. Maybe a world where we let go of the bad traditions that destroy us, while holding tightly to the ones that make us more like we wish we were.
Maybe if we held on to more of those corny old, time-honored traditions, we’d live in a world worth singing about. Because as Tevye said, “Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof”.
