One girl is boring,
And two is obscene.
Give him hundreds
And hundreds
Of girls!
Thus Mack Sennett, in the musical Mack and Mabel, revealing how to make your average Joe happy at the movies. Sadly, at the show’s West End première, the more Mack sings about “Hundreds and Hundreds of Girls,” the more you notice that there are, in fact, precisely eleven of them, strung out across the vast Piccadilly Theatre stage so thinly that, in the gaps between, Mack could drive a truck. A number intended to celebrate the lavishness of motion pictures instead draws attention only to the stinginess of theater.
It’s considered bad taste to discuss the legitimate stage in these terms. Yet the economics of theater is now its defining characteristic. Of course, movies are spectacular mainly because of slick editing, for which theater has never found an equivalent. And electronic marvels bring diminishing returns: we’re blasé about breakthroughs. Thanks to computer-generated images, the late John Candy’s death halfway through shooting was no obstacle to him completing his last picture; courtesy of digital remastering, Nat “King” Cole, after twenty-five years beyond the grave, recorded a duet with his daughter. But big deal. In films, TV, recordings, we’re impressed by nothing; in theater, we’re impressed by anything. We applaud a helicopter landing in Miss Saigon; we take it for granted in the opening titles of M*A*S*H. And so, by the very extravagance of our gratitude—our sympathy, our understanding
