A couple of weeks ago I went to see a low-budget, concert-style production of the 1960s musical Half a Sixpence at an off-Broadway revival house. Half a Sixpence was a crowd-pleaser that had successful runs both in London and New York; having been taken to see it as a child (I must be one of the only people left to have a vivid memory of its Broadway run), I was curious to know whether its unsophisticated charms would hold up in the cynical and knowing yet dumbed-down twenty-first century.
Well, not really—and I couldn’t quite figure out why. The lack was not in the Edwardian setting, or the substance of the story, for the show’s authors had based it on the H. G. Wells novel Kipps, a clever sociological parable that still has much to tell us. It was more the style of the telling that rings false now, for Half a Sixpence epitomizes the big, brassy, Sixties musical (think Oliver!) characterized by dogged innocence and adorned with big production numbers in which passers-by, street vendors, policemen, etc. get caught up in the spirit of the thing and join the singing and dancing. At the intermission I overheard two ladies (elderly, of course—for who else goes to these things?) opining that, while they themselves were enjoying the show, there was absolutely nothing in it to attract young people.
How, then, to explain the success of In the Heights? Simple, naïve, and corny as Kansas in
