42nd Street

(Theatre Royal Drury Lane, 22 December 2018)

The 42nd Street is a solid musical with no dramatic depth, with underdeveloped narrative arc, and with no memorable musical numbers (possibly except for the one remembered by Mike Coupe right before his ITV interview). Tap dancing is good. The mood is cheerful.

Weimar-era paintings are rather gory. By contrast, the enduring flicks and musicals from the 1930s and the early 1940s are lighthearted and gay. Two such different recollections of misery may be at least in part due to the technological accident: the cheer of Berlin cabarets was ephemeral, whereas that of Hollywood motion pictures has happened to be preserved on film and then revived, onscreen and onstage. Thus, the streak of optimism that has entered the American DNA may have been accidental.

(Comparisons are delicate because movies and paintings address different audiences, just as movies and theatre do. American optimism is probably mostly due to the consistent inflow of talented, hard-working, and forward-looking immigrants.)

What has kickstarted the US economy after the Great Depression was purportedly the WWII. Later, the Silicon Valley flourished thanks to defence contracts. The challenge is to maintain state support for fundamental science and technology in the absence of the threat of war by betting not on technologies but on outcomes, such as colonising Mars.