Hey big spender, spend a little time with these decades-old Broadway shows

Between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, something big happened to the Broadway musical. It got sexier. It got grittier. It got ironic, even cynical. It got more ethnically diverse. It went concept.

All this was aided and abetted by a generation of artistic mavericks eager to breathe new life into a tired idiom.

And if they never entirely disappeared from the theater scene, today some of these once-innovative experiments by such brilliant showmen as Bob Fosse, Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince and Michael Bennett are being resurrected with new fanfare and gusto.

The rarely revived Sondheim show "Company" opens at 5th Avenue Theatre this week, just before a chamber-style version of the musical hits Broadway.

"Sweet Charity," one of director-choreographer Fosse's early hits, comes to the Paramount Theatre this month in a tour starring Molly Ringwald.

Village Theatre's first take on "Evita" (originally staged by Prince) is wrapping its Issaquah run and moving to Everett. And a new revival of Bennett's "A Chorus Line" just landed on Broadway.

Why now?

One reason such tuners are making splashy comebacks is mercantile. After raiding much of the Rodgers-Hammerstein canon of 1950s and 1960s hits during the past decade, and much of the '80s Fosse and Sondheim output, too, a voracious Broadway revival market needs more new (old) blood.

There's also the fashion angle: Those platform shoes, go-go boots and mini-skirts in "Sweet Charity" are back in style.

5th Avenue Theatre artistic head David Armstrong believes socio-cultural forces are prodding the revivals, also.

"I think 30 years is the average time that needs to pass before people want to go back to certain shows," says Armstrong, who is directing "Company," and recently brought its contemporaries "Hair" and "Pippin" out of mothballs.

"This isn't about nostalgia," he contends. "We always look back at other times to see our own time more clearly."

Family values

There's sense in that: Three decades ago, stark divisions between conservative and liberal Americans over "family values" and "lifestyle choices" abounded, as they do today.

But there's quite a contrast between the graphic sexuality allowed on stage and screen now, and the new candor that crept onto Broadway back then.

When it debuted in 1970, "Company" (composed by Sondheim, staged by Prince and written by George Furth), was risky in its focus on a "swinging single" — an ancestor to today's "metrosexual" bachelor.

On his 35th birthday, Bobby (played here by Hugh Panaro) examines his marital options. Wedded life doesn't look blissful, given the tensions between the hitched couples Bobby knows. Yet to stay single is to evade intimacy and commitment.

" 'Company' looks at the effects of a changing society on interpersonal relationships," notes Armstrong. "It's interesting because we're now in a period of trying to define exactly what marriage is. This show takes a broad view of that, in a way that feels very timely."

Not-so-sweet "Charity"

"Sweet Charity" hit New York a bit earlier (1966), and is by design a more conventional musical comedy. But it also displays a sexual candor new to Broadway at the time — yet taken for granted today.

Based on Federico Fellini's film "The Nights of Cabiria," the Fosse-staged, Neil Simon-scripted work boasts Charity Hope Valentine, a lovable naif — and a prostitute.

Due to Broadway mores of the time, Charity's official job in the show is "dance hostess." But from the raucous "Big Spender" number on, Fosse's sexy dances and a savvy Cy Coleman-Dorothy Fields score make it clear that Charity's selling more than a cha cha.

By 1975, a show like Bennett's "A Chorus Line" could be more realistic and frank. In its line of dancers vying at an audition, there is an out-front gay man — a bold move then, nothing unusual now.

A culture divided

A closer parallel between the era that spawned these shows and our own, is the similar climate of political pessimism, division and corruption in the shadow of an unpopular war.

In the 1970s, the Vietnam War and the wiretapping and Watergate scandals of the Nixon reign cast a cloud over the nation. And if such concerns were rarely dramatized in musicals, the more adventurous viewed the world with far more ironic skepticism than, say, "Hello, Dolly!" did.

Take "Evita." It deconstructs the rise of Argentine dictator Juan Perón and his magnetic wife, Evita, critiquing a media-fueled political order not entirely foreign to our own.

Stylin'

And if some of these musicals initially seemed experimental in form, they're right in sync with current film-theatrical aesthetics — or maybe even dated.

"Company" took audiences by surprise with its modular set, fragmented narrative and unheroic protagonist. Sondheim called it "a collection of playlets" held together "by a central character who observes as much as he instigates."

Bennett et al used similar story-telling techniques in "A Chorus Line." And "Evita" merged film sequences, political rallies and ghostly narration with the through-sung, pop-based score of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. And it paved the way for such later (more lucrative) "pop operas" as "Miss Saigon" and "Les Misérables."

If these musicals seem refreshed now or more like dusty relics will, of course, be decided by patrons revisiting them — or seeing them for the first time. In both cases, they're worth a second glance.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com