This morning’s Times reviews the current revival of the musical On the Town, playing through the weekend at City Center as part of a city-wide celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s 90th birthday. Originally on Broadway in 1944 — in the midst of the Second World War — the musical follows three American navy men through a 24-hour shore leave in the city. They are eager tourists, quick to orient themselves (“the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down”) and to make hot pursuit of the reigning Miss Turnstiles, whose picture is prominently displayed in the subway.
In the opening lecture of Writing New York we show a montage of film representations of the city, including a clip from the 1949 feature film adaptation of the musical. Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munchin play the sailors:
(Later in the semester we show the final sequence from Tim Burton’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which quotes the line about the Bronx and the Battery when Johnny Depp introduces Christina Ricci to a fabulously overdrawn 1800 New York.)
Considering this production as a WWII artifact (the current revival, like the wartime original, begins with the Star Spangled Banner) has me thinking, too, about the figure of the tourist in New York City literature. In lecture, I’ve often talked about the figure of the tour guide — the Virgilian character, the flâneur, the person who provides access to the city’s darkest corners for armchair tourists reading urban fiction. I’ve thought often as well about representations of tourists in the nineteenth century, from the country rube Jonathan in Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (who has various tricks played on him by some scheming city servants) to the country cousin in Benjamin Baker’s Glance at New York (a working-class entertainment), who also gets fleeced at every turn to the delight of the audience.
At what point, though, do we witness a shift that places the tourist figure center stage, as in On the Town? What is the particular appeal of that trope? Would this shift possibly signal the moment when urban entertainment in the city becomes a tourist industry rather than a pastime or entertainment for locals? Or is there something appealing in being a local, seeing the city on stage (or page, or screen) through a tourist’s eyes?
The sequence from On the Town reminded me of one of the most touristy things I did last holiday season. A relative who’d been planning a trip to town had to cancel at the last minute and as a result we found ourselves with half a dozen tickets to the Rockettes’ Christman Spectacular, something we probably never would have gone to on our own. One of the pieces in that exquisitely bizarre production that transforms a family-friendly leg show in an instant into a nativity scene (with the dancers now in drag as bearded wisemen hauling live camels across the stage to find the baby Jesus) is a ride on a tour bus that echoes, faintly, the Bernstein number:
Watching this live I had no doubt that we were witnessing something like the Las Vegas version of New York, absolutely designed for tourists to reassure them that they had, indeed, seen all the important sights. Why else use one of those obnoxious buses as a prop, except to remind the audience that just yesterday they were doing the same thing?
Not that our readers are the chattiest bunch, but I wonder if others can think of stories or plays that put tourists in the lead roles. When would this tradition have started? And is it designed purely for the pleasure of tourists themselves?
Recent Comments