Charles Isherwood thinks the Broadway musical is suffering because producers are hiring TV stars who have names but not spectacular singing voices.
This seems like an odd point of view to me. Broadway has always loved stars, whether they were from movies or TV…and some pretty wonderful musicals have not featured great singers. Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady comes to mind immediately…and the current stars Isherwood's complaining about probably sing about as well as Richard Burton in Camelot, Robert Preston in The Music Man, Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof or Mary Martin in anything she did. (They probably sing better than Sam Levene in the original Guys and Dolls but so does everyone.) And what about Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner in the original The King and I?
I suppose Isherwood wrote this because of Mr. Radcliffe in How to Succeed…but judging from the clips at least, what might be wrong with that production is not Radcliffe's singing voice. Robert Morse wasn't a great singer either, we might note.
This may not pertain to Isherwood's article but I often seem to encounter an incredible snobbishness in the Broadway community towards performers and actually any kind of talent that has had the temerity to become successful and famous in another medium and then come to Broadway in a primo position. Years ago on the Musicals newsgroup, I got into a fiery debate with some fellow who was outraged that a lady who was on a popular sitcom thought she could segue to Broadway and star in a then-imminent musical there without starting at the bottom, auditioning for the chorus. On and on he went about how those performers invariably stink, plus it's unfair to those who approach Broadway out of love and a willingness to start in the spear-carrier jobs for rotten money.
In this case, the fellow (and those who chimed in with support for his viewpoint) were wrong two ways. I'm all for people paying dues and not getting breaks they don't deserve but ultimately, it's about doing the job. If someone gives a lousy performance, it's a lousy performance regardless of whether they started at the bottom or not…and the lousiness is what's wrong with it. The audience doesn't give two figs about how someone got the gig or whether they "deserve" it by some contrived judgment call.
And he was wrong about the person in question, who was — I think he called her — "that boring lady from Cheers," Bebe Neuwirth. She was then about to star in the revival of Damn Yankees and this guy on the newsgroup was unaware she'd been on Broadway pre-Lilith and had a pretty impressive set of stage credentials. But you know, since she was on a situation comedy, she couldn't possibly be good enough to star in a musical…