THOUROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE
4/18/2002
Marquis Theatre
903 performances
I vividly remember the autumn of 1976 when I first saw Manhattan’s Times Square. As a twenty-three year old hopeful, I had just arrived from one of the last trains leaving Union Station in St. Louis and found myself in a wonderland of sights and sounds. I had come to New York to seek fame and fortune. In fact, the highlight of my first evening in Manhattan was purchasing a standing room ticket to see that night’s performance of A CHORUS LINE. This story of New York hopefuls, like myself, trying to get into the chorus of a Broadway show would become a tale that I would all too soon know quite intimately.
Without exception, most of us have at one time or another followed our hearts away from friends, families, and the places we called home, to chase a dream that couldn’t be realized in our own backyards. My story was no different from so many others. I think that is why THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE means so much to me. At its core, Millie’s story is that of a young person’s unwillingness to settle for the small-town life she seems fated to live, opting instead to follow her dream in Manhattan.
Whether our dreams lead us to New York, California, or Timbuktu this is a story most young professionals can intimately relate to. Certainly when I arrived in Manhattan, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I knew I’d find it in New York City. Part of that certainty came from my early discovery of musical theatre as represented by countless local theatre productions and my large collection of original Broadway cast albums. Something about the bold and brassy sounds of the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Lerner and Loewe seemed to indicate that I had heard my future, and its name was Broadway. The delicious melodies, the pulse-racing orchestrations, seemed as out of place in my comfy suburban bedroom as the Chrysler Building itself might have had it risen in my own back yard. Yet every time I heard the score from the latest Broadway show it was like a homecoming to me. Just as Millie finds proof of a life outside Kansas in the pages of Vanity Fair, the drummer that I marched to was clearly a pit player for Broadway musicals.
This celebration of musical theatre has certainly for me been a life-long pursuit. But while celebrating this most uniquely American art form, I also have found myself celebrating the journey each and every one of us has taken to arrive at the point in our life when we find our spiritual home. It is this journey that is at the heart of THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE. For Millie, New York may be the capital of reinvention. But I find the desire to improve one’s lot in life also a universal and essentially American impulse. America may be viewed as the land of the makeover, as well as the land of the musical – for unquestionably, the vast majority of classic musicals were made in the U.S.A. To quote THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE’s lyricist Dick Scanlan: “Each day is free admission to those who dream.” He wrote about Manhattan in the song “Only In New York.” Millie is just another dreamer who is willing to risk it all in order to become the person she yearns to be. There are a lot of us.
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