WALL E, 'Dolly!' And the Universe Of Musicals

WALL E and me -- we're like this. See, the robot knows what I know: You can be stuck in a wasteland, abandoned to the whims of fate, with a cockroach as your only friend . . . Yet even then, as long as you have a song in your hard drive -- uh, heart -- hope is not lost.

And not just any old song, mind you. No, the singular cosmic force that sustains WALL E, the titular hero of Pixar's latest animated blockbuster, is musical theater.

As the film begins, unveiling the garbage-choked future Earth from which humans have exiled themselves, viewers hear Michael Crawford belting out "Put On Your Sunday Clothes." Gleaned from a videotape of the 1969 big-screen version of "Hello, Dolly!" that WALL E has salvaged, the uber-perky production number is his preferred accompaniment to an interminable task: He's the planet's last functioning robot, valiantly compacting trash in hopes of making Earth once again habitable by the people who are hanging out in deep space on a perma-pleasure cruise.

The first few words that Crawford sings -- "Out there, there's a world outside of Yonkers!" -- are the very ones that I turned to time after time as a teenager yearning for reassurance that the trash heap of existence, as I knew it, wasn't as good as it gets. (WALL E's post-apocalyptic Earth circa 2800, my small Southern town circa 1985: same difference.) "Way out there beyond this hick town, Barnaby," Crawford continues. "There's a slick town, Barnaby!"

Heck, you may even think you're stuck in such a hick town that Yonkers itself sounds like an otherworldly place you wouldn't mind checking out. (If WALL E unearthed a copy of the musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," he might find New Rochelle -- integral to the song "Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm" -- a tantalizing concept, too.) Of course, for all we know, Yonkers could very well be buried under all the garbage that WALL E is so dutifully dealing with.

"Out there, there's a world outside of Yonkers!": Really, if you know nothing about musical theater, they're the words that convey half of the art form's fundamental meaning -- that unmistakable sense that, by golly, there has to be a place where your dreams can be fulfilled, as long as you hold on to them and, well, sing about them in the key of C, with a 30-piece orchestra backing you up. And to grasp the rest of the meaning, you simply need the other song WALL E loves: "It Only Takes a Moment," featured in a "Hello, Dolly!" scene that he watches repeatedly at night when he retreats to his storage container. The refrain of that sweet ballad -- "It only takes a moment to be loved a whole life long" -- inspires WALL E's sense of romance, and the hand-holding in the scene inspires his desire to connect with a new robot sent to Earth to search for signs of life.

Now, WALL E needn't have limited his playlist. A worldview shaped by musicals might also rely on, say, "Something's Coming" from "West Side Story" ("There's something due any day/I will know right away/Soon as it shows"); "I Can See It" from "The Fantasticks" ("Who knows, maybe/All the visions I can see/May be waiting just for me"); or even, when pessimism rules the day, something that's bleak but still super-satisfyingly catchy, like "It's the Hard-Knock Life" from "Annie" (best rhyme ever: "No one cares for you a smidge/When you're in an orphanage!").

WALL E certainly has the big idea down pat, though. But considering the treatment of "Hello, Dolly!" as a one-of-a-kind relic, the most urgent message in "WALL E" isn't "Save the planet!" It's "Save show tunes!"

Alas, in some circles, life is already imitating art. In the New York Times review of "WALL E," A.O. Scott dismisses "Hello, Dolly!" as an "old, half-forgotten musical." Older than "The Lion King," yes. But half-forgotten? What planet is he on? (One without community theaters, dinner theaters or high schools, apparently.) For the love of Carol Channing, this is Hello freakin' Dolly we're talking about here!

Perhaps this critical memory lapse is limited to the misguided film adaptation of the show. Granted, who wouldn't like to forget that a 20-something Barbra Streisand was shoehorned into the role of the meddling middle-aged widow Dolly Gallagher Levi?

But the power of "Hello, Dolly!" and its radiant Jerry Herman score is way bigger than Babs (whose performance isn't referenced in "WALL E"; whew!). And if a place for "Dolly!" in our cultural cache is in question, "WALL E" could be just the reboot it deserves.

After all, if you don't know that there's a world outside of Yonkers, you may never know that there's a world worth seeing -- and worth saving.