The debate continues to rage over the state of the modern musical. Is it relevant? Can it survive in a world dominated by digital entertainment? For years, Broadway has faced criticism that it is outdated and elitist. In order to stay vital, Broadway attempted to democratize; to become more accessible to more people. Musicals now do everything they can to appeal to this new audience, and therefore focus less on the exquisite art of good storytelling, and more on visual spectacle and gimmicks. Broadway’s continued pursuit of the vapid and the pedantic is decreasing the market for real, engaging drama, because consumers of spectacle will never spontaneously turn into consumers of real theater.
The crisis of the American musical is no different from the current crises facing literature, music, or film. The proliferation of chick-lit, teen-pop, and blow-em-up movies is equivalent to the eye-candy that now litters Broadway: hokey sentimentalism dumbed-down and wrapped up in the guise of art. Musicals try to keep up with film, and for most that means striving to be Bigger, Louder, and Slicker. Gone are the days when a musical could succeed based on the sheer quality of its content, often filled with subtlety and nuance. To lure the “tween-and-tourist” demographic, musicals now have to be Hip, because subtlety is not inclusive or democratic. Broadway 2.0. does everything to ensure that the viewer is never challenged by the unfamiliar or unknown.
The easiest way to be accessible is to base a musical on an existing story. Many blame Broadway’s demise on the current fad of converting popular films into stage musicals, but the trend is hardly new. Musicals have been based on pre-existing material, whether highbrow or lowbrow, for their entire history as a genre. The difference between classic musicals and modern ones, however, is that the classic shows contributed in some way to the story. West Side Story and Kiss Me, Kate are based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Taming of the Shrew, respectively. Li’l Abner and Annie are based on popular comic strips. Sweet Charity is based on Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, and Sondheim’s A Little Night Music is based on Smiles of a Summer Night, directed by Ingmar Bergman.
The problem is not the use of adaptation itself, it’s that classic musicals enhanced and illuminated the original story, and modern musicals simply rehash it. Legally Blonde and The Little Mermaid do not offer fresh, different points of view from their film counterparts. In fact, in most new film-to-musical adaptations, the musical version is considerably more insipid, further contributing to Broadway’s analog reputation in a digital world. The new translations from screen to stage are so literal and pedestrian that the audience cannot possibly be challenged or enlightened by the show. In classic musicals, the music exists only to serve the plot, and sadly, today’s musicals only have a plot in order to justify the trapezes, flying, or fog machines.
It all began with Cats, which opened on Broadway in 1982. The musical was based on T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” a collection of poetry about feline sociology and psychology. Cats featured an airtight literary pedigree, an inspired score, brilliant choreography, and incredible design. Ultimately, though, the show failed to actually tell a story. T.S. Eliot didn’t write a plot into his series of vignettes, and the plot added by the musical’s production team was flimsy, at best. While the components of the musical are harmless, the resulting show was ludicrously banal…the star of the show wasn’t the music or the lyrics; the stars of the show were the dancing cats. The show would ultimately run for almost 20 years on Broadway, due to streams of tourists from Taiwan to Teaneck craning their necks to get a glimpse of these dancing cats. The national tour brought Cats into every mid-sized town in America. You didn’t need to be informed about theater in order to enjoy Cats. The audiences never noticed the brilliant choreography or music, so mesmerized were they by dancers dressed up in such elaborate costumes. The score itself became a phenomenon, and it’s signature tune, “Memory,” recorded and performed by pop stars and cabaret singers all over the world. After a cultural moment such as Cats, other musicals followed which played up their use of large-scale visual effects or gimmickry. Cats paved the way for Starlight Express, the original futuristic roller-skating extravaganza, Phantom of the Opera and its falling chandelier and underworld gondola rides, and Miss Saigon’s onstage helicopter. To be sure, these shows also featured first-rate music and performances, but their epic scale demanded that any subsequent musicals should rise to their level. Huge and overwrought, these shows relied on cloying sentimentality and outrageous visuals to tell their stories.
At least the original mega-musicals had stories to tell. The stories that are chosen today to be musical-ized are bland and accessible from the start. Classic Broadway shows never shied away from tackling serious issues, whether it was racism in South Pacific, violence in West Side Story, or homosexuality in La Cage aux Folles. Most musicals on Broadway today just focus on mindless self-esteem building, offering bland and easily digestible cliché instead of real, sometimes uncomfortable truth. Seeing bright, happy young people singing and dancing about how great they feel might sell a few tickets to Shrek, but it’s not enough to sustain the genre for generations to come. People become consumers of theater by grappling with the opaque and difficult masterpieces of Stephen Sondheim, Kurt Weill, and Leonard Bernstein, not by being pandered to. Currently on Broadway, there are two shows featuring puppets, two shows featuring rollerskating, two shows featuring various sorts of monsters, and a show whose cast was decided on a reality television program. Although none of these gimmicks are inherently bad, the fact that the shows are defined by them exposes the inherent soullessness and corporate banality inherent in today’s Broadway. Avoiding subjects that may cause discomfort or upset does not generate consumers of good theater, and if audiences never have access to theater that shows life in all of its complicated and heartbreaking glory, they will never learn to appreciate or patronize it.
Of course, not every classic musical portends to offer Truth or Enlightenment. Plenty of musicals have existed and thrived because of the simple reason that musical comedy is enjoyable. Classic musical comedy, however, should not be confused with mere spectacle. While visual effects have always been a part of the Broadway tradition, from Pippin to Parade, legitimate musical comedy does not rely on cheap sight gags or moonlighting tv actors. Instead of honest emotion or mesmerizing acting, shows today use big sets and shiny costumes to disguise the fact that they are ultimately empty enterprises.
Just as not every classic musical is a revelation, not every modern one is a failure. There have been a string of musicals in recent years that have attempted to return to classic Broadway, and they have achieved varying levels of success. The Light in the Piazza, Grey Gardens, and The Drowsy Chaperone were not able to generate the intense hype enjoyed by schlock like Hairspray. At least Rent (despite having been described by critic Cintra Wilson as “Cats with AIDS”) was a long-running success, despite the ‘handicap’ of a completely original scores and the use of actual musical theater performers in the leading roles. The segment of the theatergoing population that patronizes the truly original and unique shows is dwindling, and modern musicals aren’t replacing them, since the general culture of Broadway discourages innovation and rewards banality. Poor direction and poor writing have not hindered the receipts of overwhelmingly mediocre musicals such as Legally Blonde or Jersey Boys. Revivals of the classics are dismissed as mere relics and pastiche. There are many inspired modern musical-theater composers, such as Michael John LaChiusa and Adam Guettel, but any show without a modern “hook” has little-to-no chance of commercial success on Broadway. The democratization of theater has created an audience that has no capacity to recognize good theater when they see it. Audiences have been primed to expect roller-skating mermaids, puppet animals, and vine-swinging ape-boys, all emoting as hard as they can. Audiences weaned on pop remakes will never understand Parade. They’d rather see Young Frankenstein, because Hey, there’s a monster!
Attempting to please the greatest number of people goes against the very nature of art, which is to be controversial. It is not a ‘problem’ that some groups of people will inevitably dislike some forms of art. Even if it is a problem, though, the solution is not to change the definition of art itself. A person with no regard for painting may not enjoy Picasso’s “Guernica,” but they will never come to understand it if they are only ever exposed to a velvet Elvis, or poker-playing dogs. Instead of educating audiences about the brilliance and transcendence of theater, Broadway today only panders to the lowest common denominator. New pop-sicals and jukebox musicals only serve to create a market for spectacles just like them – bland, insipid, and dull. Democratizing theater by removing anything edgy, unusual, or challenging does not create theatergoers with a frame of reference for understanding that which is complex, emotional, and difficult. They will expect rollerskating, and sooner or later, that is all that Broadway will have to offer.
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