The wonderful interview recently done with Sondheim says it all.
Dead on its feet
The musical is not a dying form, it's virtually extinct. As yet more rock pseudo-musicals flood the West End, David Benedict and Stephen Sondheim count the reasons why...
08 August 2004
Which album holds the record for the most weeks on the Billboard Top 40? Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon? No, My Fair Lady. The 1956 original-cast album - Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway - may only have held the number one slot for a seriously impressive 15 weeks, but it sat resplendently in the Top 40 for an unrivalled 292 weeks and in the top 100 for 480. That's more than nine years.
That one show bankrolled CBS for years. They produced not just the album but the entire show having stepped in with the total budget of $400,000, then a huge sum, when earlier financing collapsed. The Broadway run lasted six-and-a-half years, the London one five-and-a-half. Musicals have always been about popular entertainment but the monster bucks generated by such a perfectly constructed artistic success as My Fair Lady represents a high-water mark.
Cats too hasn't done badly - it has taken more money than Titanic. Shows like these, however, don't grow on trees and the ratio of flops to success is terrifyingly steep. So much so, that the musical as a living, breathing artform is dying. Correction: it's virtually dead.
You want proof? Even the name Stephen Sondheim doesn't guarantee success. His latest show Bounce never made it to New York. The recent revival of his 1991 show Assassins - a glittering, jet-black study of American idealism seen through the men and women who have shot or attempted to assassinate American presidents - closed within weeks of winning five Tony awards. In its initial limited engagement it hadn't suffered a single loss-making week but the producers weren't confident of sustaining even a show as strong as this in a financially hostile environment.
Sondheim, never one to bandy about false praise, believes the production was as good as anything he himself has ever been connected with. There's a hint of rancour as well as sadness in his voice. "I am much more upset about this production closing than any I can recall."
He is, however, notably clear-eyed about the context. "It is about a change in the audience. If Assassins had opened 20 years ago it would have run. The former New York Times critic Frank Rich told me that 10 years ago, two-thirds of the Broadway audience came from the New York tri-state area and only one-third was tourist. That core New York audience could guarantee you a run of at least four to six months. But that audience no longer exists - the equation has been reversed."
Worrying about the make-up of the audience is not snobbery. "If two-thirds are tourists, they'll take what they know, a familiar product - whether that's Mamma Mia! or Fiddler on the Roof. Theatre is so expensive, you have got to expect they'll want to go to Disney. For the future life of the musical, that's deplorable: young writers don't get their work heard, which means they don't get experience, which means they don't get better."
Unlike plays, musicals have several authors - composer, book writer, lyricist, director, choreographer - so making them mesh is seriously difficult. Experience is essential.
"I chair the Ascap [American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers] seminar and I'm always surprised that every year there are 60-70 people there who want to write musicals. They're all ages but the bulk are under 30. These are accomplished composers. I also chair a Richard Rodgers production award which gives money to help enhance new works to be performed. The trouble is there are endless workshops with good people involved but big money is needed to get a show beyond workshop. Producers are needed. That's where the gears grind to a halt."
You can see why. Andrew Lloyd Webber's forthcoming The Woman in White has £3m in advance ticket sales, but his recent shows (Whistle Down The Wind, The Beautiful Game) have failed as money-spinners. An endless succession of star names failed to turn Sunset Boulevard into a profit-maker.
Yet putting on a musical has always been costly - the wage bill alone is prohibitive to all but the supremely confident - so why are producers only now running for the exit? Because not only do spiralling production costs mean that chances to recoup have disappeared for all but the safest of bets, but musicals are now a museum form.
From the 1930s onwards, talent crossed back and forth from Broadway to the movies. By the Fifties, the Broadway musical's heyday, there was a complete synchronicity of tone, and musicals were at the centre of popular culture. Hollywood poured money into technicolour screen versions of Broadway greats, even going so far as to spend eight months in Nogales, Arizona making it look like Oklahoma! After almost five years on Broadway, the movie version of South Pacific became the highest-grossing film of 1958 with its soundtrack staying in the charts for 262 weeks and making it the best-selling LP of the second half of the Fifties.
All of which pales beside West Side Story. The groundbreaking Broadway show - a perfect synthesis of drama, music and dance - was only a moderate success and only bagged Best Choreography and Scenic Design at that year's Tony awards. Just about everything else went to The Music Man, a conservative, down-homey celebration of Americana, albeit with two knock-out performances and a real one-hit-wonder of a score. The absolute antithesis of the urban anger of West Side Story, The Music Man celebrated innocent American boyhood. With its climactic multiple-body-pile-up West Side Story killed it off.
Hollywood filmed both. But successful though The Music Man movie was, it simply couldn't match the film of West Side Story the previous year which walked away with 10 Oscars including Best Picture. And its album sales? Well, if you thought Michael Jackson's Thriller held the record for the longest stay at number one in the Billboard album charts - a flabbergasting 37 consecutive weeks - you'd be wrong. It's only the runner-up. Nothing shifted West Side Story from the top for a mindbending 54 weeks. What America was watching and listening to were one and the same.
But not for much longer. This is the crossover point. The traditionally toned bonanza that was The Sound of Music was still to come, but West Side Story is Janus-faced, looking back to Broadway's Golden Age while simultaneously looking forward to the cult of youth. Where are the parents in this story of youth on the loose? Nowhere.
Teenagers arrived in 1953 with Brando in The Wild One and in 1955 with James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, but they were just warning shots. McCarthyism had mythologised America. On screen, and even more so on stage, straitjacketed artists sold safety and happy endings: suburbia was the ideal. It was the Sixties which gave us the war on parents and their conservative values, AKA the generation gap. Mainstream gave way to the maverick and the studio system slid into terminal decline. Movies grew up? Yes, but only by ageing down and that meant a new soundtrack.
Throughout the Sixties, guitars replaced keyboards and the pop of the past - the Great American Songbook largely written by Broadway and Hollywood's finest - was replaced by rock. That, in turn, meant that the musical's secondary support systems dropped away. TV variety shows had traditionally hosted selections from Broadway musicals but they began to disappear. Worse, radio no longer gave old-fashioned-sounding musicals serious airplay and that meant album sales plummeted. Rock had arrived.
As Sonny Bono wrote in the song title that now adorns his headstone, "the beat goes on". And that's the trouble with rock as a theatrical form: it's slave to the rhythm. Of course, there are rock songs which powerfully express an intelligent lyric, but most rock musicians are interested in things other than using music to develop narrative or to dramatise theatrical ideas.
In the oh-so-ironic Nineties, Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe proved to be seriously smart and smooth pop operators partly because everything in their work is about ironic distance. But, as their grisly musical Closer to Heaven (than what?) proved, irony is the quality least useful when attempting to dramatise character and action. Theatre is about presence, not detachment and you cannot be at one remove about standing there and singing. Voicing emotions, vigorously committing to something is seriously uncool. The energy involved doesn't fit in a world dominated by soaps where most actors merely do low-energy behaving.
Sondheim is clearer still on the restrictions of contemporary music. "The power of pop music is not suited to telling stories that last two hours. The style may be fine for stories lasting three or four minutes, but that music isn't suited to variety or development of character. Occasionally, a work like Rent appears which bridges the worlds of pop and theatre. But its writer, Jonathan Larson [who died prior to the opening], would be as surprised as anyone that it went the way it did. He saw it as a work in progress." And despite throwing Stevie Wonder on to the cast album, it still didn't sell.
Rock also presents a problem of scale. The size of amplified sound is great for bombast but lousy for subtlety or quiet accretion of detail. And while the rock shows we have may make money, are they musicals?
Queen's vast sound was perfect for its stadium-sized anthems and antics. But the Ben Elton/Queen vehicle We Will Rock You only works as a Greatest Hits on legs. With its cast strewn about the hangar-sized stage dwarfed by state-of-the-art projections, it's a techno trade-fair, not a musical. Mind you, Tonight's the Night, Elton's subsequent shameless, cynical strut through Rod Stewart's back catalogue makes We Will Rock You look like The Cherry Orchard. (Next up is Elton's take on the Tina Turner hit list.)
Mamma Mia! has much to answer for. Umpteen times wittier and more joyous than anyone could have imagined, it never makes you feel you are being fleeced, which is more than can be said for opportunistic, drama-free events like Tonight's the Night or Saturday Night Fever. But the other downside of the compilation show is that they make audiences lazy. You don't have to pay attention to the music because, hey, you're going in humming the tunes. Every one of those shows pushes musical invention and experiment further away.
We're left with revivals or re-treads: nostalgia is king. Mary Poppins has taken £10m in advance sales, not (alas) because it has an A-list creative team in Richard Eyre, Matthew Bourne, Stephen Mear and Bob Crowley, but because all those homsesick parents who grew up on the film are taking their own kids to its reincarnation.
But the bottom of the barrel is being scraped. Aside from the odd one-off like Susan Stroman's forthcoming sensational staging of Mel Brooks's The Producers - a deliriously funny spoof of Broadway excess - and the few remaining classics like Guys and Dolls which Michael Grandage will revive in 2005, there's little from the past left to do. Worse, the pre-eminence of dance music and the infantilisation of pop don't suggest there's exciting theatre talent around the corner.
Sondheim, now 74, jokes that he likes going to matinees: "I'm the youngest person in the audience - it feels like spring! But that's no good for the future. It's the same as what is happening for symphonic music. The grey-haired audience is dying off and not being replaced."
I hate to toll the funeral bell - and I'd love to be proved wrong - but with the exception of rich entrepreneurs like Lloyd Webber who can produce their own work, it's a case of no future and occasional glimpses of a once-glorious past. John Doyle's current, thrillingly intimate production of Sondheim's masterpiece Sweeney Todd is shocking not for its blood and gore, but for the genuinely astonishing power and depth of the writing it reveals. These we have lost.
"Life is a lesson in humility"
