Posted: 10/22/18 at 9:46pm
I seems to be a pretty common opinion nowadays to claim that everything on Broadway- at least in terms of musicals- is a cheap cash grab made solely for profit and that artistic integrity in musical theatre is dead. This isn't necessarily anything new, but with all the comments I've seen lately about how Broadway has "sold out," I decided to do some math.
Of the twenty-four musicals currently running on Broadway, eleven are based off of movies, two are based off of plays, four are based off of books, four are based off of true stories, and one is largely just a concert performance of existing material. That leaves just two shows (The Book of Mormon and Dear Evan Hansen) that can be argued as "original musicals." However, since the argument is that commercialization of Broadway is a recent trend, I also went back a bit further.
Of the twenty-eight Best Musical Tony winners since 1990, twenty-one are based off of existing works- ten from movies, one from a play, three from books, six from true stories, one from a musical, and one from an opera. Two were dance performances. That leaves just five musicals from nearly the past three decades that can be considered wholly "original"- City of Angels, Avenue Q, In the Heights, the Book of Mormon, and Dear Evan Hansen.
The point I try to make to people that complain about Broadway "selling out" in order to favor commercialization over original work is this- 100% original Broadway musicals are actually pretty hard to come by. If you go back further than 1990, you find a lot of musicals based off of plays, books, and other existing legends and stories. People love to tout the "death of the original musical," but the original musical barely even exists. Few people get upset when a book is adapted into a movie, so why do they get upset when a movie is made into a musical? No one gets mad when a play or a book is made into a musical! My point is this- rarely do audiences actually want to see a completely unknown story put to music onstage. There's a reason why many of the shows I named above were lauded as sensational, groundbreaking works in one way or another, and it's not that they had original stories- they had something that made them different. Avenue Q had puppets, In the Heights had rap and salsa music, The Book of Mormon had R-rated humor and religious blasphemy. No one is buying tickets for Dear Evan Hansen because it's an original musical, they're buying tickets to see Evan spill his heart onto the stage every night.
Broadway's bottom line has always been to sell tickets and put butts in seats- that's why you see so much more original work in regional and local theaters. I just wanted to point out that this has literally always been the case, and likely will be for the foreseeable future. I'd love to hear other people's opinions on this concept, since I tend to see more actual debate here than on other platforms like Twitter.
*Before anyone comes for me in the comments, my criteria for categorizing these shows came from whether they pulled characters or plot lines from preexisting stories or media. Even though In the Heights is semi-autobiographical, the plot and characters are ultimately fictional. This differs from something like Hamilton, where the characters and plot are fictionalized, but are ultimately still based heavily off of their historical counterparts and are used to tell a true story.*
