This is a load of ****!
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.
FENRIS:
Both are likely stage-material. Both are works of art. The writer is a snob in that he assumes My Fair Lady is better, because, 1) it's a completely different deal than Pink Floyd and 2) Dark Side and My Fair are masterpieces in their own right! The only difference is the stats! This started me thinking this writer was a snob.
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.
FENRIS:
Correction: it's probably dead on Broadway. What about Germany? What about London? WHat about the rest of the world? This snobby writer cannot see that there are hundreds, thousands, millions of new works being produced EVERY day! Not EVERYTHING is defined in Broadway! Not everything SHOULD be defined in America!
You want proof? Even the name Stephen Sondheim doesn't guarantee success. His latest show Bounce never made it to New York.
FENRIS:
Because it was flawed. The music, book and lyrics were flawed. That's the only reason... it has nothing to do with popularity!
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.
FENRIS:
Ah, gee, I wonder why. Musicals about classical terrorists? If I opened Usama the Musical, in New York, would you be surprised if it closed also?
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."
FENRIS:
Well, if he'd write a more appealing show. All the Broadway classics were appealing. What's so appealing about 'Assassins' years after the attack on the World Trade Center?
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,
FENRIS:
Frank Rich was a snob.
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."
FENRIS:
I agree with this. But why does success have to be made on Broadway? What about Britain? What about your home-town? Did Shakespeare succeed in Broadway IN HIS LIFETIME? Noel Coward? Theatre is about theatre, not Broadway!
Unlike plays, musicals have several authors - composer, book writer, lyricist, director, choreographer - so making them mesh is seriously difficult. Experience is essential.
FENRIS:
Well, what are they doing about it? Whinging won't help
"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."
FENRIS:
Well, what is he doing about it?? Whinging?? Whining?? Sitting on his bottom and not lifting a finger to help???!
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.
FENRIS:
What about Tanz der Vampire? What about Producers? Hairspray? Rent? Thoroughly Modern Millie? What about the hundreds of successful musicals OUTSIDE Broadway? This critic has got a narrow mind!
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.
FENRIS:
How does discussing the past help things??
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.
FENRIS:
It didn't kill anything. It was a masterpiece. It was an advancement in art. Surely one couldn't expect Broadway to remain as it was? Would you expect Baroque to remain???
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.
FENRIS:
But rock DOES dramatise theatre. If used correctly, it HEIGHTENS it. Has anyone seen Hair? Jim Steinman's Dream Engine? Tommy? Jesus Christ Superstar? Phantom of the Paradise? Rocky Horror Show?? Why is this critic so BIASED?? I knew of these 'rock musicals' before any of Sondheim's. I didn't even know who Sondheim was until I saw "Hey Mr Producer"
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.
FENRIS:
You call ROCK low-energy? This guy is on drugs!
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.
FENRIS:
OK. What about Andrew Lloyd Webber? Frank Wildhorn? Jim Steinman? They use pop music, in the theatre, and its ****ing extraordinary! Boublil and Schonberg used pop in Les Mis, and that's one of the most successful musicals of all time. Phantom had pop, Jekyll and Hyde had pop... How SUCCESSFUL are they?? They're probably even more successful than My Fair Lady! Now this critic is contradicting himself!
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?
FENRIS:
Um... Jesus Christ Superstar... Hair... Rocky Horror Show... Tanz der Vampire.... They heighten music more than anything from the classic Broadway era. And, honestly, how BORING can Sondheim get? Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods were his only good shows, IMHO. I enjoyed everything by Lloyd Webber, etc. And I am not a dumb idiot who knows nothing about the theatre!
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.)
FENRIS:
What does rock have to do with revue-shows? These are RADIO shows! Has nothing, whatsoever, to do with ROCK MUSICALS! They're entertainments... revues... Jesus Christ Superstar are REAL rock musicals!
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.
FENRIS:
What about Hair? That's rock. That pushed experiment to the max! Tanz der Vampire was rock and that's the most eclectic piece of work EVER!
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.
FENRIS:
What about the hundreds of musicals OUTSIDE Broadway? Has this guy visited 21st Century Musicals.com?!
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.
FENRIS:
Ehem... Tanz der Vampire... This guy should get out more
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."
FENRIS:
At least not on Broadway. Out here, in the real world, I see them all the time at the theatre. There are great musicals out there and they don't need Broadway for SUCCESS! If they want to promote it, they have one option: THE INTERNET. The Internet is the best thing to happen. Any show can be done anywhere and be promoted, online, from West End to Timbuktu!
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.
FENRIS:
They are lost to the critic, because he's caught between eight blocks on Broadway. My advice to him is: get a plane-ticket, take a trip to Germany, or France, or Australia, or anywhere in the world - stop being an ignorant bastard - and really 'look' before he 'tells'. New theatre is out there, it just hasn't been found. If we can use the internet, we can make our own Broadway... we can promote shows from our cities... and get success THAT way. On this merit, the musical is not dead. On the merit of hundreds, thousands, millions of musicals IN THE WORLD the musical is not dead. It's just dead on Broadway
Fenris
Who can explain it, who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons, wise men never try
-South Pacific
Updated On: 8/12/04 at 06:03 AM
it's still remarkably faithful to the constructs and forms of the classic musical.
