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By Terry Teachout
Each May, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle votes on the best play, foreign play and musical of the season. This year it chose not to give a best-musical award. What’s more, the NYDCC (of which I am a member) made the same call in 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2010. To be sure, nearly all of the 19 members loved “The Band’s Visit,” but it won last year’s best-musical award after opening off Broadway in 2016. As for this year’s shows, only two Broadway musicals got any support, “Mean Girls” (one vote) and “SpongeBob SquarePants” (two votes). Every other member either picked off-Broadway shows or abstained.
Does this mean that the Broadway musical is dying off? Not exactly. In addition to “The Band’s Visit,” my 15-year tenure as the Journal’s drama critic has seen the arrival on Broadway of such memorable shows as “Avenue Q,” “Dear Evan Hansen, ” “Fun Home,” “Hamilton,” “The Light in the Piazza” and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” But all of them, even “Hamilton,” are small-to-smallish-scale musicals that either originated off Broadway or were developed at regional theaters elsewhere in America. What I’m not seeing are any considerable number of first-rate large-scale Broadway musicals, the modern-day counterparts of such beloved golden-age shows as “Oklahoma!” and “Guys and Dolls.” Instead, we’re getting more and more of what I call “commodity musicals,” unchallenging confections like “Mean Girls,” “Frozen” and “School of Rock” that are more or less slavishly adapted from Hollywood hits of the past in the hope of luring fans of those films to Broadway.
When I last wrote about the decline of the Broadway musical in this space nine years ago, I cited the growing dominance of the commodity musical as the No. 1 problem facing the genre. I still see these shows as roadblocks that stand in the way of fresh creative thinking. But I now regard them as a symptom, not a cause. The real problem goes deeper.
Broadway musicals were central to American pop culture well into the ’60s. Their songs were played on the radio and performed on top-rated TV variety shows, and in due course the best of these shows were turned into hit movies. But their popularity was contingent on the existence of what could broadly be described as a common culture shared by Americans of all kinds. Back then, everybody from Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley to Ray Charles sang show tunes. Their musical language was universal: They spoke for us all.
Once our common culture started cracking up, it was inevitable that the Broadway musical would lose its creative footing. “Fiddler on the Roof,” the last indisputably great golden-age musical, opened in 1964, six months after the Beatles made their fateful appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Within a couple of years, show tunes had vanished from Top-40 stations, never to return. The last such single to top the pop charts was a medley from “Hair,” which opened in 1967 and drove a deep wedge of taste between the children of the Depression and their sons and daughters, who thereafter had no use for the old-fashioned Broadway musicals their parents loved.
A half-century later, Broadway is still trying—and failing—to catch up with the Beatles. With the heartening exceptions of “The Band’s Visit” and “Hamilton,” the scores of most of the new shows that do well there nowadays are written in one of two artificial musical styles, the insipid Disneypop of “Frozen” or the equally synthetic pop-rock of “Mean Girls.” In the meantime, America’s common culture has disintegrated: No particular style of music appeals strongly to more than a fraction of the public at large. As a result, there is no longer a universal language in which artistically ambitious musicals can be written, meaning that the chances of writing a show that will appeal to a mass audience have plummeted. That’s why producers embrace the commodity musical, with its built-in audience of fans: It’s the safest way to draw a crowd big enough to turn a profit.
I continue to believe in the creative promise of the large-scale musical. It remains as potentially fertile a theatrical genre today as it was in 1964. But the cultural obstacles that stand in the way of the commercial production of such musicals have grown daunting. And wonderful though it has been to witness the well-deserved successes of “Hamilton” and “The Band’s Visit,” I won’t feel good about the American musical again until Broadway figures out new ways to produce really big shows that are equally appealing to a rising generation of serious-minded theatergoers. Otherwise, we’ll be trapped in Disneyland—forever.
—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes “Sightings,” a column about the arts, every other week. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
. The "language of musical theatre" that he speaks of has increased in diversity, which is precisely how every genre of art (including music) has continued to survive. If musical theatre remained spinning its wheels in the mud as popular music continued to evolve and diversify, it would most likely be struggling a LOT more than he believes it is now or even more likely, would have a plot adjoining Vaudeville and Operetta in the theatrical cemetery.
But oh well Carousel will be a blast and am soo looking for ward to the ABT inspired choreography in it.
