#51
Posted: 12/6/12 at 7:46pm
To threadjack the conversation back to the more fruitful topic of comparing golden ages, I'm siding with EricMontreal-- My favorite decade of great musical theater works is probably the 70's heyday of the Prince/Sondheim partnership. But since I was actually seeing shows on Broadway for much of that decade, my mind irrevocably insists that any Golden Age must have happened earlier than I could remember. Makes no sense empirically, but Golden Ages are always always in the past, aren't they?
And what constitutes an Age? For me, it's a period when the very nature of how a show works changes for all time. Once changed, the history of Broadway moves forward (though individual shows will lag behind the curve). OKLAHOMA announced the integrated musical was here to stay, and Broadway never looked back.
The difficulty is that ages are constantly overlapping. CABARET and COMPANY proclaimed a musical could be built on concept rather than plot, but LOVE LIFE had flirted with the concept musical back in the 40's. I'd say that PASSION (a show I didn't like) showed a new way to build musicals in which songs weren't songs so much as arias. THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA and maybe NEXT TO NORMAL are heirs to this kind of writing. HAIR (and YOUR OWN THING) are credited with kicking off the age of the Rock Musical, an age which I guess is still going strong with AMERICAN IDIOT et al. But these shows live side by side with all those classically integrated shows in the R&H tradition like RAGTIME and (God help us) NEWSIES.
Inevitably the so-called ages all overlap and contradict each other. Maybe we have to leave it to the historians another decade or two from now to break the last 30 years into coherent ages. :)
And what constitutes an Age? For me, it's a period when the very nature of how a show works changes for all time. Once changed, the history of Broadway moves forward (though individual shows will lag behind the curve). OKLAHOMA announced the integrated musical was here to stay, and Broadway never looked back.
The difficulty is that ages are constantly overlapping. CABARET and COMPANY proclaimed a musical could be built on concept rather than plot, but LOVE LIFE had flirted with the concept musical back in the 40's. I'd say that PASSION (a show I didn't like) showed a new way to build musicals in which songs weren't songs so much as arias. THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA and maybe NEXT TO NORMAL are heirs to this kind of writing. HAIR (and YOUR OWN THING) are credited with kicking off the age of the Rock Musical, an age which I guess is still going strong with AMERICAN IDIOT et al. But these shows live side by side with all those classically integrated shows in the R&H tradition like RAGTIME and (God help us) NEWSIES.
Inevitably the so-called ages all overlap and contradict each other. Maybe we have to leave it to the historians another decade or two from now to break the last 30 years into coherent ages. :)
Updated On: 12/6/12 at 07:46 PM
