Why The Classic Musical Are Necessary!!

[Broadway Matt]

Posted: 8/15/04 at 1:17am

this was originally going to be a response to the "Anything Goes" thread but it wound up being such a long rant I decided to just post it as a new thread. so please enjoy "Broadway Matt Rambling About The Good Old Days Even Though He's Only 21"


i'll admit, anything goes isn't usually high on my priority list of shows to see and cast recordings to listen to. no, i don't think it'll ever be in it's prime again, and i doubt a broadway revival would take new york by storm. to make a commercial success on broadway you need to cater to the modern audiences, which explains why there's so much crap being churned out, cycled through, and forgotten each season. garbage in, garbage out.

they may not be the hot ticket right now but shows like Anything Goes will be around forever because they embody American musical theatre at its very purest. they represent an era when musicals could simply be musicals. the stories were simple but fun, the characters were underwritten but memorable, and the music composed for musicals WAS the pop music of the time. the luxury of living in a simpler time let them write shows that aren't preoccupied with glitz or money or current fads.

maybe these old shows don't push the envelope like the new ones do, but once the envelope has eventually been pushed far enough that it becomes the status quo, these "cutting edge" modern musicals often wind up deflated tired fossils, desperately trying to reconnect with their lost audience. the current slow death of Rent is a great example. music is even trickier. 30 years from now there's no telling what the kids will be gettin jiggy to on MTV. true it probably won't be the hits of Cole Porter or Richard Rodgers, but the kids lucky enough to be in theatre WILL be familiar with their work.

I'm not trying to say that old musicals are necessarily better than new ones. Most of my favorites are from the last 20 years. But it's extremely important that we appreciate and continue to perform the classics, especially with the direction musical theatre has taken recently. If we forget our roots, lose our foundation, the art form really does have a chance of dying out or, even worse, being absorbed into the overall "entertainment media" that turns art to crap then sticks a celebrity name and a high price tag on it.