Cambridge Companions Online...287 The musical at the dawn of the twenty-ﬁrst century animated ﬁlm musicals (Pocahontas, lyrics, 1995; The Hunchback of NotreDame, lyrics, 1996;

Cambridge Companions Online

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The Cambridge Companion to the Musical

Edited by William A. Everett, Paul R. Laird

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521862387

Online ISBN: 9781139001823

Hardback ISBN: 9780521862387

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Chapter

16 - New horizons: the musical at the dawn of the twenty-first century

pp. 284-302

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521862387.017

Cambridge University Press

16 New horizons: the musical at the dawn of thetwenty-first century

bud coleman

During most of the 1960s, it was easy to see the musical as hopelessly outof touch with contemporary America. Even with three Broadway block-busters opening in the same year (1964) – Fiddler on the Roof, Hello, Dolly!,Funny Girl – and the film version of My Fair Lady walking away with eightAcademy Awards – it seemed apparent that the Golden Age of Musical The-atre had staged its own grand finale as these works neither reflected norcommented on the turmoil of the 1960s; they were escapist and nostalgic.With the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963), Martin LutherKing (1968) and Senator Bobby Kennedy (1968), and the escalating war inVietnam, the world was a different place from the comparative calm of the1950s. In 1964, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the firsttime, heralding with electronic chords that the British invasion was in fullforce, and rock ’n’ roll was here to stay. As urban centres across the countyfell into disrepair, many downtown theatres were abandoned (often to thewrecking ball) and the road business of touring musicals almost ceased alto-gether. Financially and artistically, the fabulous invalid was not in very goodshape.

When Hair arrived on Broadway in 1968, the Great White Way at lastembraced a musical whose music and sentiment reflected some of the head-lines of its day, and it was staged in a way that distanced itself aestheticallylight years away from other musicals playing around Times Square. Withthe New York premieres of Stephen Sondheim’s Company (1970), AndrewLloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), Michael Bennett’s A ChorusLine (1975), and John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse’s Chicago (1975),several new artists found audiences for their disparate visions of what amusical could be, sing and/or dance about. Experimentation continued asthe concept musical, the jukebox musical, the revisal, the dansical and themegamusical came to be. Despite rising ticket prices, theatre attendancebegan to climb both in New York and on the road. While movie musicalsvirtually disappeared from the silver screen after Cabaret (1972) and Grease(1978), the stage musical continued to attract audiences even as it experi-mented with new forms and structures. Truly, rumours of its demise weregrossly exaggerated.

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285 The musical at the dawn of the twenty-first century

The changes that occurred in the American musical at the end of thetwentieth century made it clear that while twenty-first-century musical the-atre owed much to the past, it was creating sub-genres which would havebeen unrecognisable to its original creators such as Cohan, Kern, Berlin,Gershwin, Hart and Fields. In order to explicate the musical at the dawn ofthe twenty-first century, we will first look at musical theatre genres that havetheir roots in the past, then move to new forms which emerged around andafter 2000.1 Finally, we will explore the changing roles of directors, chore-ographers, actors, and producers as musical theatre explores new optionsin the twenty-first century.

The operetta musical

One of the many antecedents of musical theatre is the operetta – epitomisedby the work of Gilbert and Sullivan – the genre in which Rudolf Friml,Sigmund Romberg, Victor Herbert and sometimes Jerome Kern operated.(See chapters 3 and 4.) In traditional operetta, the music will be well crafted,and though the plots and even the sentiments may sometimes seem silly,the musical result is likely to be glorious. A prime requisite is well-trainedsemi-operatic voices. More contemporary derivations of the operetta can beheard in Raphael Crystal’s Kuni-Lemi (1984), Frank Wildhorn’s The ScarletPimpernel (1997), Jeffrey Stock’s Triumph of Love (1997), and Michael JohnLaChiusa’s Marie Christine (1999). These late twentieth-century operettaswere not marketed as such, since producers no doubt wanted to avoid any-thing that might sound old-fashioned. Similarly, Sondheim did not labelhis own work thus, but A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd (1979)and Passion (1994) fall into this category. Opera companies often undertakerevivals of these almost-an-opera musicals/operettas.

Commissioned by Philadelphia’s American Music Theatre Festival in1994, Floyd Collins belongs in this category, albeit a ‘pocket operetta’ withonly thirteen performers. Based on the true story of a Kentucky man whowas trapped in a cave in 1925 for sixteen days, the work featured a scoreby Adam Guettel and a book by Tina Landau. While one reporter vis-ited and interviewed Collins eight times, efforts to save him failed. Beforehe was discovered dead, an enormous media circus sprung up outsidethe Sand Cave. When Floyd Collins opened off-Broadway at PlaywrightsHorizons in 1996, Ben Brantley of The New York Times found the workto exhibit ‘good faith, moral seriousness and artistic discipline’, neverthe-less he also thought it ‘half realized’. Responding to a 1999 revival at theOld Globe in San Diego, Rick Simas positioned Guettel with Bernsteinand Sondheim – as ‘one of the most innovative composers to write for the



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musical theatre’ – and found Landau’s book and direction to be ‘fresh’ and‘exciting’.2

The son of Mary Rodgers (Once Upon a Mattress) and grandson ofRichard Rodgers, Guettel certainly enjoys the prestige of belonging to anAmerican musical theatre dynasty. While Floyd Collins has its cult followers,Love’s Fire and Saturn Returns (a.k.a. Myths and Hymns, 1998) generatedmore good press. Winning Tony Awards for Best Original Score and BestOrchestrations (with Bruce Coughlin and Ted Sperling) for The Light in thePiazza (2005) secured Guettel’s place in history. In this lush, romantic score,Guettel created a soundscape much closer to Passion than to conventionalmusical theatre.

The integrated musical

Shows with a coherent, strong libretto that create a theatrical world wherethe focus is on story and character, and songs are constructed to further plotand character development, are alive and well. Productions such as Ragtime(1998), Avenue Q (2003), Hairspray (2002), and The Drowsy Chaperone(2006) continue this fine tradition. While the Golden Age of Musical Theatreis often seen as the maturation of the integrated book musical, musicaltheatre creators are still drawn to the proven efficacy of this form.

The pop/rock musical

For most of the twentieth century, musical theatre supplied many of thepopular songs of the day. With the advent of rock ’n’ roll, however, musicaltheatre composers were slow to adopt this genre as rhythm had replacedmelody as the unifying element of a song, and lyrics often took back seatto percussion. For these reasons, most conventional Broadway composersveered away from rock. As a result, it is generally composers new to Broadwayor the West End who write the majority of pop/rock musicals; unhappily,these writing team teams tend to create only one successful work. (Seechapter 13 for more on rock musicals.) Where are the follow-up hits by GaltMcDermott (Hair, 1968), Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey (Grease, 1972),Carol King (Really Rosie, 1980), Roger Miller (Big River, 1985) and others?While such musicals enjoyed long runs, they appear to be one-offs.

The exceptions to this one-hit trend are Stephen Schwartz, Elton Johnand David Yazbek, who have brought numerous contemporary pop musi-cals to the Broadway stage. Following Godspell (1971), Schwartz pennedsuccessful Broadway musicals – Pippin (1972), The Magic Show (1974) – and




animated film musicals (Pocahontas, lyrics, 1995; The Hunchback of NotreDame, lyrics, 1996; The Prince of Egypt, music and lyrics, 1997) before hewrote the blockbuster Wicked (2003). (See chapter 19 for more on the cre-ation of Wicked.) Elton John was certainly no stranger to popular prestige,but even his most ardent fans were probably surprised by the vengeancewith which he conquered the stage musical. Elton John and Tim Rice’s filmThe Lion King (1994) became a phenomenal stage sensation in 1997 andthen John began writing directly for the stage, starting with Aida (lyrics byTim Rice) in 2000, Billy Elliot: The Musical (lyrics by Lee Hall) in 2005, andLestat (lyrics by Bernie Taupin) in 2006. Only Lestat failed to connect withcritics and audiences.

Having been recorded by a number of popular groups and the composerof a number of scores for television, David Yazbek came to musical theatrein 2000 by adapting for the stage the 1997 British hit film The Full Monty.Teaming up with veteran librettist Terrence McNally, the stage musical ranfor 770 performances. Yazbek returned to Broadway with the stage musicaladaptation of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005), this time collaborating withlibrettist Jeffrey Lane. Along with Elton John, Yazbek is a successful popsong writer who made the transition to musical theatre, proving that hecan write for character and keep his award-winning aesthetic of the engag-ing, contemporary pop song. Another pop song composer who has hadsuccess on Broadway is Frank Wildhorn, who had three musicals runningsimultaneously on Broadway in 1999 – Jekyll and Hyde (1997), The ScarletPimpernel (1997) and The Civil War (1999).3

Related to the pop/rock musical is the ‘jukebox musical’. These revuesand musicals take advantage of previously written music, as opposed to theabove productions, which feature original music. Similar to the revue, thejukebox musical is an assemblage of pre-existing songs where the emphasisis clearly on the songs, not on plot and/or character. Unlike earlier elaboraterevues put on by the likes of Ziegfeld and George White, late twentieth-century revues tend to focus on the music of one composer and generallydo not showcase stars. With the exception of Bubblin’ Brown Sugar (1976),Sophisticated Ladies (1981) and Black and Blue (1989) – which featured largecasts, elaborate sets, and demanding choreography – most late twentieth-century jukebox musicals were small, intimate affairs, and included Ain’tMisbehavin’ (1978, music of Fats Waller), Five Guys Named Moe (1992,songs by Louis Jordan), Smokey Joe’s Café (1995, songs by Jerry Leiber andMike Stoller) and Dream (1997, lyrics by Johnny Mercer).

One variation of the jukebox musical/musical revue is the ‘disguisedpop/rock concert’. In this format a series of pop or rock hits are staged as aconcert; the evening invariably ends with an uninterrupted series of num-bers performed by the cast. Some of these musicals are semi-biographical:



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Plate 22 Imperial Theatre marquee featuring The Boy from Oz, summer 2004.

Beatlemania (1977, Beatles), Eubie! (1978, Eubie Blake), Buddy: The BuddyHolly Story (1990), Leader of the Pack (1985, Ellie Greenwich), and JerseyBoys (2006, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons). Others are less concert andmore biography, often using songs a singer and/or songwriter made famous,and include The Boy from Oz (2003, Peter Allen) and Good Vibrations(2005, Beach Boys).

Another genre of the jukebox musical that utilises pre-existing songs, butcreates a plot around them, is the ‘story album musical’ or the ‘anthologywith a story’ musical. (These contain plots where the story is not a biographyof the songwriter.) Some incorporate songs written originally for musicaltheatre, and others use pop songs. Two of the most popular of the formervariety are the ‘new’ Gershwin musicals My One and Only (1983) and Crazyfor You (1992). Crazy for You contains five songs from Girl Crazy, four fromA Damsel in Distress, three from the film Shall We Dance?, and six otherGershwin tunes. Ken Ludwig wrote a new libretto; directed by Mike Ockrentand choreographed by Susan Stroman, the musical was very popular withaudiences. Similarly, two plot musicals have created new characters andcontexts for songs already written by Stephen Sondheim: Marry Me a Little(1980) and Putting It Together (1999).




Jukebox musicals featuring pop songs (and non-biographical plots)include the international sensation Mamma Mia! (1999) and the BillyJoel/Twyla Tharp dansical, Movin’ Out (2002). Like the biographical orrock concert jukebox musical, musicals in this niche enjoy the fact thatmany potential theatre patrons already know the music very well. Duringtheir ten years of existence as a band (1972–82), the Swedish group ABBAhad fourteen singles in the Top 40 (four in the Top 10), and record salesthat exceeded 350 million units. British playwright Catherine Johnson tooktwenty-two of their greatest hits and fashioned a plot around them about ayoung woman who wants her father to give her away at her wedding; prob-lem is, mom doesn’t know which one of three men she was seeing at the timemight be Sophie’s dad. Mamma Mia! has been performed in ten languages,in eighty-five cities, and to over twenty million people; it has become anentertainment industry in its own right. Now its fifth year (and counting)in Las Vegas, it is the longest-running full-length Broadway musical ever toplay this city of chance.

Ethnic musicals

The black musical is a subdivision of the pop/rock musical, featuring musicthat reflects African-American jazz, blues, gospel, funk, reggae, rap orMotown. Examples are Gary Geld’s Purlie (1970), Judd Woldin and RobertBrittan’s Raisin (1973), Micki Grant’s Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope (1972)and Your Arms Too Short to Box With God (1976), Charlie Small’s TheWiz (1975), Michael Butler’s Reggae (1980), Gary Sherman’s Amen Cor-ner (1983), and The Color Purple (2005, with book by Marsha Norman andscore by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray). Special mentionshould be made of Mama, I Want to Sing! (1983), which opened at the 632-seat Heckscher Theater in Harlem. Written by Vy Higginsen, Ken Wydroand Wesley Naylor, the original production ran 2,213 performances, closingafter eight years only because of a lease dispute. Two sequels – Mama, I WantTo Sing II (1990) and Born to Sing! (1996) – along with a six-month run onthe West End of the original Mama in 1995 and several world tours broughtthe musical to millions. The original Mama cost $35,000 but grossed $25million in its first five years. Higginsen (wife) and Wydro’s (husband) familybusiness earned $8.7 million in 1988; they are one of the most-successfulblack-owned enterprises in America.

The jukebox musical also proved to be a popular form for African-American songwriters and performers. Notable examples include Ain’t Mis-behavin’ (1978), a celebration of songs by Fats Waller; Sophisticated Ladies(1981), showcasing the music of Duke Ellington; Black and Blue (1989), an



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anthology of songs by African Americans that were popular in Paris betweenthe two world wars; and Five Guys Named Moe (1992), focusing on songsby Louis Jordan. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the demographics of theBroadway audience, few producers have attempted to bring rap music toBroadway, the exception being Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk (1996).Conceived and directed by George C. Wolfe, the appeal of Funk had moreto do with the innovative choreography and performance by Savion Gloverthan the music.

New York City census information from 2000 indicates that 26.9% of themetropolitan population was Hispanic or Latino, and that 39% of Broadwayaudiences come from the New York metropolitan region.4 Given this demo-graphic information, it seems surprising that the Latino musical has thus farnot found an audience on Broadway. Examples include Luis Valdez’s ZootSuit (1979) and Paul Simon’s Capeman (1998). Arne Glimcher’s The MamboKings (2005) closed in San Francisco before it even came to New York.5 Moresuccessful have been dance-based revues such as Tango Argentino (1985,revived 1999), Flamenco Puro (1986) and Forever Tango (1997, revived 2004)and off-Broadway productions such as El Bravo! (1981) by José Fernandez,Thom Schiera and John Clifton; ¡Sofrito! (1997), a bilingual musical byDavid González and Larry Harlow with a Caribbean-influenced score thatplayed to sold-out audiences at New York’s New Victory Theater; and Gardel:The Musical (2006), a bio-musical about Argentine tango music legendCarlos Gardel. Since the only two genres of music that saw increases in CDsales in 2004 were country and Spanish, it is only a matter of time beforesavvy theatre producers move into this market. One might also expect moreexamples of the Spanish light opera, or zarzuela, to begin to appear in therepertoire of English and American opera companies. (See chapter 2 formore on the zarzuela in North America.)

While such shows as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song(1958) and Boublil and Schönberg’s Miss Saigon (1989) have given Asian-American performers long-running hits in which to perform, there havebeen very few Asian-American-authored musicals. Leon Ko and RobertLee’s Heading East (1999), A. R. Rahman’s Bombay Dreams (2004), andMaria Maria (book and lyrics by Hye Jung Yu, music by Gyung Chan Cha,2006) are rare exceptions. Though the original music was kept, David HenryHwang wrote a new libretto for The Flower Drum Song when it was revivedon Broadway in 2002.

In the folk/country-western music genre, there have been notable pastsuccesses, such as Carol Hall’s The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978),Quilters (1984) and Roger Miller’s Big River (1985). Yet, even though countrymusic sales have been rising along with Spanish CD music sales, there hasyet to be a successful twenty-first-century folk or country musical.




The non-linear or ‘concept’ musical

In contrast to the integrated musical, the concept musical rejects a traditionalstoryline; instead the emphasis is on character, or on a theme or a message.And since they are ‘thought pieces’, concept musicals are rarely comedies.After two successful off-Broadway musicals (First Lady Suite, 1993; HelloAgain, 1994), composer/lyricist Michael John LaChiusa was heralded as oneof the promising musical theatre creators who were forging new forms. Butthe box-office failures of The Petrified Prince (1994), Marie Christine (1999),and The Wild Party (2000) seemed to indicate that Broadway audiences werenot yet ready to embrace his experiments with the concept musical.

Joseph Moncure March’s 1926 poem The Wild Party inspired LaChiusaand co-librettist/director George C. Wolfe to musicalise this depiction ofjazz-age debauchery.6 Produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival, theproduction opened on Broadway in 2000 with a top-tier cast (Eartha Kitt,Mandy Patinkin, and Toni Collette) and was nominated for seven TonyAwards. Set in the twilight of the vaudeville era, the show is conceptualisedaround a series of vaudeville turns, complete with signs announcing thetitles of the acts. New York Magazine’s John Simon found the piece to be‘a fiasco’ since it appeared to him to be a series of ‘random incidents thatrefuse to mesh’.7 Similarly, Ben Brantley (in the New York Times) describedthe evening as ‘a parade of personalities in search of a missing party’.8 Unableto find an audience, The Wild Party closed after sixty-eight performances,losing all of its $5 million capitalisation.

While the concept musical found a niche within the tenets of post-modernism, musical theatre audiences tended to be more conservative,preferring a linear story and hummable tunes to radical experimentation.The box-office failures of Jerry Herman’s Mack and Mabel (1974, sixty-sixperformances), Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along (1981, sixteenperformances) and Jeanine Tesori’s Caroline, or Change (2004, 136 perfor-mances) serve as warning beacons to those who would argue that audienceswant challenging fare. Even though many critics considered each of thesemusicals to be some of the finest work that these creative teams in questionhad ever written, they failed to find a loyal audience.

One variation of the concept musical that has found appreciative audi-ences is the self-reflexive musical. While the ‘backstage musical’ has longbeen a popular genre – Kiss Me, Kate (1948), Gypsy (1959), Dreamgirls(1981), The Producers (2001) – the self-reflexive musical is not just aboutshow business and/or musical theatre, it asks the audience to believe thatthe production of the musical which they are watching is happening in realtime in front of them. Little Sally interrupts Office Lockstop as he attemptsto introduce the audience to Urinetown, the Musical (2001). Little Sally



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questions why the musical has such an ‘awful’ title, especially when themusic is so ‘happy’. When she attempts to understand the seriousness ofthe water shortage crisis around which the musical’s plot revolves, OfficerLockstock cuts her off, explaining ‘nothing can kill a musical faster than toomuch exposition’. Similarly, in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005) and Spamalot(2005), characters also often break the fourth wall. The self-reflexive musicalcan appear as too much of an insider phenomenon – like quoting chore-ography from West Side Story in Urinetown – suggesting that audiencesmust know a great deal about musicals in order to get all of the allusionsand jokes. But musical theatre never gets tired of looking at its own reflec-tion, as writers continue to be drawn to the backstage musical, the show-within-a-show, and the self-reflexive musical in works such as The Musical ofMusicals: The Musical (2003), The Drowsy Chaperone (2006), and Curtains!(2007).

The ‘dansical’

When Contact won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2000, it was clear thatthe dansical had arrived, although director/choreographer Susan Stroman’swork was advertised as ‘a dance play’. Here the emphasis is on dance andthe narrative is told through movement since there is generally no dialogueor sung lyrics. As another sign of the new supremacy of the choreogra-pher/director (see chapter 12), the dansical often does not contain originalmusic. Consider, for example, Big Deal (Bob Fosse, 1986), Dangerous Games(Graciela Daniele, 1989), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Daniele, 1995), Con-tact (Stroman, 2000), Movin’ Out (Twyla Tharp, 2003), and The Times TheyAre A-Changin’ (Tharp, 2007). While the form is not new, Susan Stromanand Twyla Tharp can be given credit for almost single-handedly popularis-ing the form. Some critics noted that Tharp had already been on Broadwaybefore with an evening-long dance theatre piece The Catherine Wheel, whichhad a three-week engagement in 1981.

‘Actor-musicianship’

Having worked in British regional theatres for several decades, during thebelt-tightening of the 1990s, John Doyle was faced with the challenge ofdirecting/producing musical theatre with companies who could no longerafford orchestras. At first he had actors play musical instruments when theircharacters were not on stage. Then he began to direct the musical in a waythat the characters stayed on stage and in character, and so their playing an




instrument became another facet of their characterisation. For this reason,Doyle calls his approach ‘actor-musicianship’ as it is ‘a “multi-skilled” wayof telling a story’.9 As associate director of the Watermill Theatre, his exper-iments in this 220-seat theatre in Berkshire attracted critical notice. Butwhen Doyle’s The Gondoliers (2001) and Sweeney Todd (2004) transferredto the West End, more audiences were exposed to these unique revisals. Gon-doliers was rewritten with a cast of eight actors to feature a Chicago mafiafamily who find themselves in a London Italian jazz café, while Sweeney wasreduced to a cast of ten performers who all played musical instruments; nei-ther production featured a separate orchestra. When Sweeney Todd moved toBroadway, Doyle won the Tony Award for Best Director of a Musical. Doyle’srefashioned Mack and Mabel transferred to London’s Criterion Theatre in2006, the same year his Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park production ofCompany (with new orchestrations by Mary-Mitchell Campbell) moved toBroadway. In these re-imaginings of shows, the guiding hand of the auteurdirector (and now auteur orchestrator) is extremely visible.

The ‘revisal’

A variation on the director and/or choreographer as auteur is the revivalwhich features a new (or significantly altered) libretto. In the case of these‘revisals’, the librettist is now the auteur. In 1983, Peter Stone and TimothyS. Mayer crafted a new book to create My One and Only, using many ofthe songs from George and Ira Gershwin’s Funny Face (1927). Eventuallyrunning 767 performances, its commercial success no doubt inspired thecreation of the next ‘new’ Gershwin musical, Crazy for You (1992), for whichKen Ludwig wrote a new libretto using Guy Bolton’s basic storyline for theGershwins’ Girl Crazy (1930).

The practice of the revisal dates back centuries. When French composerGeorges Bizet created Carmen to a libretto by Henri Meilhac and LudovicHalévy in 1875, this opéra-comique contained spoken dialogue. By the time itopened in Vienna later in 1875, Carmen no longer featured spoken dialogue,but rather recitative devised by Ernest Guiraud, as Bizet had died threemonths after the opera’s premiere. Oscar Hammerstein II then wrote a newlibretto and lyrics in 1943 to Bizet’s music, titling the new work CarmenJones and setting it in World War II Alabama. The next major reiterationoccurred in 1983 when Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière removed thechorus to create La Tragédie de Carmen.

A recent, significant rewrite happened when a production of AnnieGet Your Gun was being prepared for a 1999 Broadway revival starringBernadette Peters. The original book by Herbert Fields and Dorothy Fields



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was revised by Peter Stone to remove the jokes and songs aimed at AmericanIndians. The song ‘I’m an Indian, Too’ was cut and the musical’s subplot wasrewritten to feature an inter-racial couple. Even though Stone’s alterationswere made with the permission of Berlin and Fields’ heirs, criticism waslevelled at Stone and the revival’s producers for changing a work of art. Onthe other hand, no one missed the racial slurs of the original 1946 show,and with Stone’s new book and galvanising performances by Peters and herreplacement Reba McEntire, the revisal had a very profitable run of 1,045performances.

David Henry Hwang wrote an entirely new libretto for Joseph Fields,Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song. Whilegroundbreaking in 1958 for humanising a marginalised group in Amer-ican society, the work nevertheless became perceived as sentimental, a‘minor’ Rodgers and Hammerstein work. The reviews that greeted the2001 ‘revisal’ at the Mark Taper Forum were universally positive. Varietyapplauded Hwang’s ‘wholesale reconstructive surgery’ to the script, callingit ‘an artistic success, revealing a revitalised score and a dramatic complex-ion that’s far richer than the original’.10 Diane Haithman of the Los AngelesTimes notes that Hwang’s changes are not about updating a 1958 musicalto twenty-first-century standards of political correctness, instead ‘he playswith Asian stereotypes, rather than eliminate them’.11 The reviews for theNew York run were not as positive, and the production only managed a runof 172 performances on Broadway.

While the producers clearly marketed their productions of My One andOnly and Crazy for You as ‘new’ Gershwin musicals (complete with quo-tation marks), the revisals of Annie Get Your Gun and Flower Drum Songdid not have titles that distinguished them from their original incarnations.Unlike various versions of a song recorded by different artists, these revisalsare not interpretations of a work of art, they are unique works of art. It isahistorical and unethical to present a work to audiences under its old titlewhen it contains significant alterations to its original form.

For most of the twentieth century, musical theatre writers not only sup-plied the nation with many of its hit songs, but also many of its top musicalfilms as well. Indeed, perusal of the American Film Institute’s (AFI) listof the twenty-five ‘Greatest Movie Musicals’ reveals that over half startedon the Broadway stage. While the norm has been stage-to-screen transfers,there are a handful of musicals that were originally conceived and writtenfor film that have been subsequently reconfigured for the Broadway stage.(See Table 16.1.)

The wildly acclaimed classic The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Rodgers andHammerstein’s television film Cinderella (1957) were made into popu-lar stage properties in the 1990s, but curiously neither has ever played a




Table 16.1 Selected stage adaptations of musical films (arrangedchronologically according to the year of the stage version)

Title Year of film Year of stage version

Gigi 1958 197342nd Street 1933 1980, 2001 revivalSingin’ in the Rain 1952 1985Meet Me in St. Louis 1944 1989The Who’s Tommy 1975 1993Beauty and the Beast 1991 1994Victor, Victoria 1982 1995State Fair 1945 1996The Lion King 1994 1997Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 1968 2002 (London), 2005 (New York)Mary Poppins 1964 2004 (London), 2006 (New York)

Broadway theatre. Instead, they have been performed professionally on theroad and in regional theatres, and both were released for amateur pro-ductions relatively quickly. Similarly, Disney’s megahit High School Musical(2006) went from cable television to high school productions within itsfirst year. A New York run was once seen as an absolute imperative so aproduction could boast ‘direct from Broadway’ even if they did not haveany glowing quotations from reviews to go with that claim. But these threepopular productions purposefully declined a Broadway production as noneof them needed the imprint of a New York production to ‘validate’ them.

Concerning story and characters, a minority of musicals feature an orig-inal plot; most are adaptations of source material that first existed as a novel,short story, news article, biography, ballet, or even a painting (Sunday in thePark with George). A recent trend – which some critics fear has become anepidemic – is the musicalisation of popular films. (See Table 16.2.)

A snapshot taken on 1 January 2006 shows thirty-eight productions onBroadway; of the twenty-nine musicals running, nineteen were either madeinto or from a film.

The genre of the source material is no guarantee of the critical and/orcommercial success of a musical, but what the screen-to-stage musicalisa-tion can capitalise on is name recognition. When a film like Footloose comesto Broadway, even a mediocre stage musical staging can run for 709 per-formances in New York, enjoy a long run in Las Vegas, and see numerousamateur productions. But name recognition is certainly not a reliable insur-ance policy: for every megahit (Little Shop of Horrors, La Cage aux Folles,Hairspray) there is an implosion (The Goodbye Girl, Urban Cowboy). In2002, MGM created ‘MGM On Stage’ to develop and license films fromtheir catalogue for stage production. Starting with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert



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Table 16.2 Selected stage musicals based on largely non-musical films,some of which feature significant musical sequences (arrangedchronologically according to the year of the stage version)

Title Year of film Year of stage musical

A Little Night Music 1955∗ 1973Little Shop of Horrors 1960 1982, 2003 revivalLa Cage aux Folles 1978 1983, 2004 revivalMy Favorite Year 1982 1992The Goodbye Girl 1977 1993Sunset Boulevard 1950 1993 (London), 1994 (New York)Passion 1981∗∗ 1994Fame, The Musical 1980 1995Big 1988 1996The Full Monty 1997 2000The Producers 1968 2001Hairspray 1988 2002Sweet Smell of Success 1957 2002Thoroughly Modern Millie 1967 2002Urban Cowboy 1980 2003Spamalot 1975∗∗∗ 2005Dirty Rotten Scoundrels 1988 2005Billy Elliot: The Musical 2000 2005 (London), 2007 (New York)The Wedding Singer 1988 2006Tarzan 1999 2006Legally Blonde 2001 2007Young Frankenstein 1974 2007

∗Based on Ingmar Bergman’s Sommarnottens leende (Smiles of a Summer Night)∗∗Based on Ettore Scola’s Passione d’Amore (Passion of Love)∗∗∗Based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail

(Australia, 2006), and Legally Blonde (2007), this division has plans to musi-calise another fifteen films for the stage.

Producers

Producing changed a great deal during the last decade of the twentiethcentury as the days of the sole theatrical producer disappeared. Legendarysolo producers, such as David Merrick and others, were known for theiridiosyncratic taste, business savvy and aesthetic fingerprint. Indeed, there isa universal sentiment that with the disappearance of the solo producer therewas a corresponding evaporation of much risk-taking on Broadway. Theseproducers did not just ‘discover’ new musicals, they often assembled a cre-ative team to realise an idea that they had for a musical. Historians LawrenceMaslon and Michael Kantor conclude that ‘whereas once a producer wasexpected to have some artistic acumen, the job now was about cultivatingcash’.12 As costs to mount a new musical increased, producers beginning inthe 1960s began to experiment with often bold ventures in order to secure a




profit from their ventures. One of Merrick’s innovations was celebrity cast-ing. When the originating star of a musical left the show, it was the Broadwayconvention that that they would be replaced by an unknown (and less expen-sive), talented performer. Merrick’s Hello, Dolly!, starring Carol Channing,started off with a bang, winning a record ten Tony Awards in 1964. WhenChanning left the show, Merrick engaged Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, andan all-African-American cast, which attracted new publicity and new audi-ences. Back to a Caucasian cast, Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, Betty Grable,Bibi Osterwald, Phyllis Diller and then Ethel Merman essayed the role ofMrs Dolly Gallagher Levi to realise a run of 2,844 performances (almost sixyears). For Merrick, the idea was not to get patrons to buy a ticket once,but to create reasons for them to return. And by casting wildly differentstars in the role, he also ensured different demographics might be attractedto his show. This ‘revolving door’ star casting ploy has been employed byproducers Fran and Barry Weissler with equally impressive results in the1994 revival of Grease, and later Annie Get Your Gun, Wonderful Town, andthe most lucrative to date, Chicago (1996), which is still running in 2008.

Like Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, and Rodgers and Hammerstein – inaddition to his prodigious accomplishments as an artist – Andrew LloydWebber has enjoyed much success as a producer. From 1986 to 1990, Webbersought to eliminate the ‘backer’s audition’ where the composer and lyricistsing through the score with the hopes of enticing well-heeled angels toinvest in their show. Instead, he sold shares in his Really Useful Group, sothat investors would be gambling that any future Webber property wouldbe popular and run a profit, or become a blockbuster like Cats or ThePhantom of the Opera and make a great deal of money. Ultimately, thestrain of maintaining a publicly held company led Webber to buy back theoutstanding shares in 1990. Canadian producer Garth Drabinsky similarlytook his company Livent, Inc. public in 1993, but the company declaredbankruptcy in 1998 amid a flurry of lawsuits.

For a 2006 London revival of The Sound of Music, Webber hit uponthe novel idea of creating a reality television programme centred on themusical’s casting. The viewing audience voted on the contestants at eachstage, and the actors with the fewest votes were eliminated. Carried on BBCfor eleven hours, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? was very successfulin terms of generating audience interest, as the advance ticket sales topped£10 million before opening. And while 7.7 million viewers witnessed thefinal showdown between the top three finalists and two million voted toextend a six-month contract to Connie Fisher, it seemed nothing more thana publicity stunt, but twenty-three-year-old Fisher received great reviews.It was inevitable that an American producer would seek to emulate thissuccessful gimmick: Grease: You’re the One That I Want! appeared on NBC



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in 2007, with viewers deciding on the casting of the leads for a Broadwayrevival of the classic musical.

By the 1990s, costs had begun to escalate outside the reach of the indi-vidual investor. Broadway musicals are now generally financed by teams ofproducers and/or corporations (Disney, 20th Century Fox, Clear ChannelEntertainment, Suntory International Corporation, Warner Brothers, etc.).

Disney made their Broadway debut with little fanfare as ‘The Walt DisneyStudios’ was listed along with James B. Freydberg, Kenneth Feld, JerryL. Cohen, Max Weitzenhoffer, and The John F. Kennedy Center for thePerforming Arts as producers of Bill Irwin’s wordless masterpiece, LargelyNew York (1989). With their revitalised animated film musicals back inpopularity, it was only natural that Disney began to look at its own cata-logue of film musicals for possible stage transfers. The newly formed DisneyTheatrical Productions made their Broadway debut in 1994 with Beautyand the Beast, which when it opened in London the following year wasthe most expensive West End show of its time (£10 million). With cross-platform advertising (television, video, web, etc.) and extensive merchan-dising, Beauty and the Beast has enormous visibility. Two additional factorscontributed to the production entering its thirteenth year (five thousandplus performances) on Broadway in 2006: a reputation as ‘family entertain-ment’ and occasional star casting.

In short order, Disney decided not only to continue to produce live musi-cals, but to become a theatre owner as well. After a $36 million renovation,Disney reopened the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street to becomethe home of the next Disney blockbuster: The Lion King. In 1998, Disneybegan work on an original musical instead of adapting another one of theirexisting film musicals for the stage. Elaborate Lives was not well receivedin Atlanta, so Disney put the show back into rehearsal before a redesigned,rewritten, recast and retitled Aida opened on Broadway. Also penned by LionKing’s Elton John, Aida was another artistic triumph (four Tony Awards)and box-office success (1,852 performances). In 2004, Disney teamed upwith British producer Cameron Mackintosh to bring Mary Poppins to thestage. Based on the stories of P. L. Travers and their own 1964 film version,this was another victory. While the stage musical version of Tarzan (2006,score by Phil Collins) was not well received critically, it appears to havefound an audience for 486 performances.

With the disappearance of the individual producer came the increasedimportance of transfers arriving to Broadway not only from London butalso from American regional theatres. Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre hasbeen importing productions to Broadway since Hair (1967) and A ChorusLine (1975); other musical transfers to Broadway include Two Gentlemen ofVerona (1971), The Pirates of Penzance (1980 revival), The Mystery of Edwin




Drood (1985), and Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk (1996). Other non-profit theatres no doubt dream of replicating the success of A Chorus Line,which ran 6,137 performances in its original Broadway run, ultimately gross-ing $280 million worldwide. While Lincoln Center produces many musicalsin its own theatres, it also has produced shows in traditional Broadwayhouses, such as Passion (1994) and Sarafina! (1987). Established in 1963,the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, has movedseventeen productions to Broadway, including Man of La Mancha (1965),Shenandoah (1975), and Annie (1977). Two major theatres in California havealso been successful in New York: LaJolla Playhouse with Big River (1985),Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002), Jersey Boys (2005) and others, and the OldGlobe Theatre with Into the Woods (1987), Damn Yankees (1994 revival),The Full Monty (2000), and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005).

Musicals can also come via organisations whose goals are to provideaffordable New York visibility for new work; among these, the New YorkMusical Theatre Festival (NYMT), the New York International Fringe Fes-tival (NYF), and the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) areincreasingly important development conduits. Established in 1999, the NewYork International Fringe Festival produced Urinetown (1999, NYF Festi-val; 2001, Broadway), Debbie Does Dallas (2001, NYF Festival; 2001, off-Broadway), and How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes(2004, NYF Festival; 2006, off-Broadway). For three weeks every Septem-ber, the New York Musical Theatre Festival has been presenting approxi-mately thirty productions each season. Productions which have moved tocommercial runs off-Broadway include Altar Boyz (2005),The Great Amer-ican Trailer Park Musical (2005), and Gutenberg! The Musical! (2006). Eachyear eight musicals are chosen for the National Alliance for Musical The-atre annual New York conference, and are presented as forty-five-minutereadings for commercial, regional, and independent producers scatteredaround the country. NAMT notes that 75% of their festival productions havereceived subsequent productions, including The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds HerChameleon Skin (2000), Thoroughly Modern Millie (2000), Songs for a NewWorld (2000), The Drowsy Chaperone (2006) and I Love You Because (2006).

The business of Broadway

While the newest technological innovations seem to make their way into theset, light, sound, and costume designs of theatrical productions, modernisa-tion of the business of the theatre often seems to come in fits and starts. Sometheatres experimented with phone reservations and credit cards in the 1960s,but it was not until 1971 that all Broadway ticket offices began to accept



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American Express. By the 1980s, ticket sales were handled by centralisedticket sellers (Telecharge, Ticketmaster, Tickets.com) that allow patrons tobuy tickets 24/7. Computerised ticketing meant that shows could sell fur-ther in advance than was possible with hard tickets, and by the early 1990s,patrons were able to choose their seats when ordering. The TKTS Boothopened for business in Times Square in 1973, run by the Theatre Devel-opment Fund. By selling half-price tickets the day of performance, manystruggling shows were able to put paying customers in their seats, and folksof more modest means were able to attend a Broadway show. A differentkind of selling tool came into being in 2001 when The Producers conceivedthe idea of premium-price ticketing in order to counteract the practice ofticket brokers buying the best seats in the house and reselling them at anenormous mark-up, a profit that did not benefit the original producers ofthe musical. Pricing the premium tickets at $480 meant that few seats went toresellers and that the profit from the mark-up went to the producers. Whileno one begrudges producers from turning a profit with their productions,this pricing scheme has not been met with universal support. According toone producer, ‘The number of premium seats for the special-event showsare spiraling out of control. We’re setting up a system that says, ‘Hey, if you’renot rich, don’t even bother coming to our show.’13

Just as the manner of selling of tickets changed radically at the end of thetwentieth century, so did advertising. Recognising that the primary strengthof Pippin (1972) was Bob Fosse’s choreography, producer Stuart Ostrowcreated the first television commercial to feature clips of an actual Broadwayproduction. Running 1,944 performances, Pippin owed a great deal of itslongevity to this commercial. While show websites were relatively modestin the 1990s, by the twenty-first century they were often elaborate affairs,selling not only tickets, but merchandise as well. Boublil and Schönberg’sThe Pirate Queen added ‘castcom’ to their website when the production wasin previews in Chicago in 2006. Daily video blogs were posted featuringinterviews with cast and crew, members of the creative team, and audiencetestimonials. Web viewers were invited to post comments to each entry.While most blogs and threaded discussions on musical theatre tend to focuson the negative and their pessimistic tone can be seen as damaging wordof mouth, the producers of The Pirate Queen sought to control at least partof the web dialogue about their production. Nevertheless, the show closedquickly in New York.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Really Useful Group and Disney are thus farthe only producing entities which group their current productions in adver-tising in order to build awareness in theatre-goers that there is a branding thatis larger than the individual production. Otherwise, advertising for Broad-way shows is done on an individual basis. Realising the strong economic




impact of live theatre in New York City, the New York State Department ofCommerce launched the ‘I Love New York’ commercials in 1978. Promot-ing Broadway as a must-see tourist attraction, these commercials not onlyincreased audience attendance but are also credited with assisting the eco-nomic recovery of New York City in the 1980s. Even though the professionalorganisation of the League of American Theatre Owners and Producers wasestablished in 1930, it was not until the end of the twentieth century thattheir mission was broadened to include promoting not specific shows, butBroadway in general. In 1997 they unveiled the ‘Live Broadway’ logo andadvertising campaign, which is meant ‘to designate genuine Broadway the-atre, the highest quality form of popular entertainment’. While some areleery of any advertising scheme that attempts to promote the Ur-Broadwaymusical, others see a benefit to Broadway and New York to position live,professional theatre on Broadway as a unique experience.

Ultimately it does not matter whether the musical is produced by an indi-vidual or a corporation, whether it boasts an original plot or is a shamelessfilm-to-stage transfer, whether the seats are twenty dollars off-off-Broadwayor cost $480 for the Premium Broadway experience; whether the show hasbeen in development for years or opens ‘cold’ on Broadway, there is no pre-dicting unqualified success. If focus groups, talkbacks, threaded discussions,and questionnaires were one hundred per cent effective, then there wouldbe no flops on Broadway. Yet the statistics yield a sobering fact: musicaltheatre remains a high-risk medium where less than one show in five breakseven. But when a show is financially successful, the economic possibilitiesare staggering.

As the twenty-first century gets under way, artists continue to stretchand question many of the assumptions and conventions that have guidedmusical theatre throughout the previous century. The Drowsy Chaperone’s‘Man in the Chair’ explains to us the virtues of the silly (and fictional)1928 musical we have been watching: ‘It does what a musical is supposedto do. It takes you to another world, and it gives you a little tune to carryin your head when you’re feeling blue.’ Of course, not all musical theatreauthors approach the genre with this goal. Nevertheless, whether they arewriting a traditional book musical, a concept musical, a jukebox musical, asung-through musical, a rock opera, a dansical, a film-to-stage musical, etc.,all of these creators would probably agree with the director Julian Marshwhen he declares his core values in 42nd Street: ‘musical comedy: the mostglorious words in the English language’. The directions in which this genrewill develop remain as elusive as those for creating a fail-proof show.



Documents

Cambridge Companions Online...287 The musical at the dawn of the twenty-ﬁrst century animated ﬁlm musicals (Pocahontas, lyrics, 1995; The Hunchback of NotreDame, lyrics, 1996;