The present Broadway revival of the late Stephen Sondheim’s most infamous flop, 1981’s Merrily We Roll Along, has unquestionably reclaimed the present’s fame, not solely by means of the rave critiques of critics however by garnering the highest common ticket worth of any present this season, with seats ranging as much as $600.
With Merrily raking it in on the Hudson Theatre, final 12 months’s acclaimed Sweeney Todd revival going robust on the Lunt-Fontanne, and the composer’s decidedly experimental present, Here We Are, garnering a blended reception off-Broadway, it’s maybe price taking inventory of what American musical theater has change into on this period the place Sondheim is each all over the place and nowhere. While Sondheim’s exhibits are at present enjoying throughout New York, his affect over the trendy musical itself has change into considerably tougher to trace.
“There’s a half-voiced fear among musical acolytes, understandable in a time in which theater itself is newly under siege,” former New York Times critic Ben Brantley lately wrote, “that on some level Stephen Sondheim represents the end of the line for a once-flourishing art form.” If that sounds dire, it’s as a result of the stakes are excessive: It’s a standard axiom that musicals are one of many few purely American artwork types; they advanced inside American popular culture to change into a world export and one in all our hottest, enduring types of leisure. But it’s additionally extensively understood within the theater world that for all of the composers like Sondheim who helped make the musical what it’s, a present like Merrily — with unknown songs, a conceptual plot tailored from a little-known play, and a story advised in reverse — may by no means make it to the Great White Way in the present day. That’s as a result of in the present day’s successes are typically jukebox musicals and exhibits based mostly on very well-known motion pictures you already know.
This doesn’t imply, nevertheless, that musicals are doomed to wither on the vine as consumerism pushes us towards ever extra by-product, watered-down franchise diversifications stacked with mediocre songs. It’s straightforward to imagine this, and to cling to Sondheim because the final nice theater composer. But maybe there’s a unique perspective on the present state of the musical: That it isn’t dying in any respect, that many probably worrying points that appear distinctive to the trendy panorama are as outdated because the medium itself, and that the artform is evolving into one thing new and equally fascinating.
The new trendy musical is arguably discovering its means right into a hybrid kind that routinely performs with construction and style expectations, pairs self-aware storytelling and revolutionary design with conventional crowd-pleasing parts, and deploys the mechanisms of social media and TikTookay to bolster viewers interactivity and unite exhibits with their core fanbases. No, it’s not Sondheim — however in a brand new period of storytelling, we don’t but know what the following Sondheim will look or sound like.
Broadway exhibits have at all times relied on pop hits to drive their success
To perceive precisely the place we’re headed, it’s useful to know that the musical as we all know it has been by means of all this earlier than. First, consider the musical as a sum of its components. There’s the story — the e book or the libretto — and the songs that go together with the story. Regardless of no matter else you place onstage, how nicely these two parts mesh determines whether or not you’ve created one thing coherent.
That may sound like a foregone conclusion, however the historical past of the shape begs to vary. The musical advanced from two completely reverse impulses: vaudeville, which paired fashionable songs of the day with entertaining skits and brief sketches, and operettas, which had dense, refined scores descended from operas. So, in a single nook, exhibits whose songs had been random and interchangeable — within the different, exhibits whose tales couldn’t be advised with out the music.
In the center, you had Tin Pan Alley, the place a lot of America’s most well-known Twentieth-century songwriters churned out songs at a feverish tempo. In this period, songwriters reminiscent of George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin thrived, churning out still-popular hits that helped kind the spine of what’s known as the American Songbook. Often, these songs discovered their means into frothy exhibits whose plots had been negligible and served as little greater than advertising and marketing for the music — which not often had something to do with the story. Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies, which reigned over the Twenties, was much more imprecise, delivering conceptually revolutionary spectacle however functioning primarily as a trend present with music.
In 1928, nevertheless, this began to vary, when Ziegfeld produced Jerome Kern’s Showboat, a difficult drama steeped within the affect of operetta and teeming with social points. Not solely was Showboat’s rating almost steady all through, however the songs had been designed to relay data and perception into the characters. In 1943, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II additional codified these components once they took a holistic method to their first collaboration. In Oklahoma!, the music, lyrics, and choreography had been all utilized to deepen characterization and advance the plot. But, crucially, whereas Rodgers’s lush rating was influenced by operetta, the songs had been all bangers. The songs from Oklahoma! had been so fashionable that for the primary time in Broadway historical past, the manufacturing made a recording to protect the unique solid, thereby turning the Original Broadway Cast Recording) into an indelible a part of the musical theater expertise.
For most theater lovers, the unique solid recording is an introduction to the present itself, lengthy earlier than they ever get an opportunity to see it. But whereas these recordings are an important advertising and marketing device, it will possibly decontextualize songs from the efficiency. Thus, mockingly, on the similar time Rodgers and Hammerstein had been nailing house the components for a totally constructed musical, their solid album was instigating the method for its deconstruction.
What even is a Broadway musical anymore? It’s a surprisingly tough query to reply
Most current Broadway productions fall into one in all two camps. In the primary camp, we’ve got musical revues — jukebox musicals — that are loosely plotted automobiles for beforehand written well-known songs from pop songwriters or performers. Think Jersey Boys, Moulin Rouge, or the current Britney Spears musical, Once Upon a One More Time.
In the second camp, we’ve got musicals written within the Disney vein, including songs or different parts to a beforehand beloved, well-known franchise. Think Mean Girls, Legally Blonde, Back to the Future, or the upcoming musical adaptation of The Notebook.
Excluding revivals, the overwhelming majority of current Broadway musicals fall into both class, with various levels of success. An ever-dwindling third class is what we’d consider because the “traditional” American musical — the Hamiltons and Hadestowns, constructed not round a beforehand present juggernaut franchise or pop hitmaker, however round an authentic thought or story adaptation, with a totally authentic rating.
There are apparent limitations to those categorizations. You can argue, completely appropriately, that exhibits constructed round beforehand present franchises are additionally “traditional” musicals — they have an inclination to have totally or principally authentic scores with a two-act plot construction. At the identical time, these distinctions have change into ever extra blurry in a musical panorama the place exhibits must attraction to the tastes of each vacationers and hardcore musical lovers with refined palettes and large fan energy. It’s more and more widespread for jukebox musicals like Jagged Little Pill and the current Neil Diamond revue A Beautiful Noise to not solely interpolate their pop hits however to deconstruct, interrogate, and recontextualize them. Is that also a revue? Meanwhile, exhibits based mostly on motion pictures like The Lion King and Matilda are easy story diversifications, however really feel recent and transformative based mostly on their musical and theatrical strengths.
Still, there’s a transparent distinction between exhibits that exist to additional the artwork kind and people who exist to additional increase an present IP. With the franchise and jukebox musicals dominating Broadway, it feels essential to separate the “originals” from the ever-growing crop of exhibits that appear to meet the latter goal. It’s exhausting to disregard that many of those latter kinds of exhibits are usually not solely by-product but additionally sloppy and creatively vapid — and that since Broadway reopened, these exhibits have been turning income even at their most muddled and cringe, as different, extra inventive and revolutionary exhibits shut up store early.
Applying the entire Rent sellout debate to a crop of exhibits which can be bringing Times Square again to life almost 4 years right into a pandemic that debilitated the American theater, nevertheless, appears at minimal ill-timed and misguided. It additionally isn’t fully correct to say that solely the by-product musicals get all the eye. Of the 10 highest-grossing exhibits of the final decade, solely two, Beautiful — The Carole King Musical and Jersey Boys, had been jukebox musicals, and solely two, The Lion King and Aladdin, might be stated to suit underneath the “franchise musical” heading. However one feels about the remainder of the musicals on the checklist, nobody can say they aren’t revolutionary. This was a decade that noticed a gradual effusion of authentic musicals, from Fun Home and Dear Evan Hansen to Be More Chill, and Something Rotten, a lot of which discovered passionate fanbases. And whilst Broadway limped alongside for many of final season, the three exhibits that recouped post-pandemic — to date including girl-powered historical past romp Six, the Michael Jackson musical MJ, and the revival of Funny Girl — arguably represented a spread of concepts and inventive ideas moderately than a narrowing of the sector.
Still, the concept Broadway ought to be about extra than simply milking money cows feels noble. It’s exhausting to let go of the Twentieth-century dream of an elevated musical kind the place each track feels inextricably linked to a novel character and story delivered to us by consummate songwriters. It’s additionally exhausting to not resent the Mean Girls and the & Juliets for robbing the Strange Loops of their probability to discover a mass viewers.
The dictum that not even Sondheim may change into Sondheim within the present atmosphere of American theater is supposed to underscore the truth that culturally, we’ve moved previous the age of visionary composers driving what will get a Broadway manufacturing. The present glut of jukebox/franchise exhibits make it extremely tough for less-known and experimental exhibits to interrupt by means of. While everyone nonetheless needs to be Sondheim, solely a handful of in the present day’s musical composers have the sort of fan following and identify recognition that permits them to mount a Broadway present and recoup its funding on the power of their rating. It’s not straightforward, as Brantley noticed for the Times, “to imagine any of them ascending to the unapproachable dominance of their profession that was Mr. Sondheim’s for roughly half a century.” A facet issue is that a lot of them have moved away from the theatrical trenches after recruitment into the Disney fold — a much less dangerous, extra profitable profession path, however not one which results in new exhibits.
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But this concept — that there’ll by no means be one other Sondheim to innovate and push the musical ahead — additionally obscures the fact that almost all of Sondheim’s musicals barely made it to Broadway to start with. (Merrily solely ran for 16 tortured performances.) For most of his profession, Sondheim handled important dismissal and audiences who didn’t know what to do together with his work. It took many years for a lot of of his exhibits, with their famously “unsingable” scores, to change into the cultural icons that established him not solely as one in all America’s most essential composers, however a popular culture mainstay.
In different phrases, even Sondheim usually persevered regardless of, not due to, the modes and technique of Broadway success. For all we laud “the American musical” as a pure artwork kind, the reality is that Broadway has at all times been a business enterprise, at the beginning, extra carefully tied to Top 40 pop music than to excessive artwork. The Gershwins, Cole Porter, Lerner and Loewe, even Leonard Bernstein — a lot of the Twentieth century’s commemorated musical composers had been primarily hitmakers.
This is a tough tablet for a lot of theater lovers to swallow. Musical theater’s relationship to classical music and opera has traditionally been such an incendiary topic that each few many years somebody drops an impassioned rant on the general public about it. The ever-present pressure between perceptions of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” artwork signifies that theater composers and critics continuously wage struggle over which realm the musical belongs to. It additionally signifies that critics have been handwringing that the trendy musical is useless for roughly 20 years — no, make that 40 years. The trendy musical has allegedly been in its loss of life throes since earlier than many people had been born, and but in some way these loss of life throes have produced most of Broadway’s longest-running and profitable exhibits, from The Phantom of the Opera to Wicked.
The extra I think about the period we’re in, the much less I’m bothered by the state of issues. The present Broadway season already holds promise past the remnants of Sondheim: The upcoming jukebox musical Hell’s Kitchen, loosely based mostly on the lifetime of Alicia Keys, guarantees to unite the usual jukebox biopic with the thematic complexity of Jagged Little Pill. Elton John’s Tammy Faye appears like it is going to inject a wanted quantity of satirical froth into the combination. Revivals of Cabaret and The Wiz already really feel like they’re arriving at precisely the second we want them most. Meanwhile, audiences proceed to return to theaters — and these audiences include fewer vacationers and extra locals and a extra numerous, younger crowd total. In different phrases, nature is therapeutic, and it needs to sing present tunes.
