Musical Theatre Part 3

Trends in Musical Theatre since the mid 1960's

1. The first trend if the advent of the rock musical. Since the late 1950's, rock and roll had slowly been taking over the top-40 stations and becoming America's new popular music. Dance styles and character types shifted to fit the new musical milieu. Dances done to rock music started with "The Twist" and "Frug", through "disco" and "break dancing", to the more recent "hip hop". Rock musicals tend to focus on young characters and counter-culture movements. Since the musical theatre had alway been dominated by composers writing in a popular vein, this switch is not surprising. Perhaps more surprising is that rock musicals remain the distinct minority of Broadway fare. The first rock musical to hit Broadway was Hair! in 1968, written by Jerome Ragni and James Rado, with music by Galt McDermott. It featured a hippie tribe who sang, danced, protested war in Viet Nam, questioned traditional stereotypes of race and gender, and smoked marijuana on stage. The production broke the "fourth wall" by bringing actors through the house and even swinging on a trapeze above the audience. Although the performers were all actors, many audience members mistook elements of the play for real life because it broke so many conventions of character and plot and audience interaction that had been typical of Broadway musicals. This was the first musical to devalue the plot, rejecting the standard of earlier musicals that tested the value of a song or a dance based on how it fit the plot. The loose plot that exists in the musical surrounds the drafting of one character in the tribe, Claude, and his personal conflict between serving his country and standing up for his belief that the war was wrong. Later rock musicals include Stephen Schwartz's Godspell and Pippin, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Jesus Christ, Superstar, The Who's Tommy, and Jonathan Larson's Rent.

2. The term concept musical was coined to fit the new structure used by Stephen Sondheim in his 1970 Company. Much like Hair!, Company rejected the notion of the plot as the organizing principle of the musical; but, unlike Hair! which seemed to have no structure whatsoever, the concept musical organizes songs, scenes, and dances around the exploration of an idea. Company explores the character Bobby's search for a relationship: first he must decide if he wants a serious relationship in his life, then he must decide what kind of woman and what kind of relationship he wants. The characters include 5 sets of married couples, all of whom are friends of Bobby but none of whom present a relationship exactly right for him, and 3 women who Bobby dates. Sondheim remains the major exemplar of the form of concept musical: his Follies explored how two middle-aged couples face their lost youth when they return to a reunion of a follies show, in which both women performed in their youth; his Pacific Overtures(1979) explores the history of Japan from the period of its isolation to its opening to the west; his Sunday in the Park with George (1984) explores artistic creation, its effect on the artist, and its effect on the people close to him; his Into the Woods presents intertwined fairy tales in Act I then projects beyond "happily ever after" for its characters in Act 2; his Assassins looks at what a person hopes for in assassinating a president; and his Passion explores the nature of obsessive love. Other musicals not by Sondheim that fit the definition of a concept musical include A Chorus Line (1975) and Cats (1982). All of these are radically different from one another in their plot structure, character types, and musical form. Some involve no dance whatsoever, and others use dance only when and where appropriate to a character. Each element of the musical is selected for how well it displays the central idea; in effect, unity has not been abandoned as an ideal, but the plot has been overthrown as the primary, unifying element.

3. Poor theatre was the term given to a theatrical style by the Polish visionary Jerzy Grotowski in the early 1960's. It refers to a style of theatre centered on actors and their imagination and "poor" in spectacle. In "poor theatre", actors transform themselves in front of an audience from one character to another and frequently into the necessary scenery, like trees or furniture, and make the necessary sound effects, like wind or explosions, with their own voices. The audience then, must also use their imaginations. Virtuosity in "poor theatre" lies in the creativity and resourcefulness of the actors themselves and in the audience's recognition of the performers' versatility. The techniques of poor theatre were incorporated into musical theatre very quickly. In 1965, Man of La Mancha, an adaptation of Cervantes' Don Quixote, opened on Broadway. In it, Quixote as an old man is thrown into prison, where, with the help of the other inmates, he tells his story.  The prisoners take on the other roles in the story as necessary, and they use the objects around them in the prison to tell Quixote's story. The frame of the play is that the cynical, jaded prisoners are having their own mock trial of Quixote. He succeeds in moving them with his story, in which they all take part; and, as the show ends and Quixote ascends from the dungeon to his real trial, the other prisoners reprise his famous "Impossible Dream" to wish him luck. Other musicals that incorporate elements of poor theatre are The Fantasticks (1964, now the longest running off-Broadway musical), Godspell, The Apple Tree, and Les Miserables.

4. Darker, more cynical stories and styles of music and dance have dominated the musical stage since the late 1960's. As in all areas of American life, the essential optimism of pre-1960's American culture has all but been erased in the wake of such turbulent social events as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X; America's failure in Viet Nam; the Civil Rights Movement, then Women's Rights and now Gay Rights movements that have made us aware how deeply embedded racism, sexism and homophobia are in our country; and finally the Watergate scandal that made us deeply suspicious of our government, democracy though it may be. The happy ending of Oklahoma! seems quaint and trite to us today; it is no longer a realistic solution to prejudices of any kind. An example of style reflecting the darker content is the dance style of Bob Fosse. Fosse, who died in 1987 of AIDS, was the director and choreographer of such hits as Cabaret (1965), Sweet Charity (1966), Pippin (1972), Chicago (1975), Big Deal (1986) and the semi-autobiographical film All That Jazz (1979) in which he projects his own death.  Fosse evolved a style of dance that involved a reversal of all our normal associations of dance with grace and beauty. In order to express the seamy, ugly, or negatively sexual sides of life, he employed turned-in positions (as opposed to ballet's normal position of turn-out of the legs from the hips), sharp and angular motions, poses and turns wildly off-balance, and a kind of comically cynical tone to most of his production numbers. In Cabaret, he uses a motley assortment of entertainers, including an MC of ambiguous gender, a topless band, and a female chorus - introduced as "each and every one a virgin" while they are usually played as near prostitutes, to get across the decadence and self-absorption of 1930's cabaret culture in Berlin. In spite of the atrocities commited against Jewish friends, this group of entertainers will only make light of Hitler and his rise to power, refusing to take any political or ideological stand against him, or even to leave Berlin before it's too late.  The main characters of the play are now mismatched: Sally Bowles is an American living in Berlin and performing at the cabaret; she is a soubrette type and sings in a lower register. The idealist, singing in a higher register, is the visiting American writer Cliff.  Cliff, who is much like the romantic leads of earlier musicals, falls in love with Sally but cannot get her to take her own life or the impending political crisis seriously. The character roles include the MC, a broadly theatrical type with no apparent life outside the theatre, and an older Jewish couple who are menaced by the Nazis. Ironically, the most beautiful ballad in the show is sung by a young Nazi in praise of the fatherland; "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" is particularly effective because of the beauty of the melody and lyric contrasted against his Nazi values. Fosse's staging often makes references to earlier theatrical or dance styles, but turns them around to give then a new, contemporary meaning, such as the burlesque sections of Chicago, in which women who have murdered their husbands execute steps and wear costumes typical of the early 20th century burlesque shows. In this case, the titillating style of burlesque is robbed of its usual, sexual meaning by the characters being murderesses.

5. Although the musical theatre is a quintessentially American form, evolving out of the social, racial, and cultural mix of nineteenth century America, the most successful producer and composer of the last twenty years is a Brit, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. His extraordinarily large and popularly successful oeuvre includes Jesus Christ, Superstar(1973), Evita(1980), Cats(1982) (the longest running show on Broadway), Starlight Express(1986), and Sunset Boulevard (1994). As a producer, his Really Useful Theatre Company, based in London, have brought Les Miserables and Miss Saigon to London's West End then to Broadway. Les Miserables (1987) and Miss Saigon (1990) are the products of a French composer-lyricist team. The most recent Broadway hit from another country is Ragtime (1998), which was produced by Toronto's Livent. It is interesting to note the number of these foreign successes that take American stories as their subjects, and all use American music and dance forms in presenting their subjects.

6. In the last half of the 1990's, a new trend seems to be emerging on Broadway; this trend is toward more optimistic, lighter content in musicals along with lavish spectacle. Perhaps due to our cultural emphasis on "family values" or Mayor Guliani's efforts to clean up New York City that has resulted in "The new 42nd Street" -- a project which demolished old buildings in the area of Broadway most heavily poulated with theatres in an effort to clean up the "adult" shops and movie theatres -- some of the most successful recent productions have been either revivals of the older, optimistic golden age musicals like Carousel, Show Boat, and Guys and Dolls, or new live theatre settings for Disney classics, like The Lion King(1997). In fact, it is Disney's theatre that dominates "The new 42nd Street", and Disney is renovating theatres in many large cities across the nation in order to bring its own productions on tour. Disney's The Lion King is family entertainment; it is directed by and contains extraordinary puppets by Julie Taymor with dances by Garth Fagan (whose dance company is centered at SUNY Brockport). Since the story is well known to families, due to Disney's large volume of videotape sales, audiences are going to see the show for it's element of live, theatrical spectacle.

Which one or more of these trends will dominate American musical theatre in the 21st centure? It is impossible to project. It is impossible to know if New York will survive as a center for musical theatre in a century in which it is increasingly easy to download clips of anything (movies, music, why not musicals?) from anywhere on the globe (New York, after all, has not only clogged highways but clogged Internet access) from a home or office PC.