Merrily We Roll Along...

2011 was a pretty great year. We produced three very cool shows that people absolutely loved, Two Gents, bare, and Passing Strange. I had a great time in New York this fall and saw five really interesting, exciting shows. It was the year my sixth book, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals, was published. It was the year I began to more clearly see and understand the tremendous changes happening in our art form -- beautiful, amazing, exciting changes. Like people once watched the end of vaudeville, I can see the end of the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, and I think that's a good thing. Those shows are well-crafted and they served their audiences well, but it's a new dawn, it's a new day, and it's a new art form. It has evolved. Musical theatre is part of popular culture again. Musicals have gotten political again. Things are different. And New Line is up at the front of the parade -- like Stork at the end of Animal House.

Steve Woolf, artistic director of The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, once told me that often, halfway through a season, he'll realize that the season has an over-arching theme, that all or most of the shows he has programmed explore a similar theme, whether it's money or family or faith or whatever. But Steve says it always comes as a surprise to him -- it's not something he plans. The theme slowly reveals itself over time. Steve is responsible for the theme -- he chooses the shows -- but it's not a conscious act.

Since New Line Theatre has, by design, a narrower palate than the Rep's, it's probably easier to find themes in any given New Line season. You know sex will be there, along with drugs and politics; and topics like violence, obscenity, religion, the creation of art, etc., will often find their way into our work too. The accidental theme of our 2010-2011 season was the destructive power of sex -- I Love My Wife, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and bare.

But looking back on calendar year 2011, I also find something else even more interesting...

This year in world events was one of the most exciting, earth-shattering years I can remember. I was alive for the late 60s/early 70s but too young to be truly aware of what was going on, although my folks did let me watch Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, so I did get a little taste of the period's politics. But 2011 changed everything, and now as a political junkie, I had a front row seat. It started with the Arab Spring (also called the Arab Awakening, which always makes me think of Spring Awakening with burkas), with revolutions and uprisings in countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria... the list goes on and on... Everything we thought we knew about the Middle East is now up for grabs. We still don't know what the end result of most of those uprisings will be, but a bunch of dictators are gone...

And then the uprisings spread to Western Europe, to Spain, Italy, Germany, Finland, the UK, and elsewhere -- and these protests were different but also the same -- citizens outraged at growing inequality and apathetic government. And then the Occupy movement began in New York, and quickly spread across our country. All this in the past year...

And what do all these world events have in common? What is everyone so enraged about?

A failure of institutions. 

All the institutions human beings have created to make a "civilized" society, government, religion, education, the media, the market economy, the legal system, the military -- and, some (conservatives) would argue, also the arts and the institution of marriage -- are breaking down. The Tea Party movement is angry over the failure of government, and the Occupy movement is angry over the failure of capitalism. And amidst all this chaos, somehow New Line really captured that zeitgeist in our shows this year. The theatre will not be one of the institutions that fail us, if we have anything to say about it.

Our spring show Two Gentlemen of Verona may have been just a messy romantic comedy as a play, but as a musical it is also about the 1970s-era breakdown of institutions -- which mirrors our own moment -- corrupt politics, an unjust war, the military-industrial complex, arrest without cause (War on Terror, anyone?), and the confusion of sexuality and gender (the Religious Right's worst nightmare). This breakdown of institutions in the show parallels a one-on-one breakdown in civility and empathy among the characters (Tea, anyone?). It portrays a world turned upside down, where nothing is sure or clear, and everyone is out for themselves (what conservatives call "rugged individualism" and what I call "selfishness"). Through our eyes today, Two Gents is America 2011 reflected in a fun house mirror.

I'd like to think our audiences at Two Gents were laughing so hard because they saw real relevance and truth in our wacky story. Or maybe it was just because our cast was full of comic geniuses. Much like audiences for our 2007 production of Urinetown (which should be the Official Musical of Occupy Wall Street, by the way), sometimes people need to be able to laugh at the horrors of our world...

In June we presented a very young but wildly talented cast, led by the truly amazing Mike Dowdy, in the regional premiere of the searing pop opera bare, a show entirely about the breakdown of institutions -- family, education, religion. We watch as the central character Jason pays the ultimate price for those breakdowns. Where Two Gents ended happily, bare did not. But bare's finale did sound a bit like a rallying cry for the Occupy movement that was still three months away from its birth...

        It's so hard to find your way
        When you have no voice to guide you on.

        No voice, no sound. 
        No sound, no words. 
        No words, no song. 
        No song, no heart. 

        One heart, one love. 
        One love, one light.
        One light, one truth. 
        One truth, one life. 
        One voice.

And then in September and October, New Line produced one of the coolest shows I've ever worked on, Passing Strange, another rock musical, about the failure of institutions to nurture and encourage the individual to find his space in the world. Our "Youth" is failed by his religion, his family, his community, his politics, even his art (notably, his drugs don't fail him...), until he finds his own "one truth" and his own "one voice." The Youth may well be first cousin to Pippin, Candide, and other Hero Myth protagonists, but Passing Strange is so utterly unlike any other show I've ever encountered, and our brilliant cast embraced its unique quirkiness and created a piece of rock theatre so beautiful, so thrilling, so deeply emotional. This was the real theatre adventure in St. Louis this fall.

As it always has, the American musical theatre reflects our culture and our times. And because our country continues to fight the decades-long battle between the conformity and control of the 1950s and the freedom and inclusiveness of the 1960s, theatre from the 60s and 70s continues to find relevance in our contemporary world. References to Vietnam in Two Gents were easily translated by our audiences into references to Iraq, just as the failure of the Catholic Church to save Jason in bare reminds us of the Church's other big failure...

I'm so proud of all three shows we produced in 2011, all of them shows that most theatre companies would never even consider producing, and that's a real shame.

And coming up in 2012... 

Our March 2012 show Cry-Baby is a story about judging people based on a false morality, about the condemnation of a community for nothing more than its poverty. Like Jason in bare, every institution fails Cry-Baby Walker, but rock and roll and love will save the day. This is a smart, wise-ass rock musical that wasn't well served by its original Broadway production. We're gonna give it another chance -- we know how to do this kind of work. I think the reason it misfired so badly on Broadway is that the production staff thought it was a musical comedy, but it's not. It's a neo-musical comedy. It's the old-school George M. Cohan-George Abbott-Jerry Herman model with a thick layer of irony and a dollop of Brechtian socio-political commentary on top, like Bat Boy, Urinetown, Return to the Forbidden Planet, Little Shop of Horrors, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Lysistrata Jones, and a lot of others.

In old-school musical comedy, the actors are constantly "winking" at the audience. In neo-musical comedy, the actors take the characters and situation so seriously it's funny. The neo-musical comedy has taken the more vaudevillian style of old-school musical comedy and refracted it through it the lens of Brecht, Prince, Sondheim, and Fosse. It's the Age of Irony. I think this is going to become, more and more, the dominant musical theatre form, alongside the dramatic rock opera.

It's hard not to see in Cry-Baby's story of class oppression today's Republican members of Congress who declare that the people who are out of work are just lazy, and that getting unemployment insurance makes them lazier. The show focuses social injustice down to the personal level, and we all feel it. In John Waters' rock and roll fable, the bad kids (the "Drapes") are clearly the Good Guys, and the good kids are obviously the Bad Guys. Like they did with Hairspray -- and a lot like Mark Twain did, now that I think about it -- Waters and his adapters reverse and exaggerate mainstream morality to expose its dark side. If ever there was a musical about the 99%, Cry-Baby is it. (Okay, I guess Urinetown and The Cradle Will Rock are too.)

And then in June, we will bring back High Fidelity, a brilliant, dark, funny piece of rock theatre about a small businessman struggling to keep his small, independent store open. What could be more zeitgeisty than that? This show fights an ongoing battle with Bat Boy for the title of My Favorite Musical. Neither of them ever wins for very long. Hi-Fi was wildly misunderstood by its original production staff but it sold out New Line's entire run in 2008 to cheering, laughing, delighted audiences. Ours was the first production after Broadway and it was so cool for us to be able to deliver the show's creators the rave reviews they deserved. People keep asking us to bring it back, so we will.

And then in the fall, we will open our 22nd season with the most relevant show we've done since Hair back in October 2008. This time, it's the rowdy, riotous, emo rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, about our first populist President and creator of the Democratic party. I'm reading books about Jackson and about the pivotal election of 1828. And sometimes I almost forget that I'm not reading about the Here and Now. The parallels to today are numerous and a little scary...

We can already see that 2012 is going to be every bit as surprising and assumption-shattering as 2011 has been. America -- and perhaps the world -- is at a major turning point. And so is the musical theatre!

I've been on this crusade lately to convince people to stop thinking of the Rodgers and Hammerstein model as some kind of ideal -- because I believe theatre is useless unless it helps us grapple with the challenges and obstacles we face. Humans tell stories to sort out the mess of life, to make some kind of order out of the chaos of our world, to connect us, to help us understand ourselves and the world around us. Rodgers and Hammerstein shows can tell you a lot about America 60-70 years ago, but they don't really tell us much about today. The Stages St. Louis audience (median age about 89, I'm guessing) enjoys the nostalgia of reliving those times, but those of us who didn't live through them the first time find very little of use there...

Meanwhile shows like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson speak to these times we're living in now...

It's been an amazing year for the New Liners, of rave reviews, enthusiastic audiences, people coming literally from across our country to see us, and many repeat customers seeing our shows over and over... We must be doing something right. And the year ahead looks just as exciting, as challenging, and as mind-blowing, as we continue our 21st season of alternative musical theatre. Beneath the surface of these three comedies lie deep and profound truths about what it means to live in these times. And after all, that's what theatre is for.

Long Live the Musical! And Happy New Year!
Scott

P.S. I just now noticed, after posting this, that my very first blog post, back on January 1, 2007 was also titled "Merrily We Roll Along". Full circle and all that.

Mapping Out a Sky

The Rep is producing Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece Sunday in the Park with George in January, and they asked me to write program notes, so Sunday and all its issues have been swimming around inside my head for a while.

It's one of those shows so rich and complex that it inevitably reminds me how often people don't dig deep down into the bone and sinew of the more complicated works of musical theatre, either because they're lazy or they don't know any better. But I have very high hopes for the Rep production -- they've got a great cast! Deborah and I got to talk to two of them, Rob Bohmer (George) and Chris Hietikko (Jules), for our radio show and they really, really get it.

When New Line produced Sunday back in 2003 (with brilliant, lusty, vivid performances from Todd Schaefer as George and April Strelinger as Dot), I realized that, as much as I loved the original production, it was colder and more restrained than I think this show ought to be. I think George and Dot are passionate, complicated, intense people, and I thought Mandy and Bernadette didn't always allow themselves to really go for broke. There was just too much restraint for my taste. (I think Jim Lapine made the same mistake with Passion.) It never felt carnal enough for me. Their big knock-down-drag-out fight ("We Do Not Belong Together") didn't feel visceral enough, painful enough, destructive enough. The stakes just weren't high enough for a fight like this between people this intense over problems this long-simmering. How long has this two-way resentment been building? Months? Years? Bernadette Peters found that place but Mandy Patinkin didn't. When Bernadette and Mandy performed this song, it was a dramatic scene; when Todd and April did it, it was a fucking fight.

And in that same vein, one key moment I found lacking from Mandy was his central character song, "Finishing the Hat." Many Sondheim fans see this song as a declaration about the creation of art, and about the perpetually over-romanticized loneliness of artists. But if you listen carefully to Sondheim's lyrics, it’s doubtful that either of those things is really what he was writing about. We're sucked in by the poetic lyrics, the soaring melody, just as George is sucked in by the seductive world of his obsession, but there is more going on here...

I think the song is more about George self-justifying his behavior toward Dot, by hiding behind the noble pursuit of art. He is outside the rest of us, he's saying. He thinks he's Nietsche's superman. He's telling himself (and us) that it's okay for him to be thoughtless and cruel to Dot (and to others) because he has something more important to do than worry about people's feelings.

He has Art to create. He has to finish the hat.

And in that light, the song takes on a much darker tint, it becomes more psychologically complex, and it also serves a much clearer dramatic purpose in the narrative, as George stumbles through his complicated feelings. This is the proof we needed that George is not equipped or ready to be in a relationship, and so Dot's decision to leave for America may be the best thing for her. Throughout "Finishing the Hat," the title phrase (standing in for the making of art in general) is always part of a larger thought, not standing alone by itself, and through its context we can see that Sondheim is telling us something very specific about George, more so than about the creation of art.

After all, this is Sunday in the Park with George, not Sunday in the Park with Art. Musical theatre is about human emotion.

At the beginning of the song, George says:
      Let her look for me -- good.
      Let her look for me
      To tell me why she left me
      As I always knew she would...
George really believes (or wants to believe) that Dot is the one at fault here, not him. The main idea of this song is set up clearly here at the beginning, as it is with most Sondheim songs. This is not a song about art; it's a song about blame. It's a character song, not a philosophical treatise. George is deeply hurt, which means that he cares more for Dot than he admits or the hurt wouldn't be so deep. George goes on to say that no one can possibly understand the motives for his behavior. Maybe, he reasons, that's why people always think it's his fault, when he knows it's always someone else's fault.

George imagines how nice it would be if anyone could understand the act of making art, could understand his compulsion to put his work above all else, could understand “how you have to finish the hat.” In other words, it's not his fault he's inattentive, insulting, thoughtless, rude, hurtful -- it's his art's fault, because it forces him to be those things. (Sounds like something Newt Gingrich might say.) Or maybe it's other people's fault for not being perceptive enough to understand him. Like I said, it's a song about blame. He justifies with his art the fact that he watches the world rather than participating in it, which by implication justifies the fact that he refuses to play by the rules of the real world. After all, he's not a part of that world, so why should he live by its rules?

And yet we'll see at the end of Act I, when he finishes his painting (and that hat), that he's not really a part of the world of his art either; he is outside of it too. There is nowhere he belongs.

George sees the real world, the people in the real world, as somehow inferior -- almost as obstacles. So George refuses to interact with them in any meaningful way. He believes he must keep himself at a distance so he can fully observe. He thinks “it's the only way to see.” The only way to create art, he believes, is to remove himself from the world -- and thereby ignore its rules and conventions. Or maybe that's just a massive rationalization.

Late in the lyric, he says:
            When the woman that you wanted goes,
            You can say to yourself, “Well, I give what I give.”
In other words, if she can't handle it, that's just tough. She knew George's rules coming in, and if she can't live by them, that's her problem and not George's. Blame. It doesn't even occur to him that he should change his behavior. That's not even an option. He knows that anyone who gets close to him figures out the most basic truth about him: no matter what he's doing, there's always a big part of him that is never really there, not in the world, not in the moment, a part of him who's standing back, watching, not interacting, not empathizing, just observing. And that's his justification for being the way he is. It's not because he's a jerk (he tells us); it's because he's an Artist. He really believes (or is it just rationalization?) that he must submerge his emotions, he must reject polite society, he must ignore the complaints and needs of those who care about him, because if he gives in, if he allows himself to live in the real world instead of in the world of the hat and the painting, he will no longer be an Artist.

Or is he just such an emotional coward and cripple that this is his bullshit excuse for hiding from the world and walling himself off? He thinks his mission as an artist gives him universal absolution. He's wrong.

George is asking us to feel sorry for him, poor misunderstood artist that he is, but his argument is not compelling enough. And perhaps that's Sondheim's greatest achievement with this remarkable, complicated song -- it is beautiful, even a little seductive, but we don't accept George's excuse. If we did, if George himself accepted it, then there would be nothing for him to learn, no reason for him to grow, and no reason for the story to continue. He's the protagonist, so he must learn something by the end of the story. George must realize at some point, or at least suspect, that his argument is bunk...

But could this song really just be about the creation of art, and not all this other stuff?,  I hear you ask.

Well, Sondheim doesn't just stop a story in the middle of a musical for meditations on related topics. Songs like “Finishing the Hat,” “Beautiful,” and “Lesson #8” let us see George trying to figure things out, trying to learn, trying to connect. That process of personal evolution is the fundamental action and structure of the show. George's struggle is so profound and so fundamental that it literally takes a hundred years, three generations, and two Georges to resolve it. Notably, the story’s final resolution comes not from the creation of a piece of art, but from human connection -- even across time.

Like I said, this isn't really a show about art.

You can read more of my thoughts on Sunday in the Park in my book Deconstructing Harold Hill. and in the Rep's program notes. The show runs at the Rep January 4-29. If you haven't seen it before, you should really make any effort to see it. It's a genuine masterpiece of the art form, right alongside similar works like Fellini's 8 1/2, Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, and Stew's Passing Strange.

Long Live the Musical! And Happy New Year!
Scott

Merry Christmas from the Bad Boy of Musical Theatre!

I've never done a Christmas blog post before. As far as I know, aside from limited-run special events (A Christmas Carol, White Christmas, The Grinch), there's really been only one Broadway musical about Christmas -- Here's Love, the bland and mediocre but fairly commercial musical based on Miracle on 34th Street, with a so-so score by Meredith Willson of Music Man fame and starring Herman Munster... er... I mean... Fred Gwynne.

Of course there are a fair number of cool musical theatre songs about Christmas -- "Hard Candy Christmas" from Best Little Whorehouse, "We Need a Little Christmas" from Mame, "A New Deal for Christmas" from Annie, "Lovers on Christmas Eve" from I Love My Wife, "Christmas Bells" from Rent, the biting "I Don't Remember Christmas" from Starting Here, Starting Now, "A Greenwillow Christmas" from the wonderful but almost never produced Greenwillow, and a few others.

There's a great CD called A Broadway Christmas that has pretty much all the Christmas songs that have showed up in musicals over the years. Great album!

But my favorite Christmas song from a musical -- by far -- is the manic, super-60s dance number "Turkey Lurkey Time" from Promises, Promises, one of my favorite shows, but one that I haven't tackled yet. With a script by Neil Simon at his darkest (there's an attempted suicide), and a fierce pop score by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, this show is everything I could ever want from a musical. And lucky for us, the original cast (including Donna McKechnie and Baayork Lee!) performed "Turkey Lurkey Time" a few times on television, so it's been preserved for us, along with its brilliant, insane Michael Bennett choreography.

There aren't many Broadway musicals about Christmas, but there are several television musicals with some great Christmas songs in them. Santa Claus is Coming to Town and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer both have some solid songs. And there's always "Christmas Time is Here" from A Charlie Brown Christmas and "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," though those two shows aren't really musicals. But my favorite Christmas show of all is The Year Without a Santa Claus, with the neo-vaudevillians Snow Miser and Heat Miser. Why hasn't someone adapted this show -- or any of these shows -- for the stage? Anyway, here is my favorite song from my favorite Christmas special...

I leave you with one more video, some holiday greetings from the New Liners themselves, wishing you a very happy holiday season... Enjoy...

I think Christmas and musical theatre have a lot in common. Both are about storytelling and even more specifically, about the most primal, most fundamental human questions. Both involve a lot of make-believe and a lot of ritual. Both bring enormous joy to a lot of people.

And both are better shared.

Long Live the Musical! And Merry Christmas!
Scott

My Husband Makes Movies

A week or so ago, I wrote a blog post about ten really cool, lesser known musicals that I wanted to make people aware of. I got some really nice feedback from folks (and only a little backlash), so I thought I'd put together another list, this time ten cool movie musicals you should see (if you haven't already)...

For the sake of this list, I'll assume you've seen really famous movie musicals like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Grease, Hairspray, Chicago, Cabaret, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut... And we're not talking here about the classic movie musicals that almost everyone knows, like The Sound of Music, Singin' in the Rain, or The Music Man. (If you haven't seen all those, watch them at some point.) For the purposes of this blog post, I'm just focusing on movie musicals that are off the beaten path a bit...

Here are ten...

Absolute Beginners (1986) may just be my favorite movie ever. It's an amazing, one-of-a-kind, rock fable that explores "the birth of the teenager" in England in the late 1950s. It centers on the every-teen Colin, a photographer who sells out his art to hold on to his easily distractible, material girl, Suzette, a fledgling fashion designer. It's about the commercialization of rock and roll, it's about race, it's about class, it's about the struggle between an artist and his art, and the struggle between art and commerce. I think what makes it work -- aside from great music, an incredible production design, and incredible camera work -- is that director Julien Temple really found a style in which a movie musical can thrive, only slightly naturalistic, more heightened, more like a serious version of the Bat Boy school of acting -- "the height of expression, the depth of sincerity." And like a lot of rock theatre, these characters are more essence than complex people. This is an adult fable. But it's a fable about complicated things -- the failure of our public institutions to adapt to a changing world, and the growing pains of our continual evolution toward a more fair and more just society. As you can tell, I love this movie. It's totally original, it's gorgeous to look at, the songs are excellent, and it's about a very turbulent, interesting time in our history -- just as interesting in the UK as it was here.

Colma (2006) is yet another movie like nothing else I've ever seen. The backstory to this quirky, smart little film is the town of Colma itself, just south of San Francisco. Because land is so scarce in San Francisco, all their cemeteries are in Colma, so the dead outnumber the living. And all this serves as a big background metaphor for these three emo rock singing high school kids who are trying to figure who they are and where they're headed. And though that description may not sound all that interesting, the writing is so fresh, the emo rock score is so good, and the camera work and editing are so much fun -- some moments feel like a really good indie music video -- that it makes for a compelling, emotionally engaging, adult movie. The 29-year-old H. P. Mendoza wrote the music, co-wrote the screenplay, and plays one of the three leads, all three of whom are perfect. Mendoza also made another film musical, Fruit Fly, which is every bit as cool. As excited as I am right now about the future of the musical theatre, Colma and Fruit Fly make me excited for the future of the movie musical too.

Spike Lee's brilliant and controversial Bamboozled (2000) is one of his very best films. It adapts the story of The Producers to modern day television. Our (anti-) hero is a comfortably assimilated black TV executive (Damon Wayans) named Pierre Delacroix. His boss (Michael Rapaport), a white guy who sees himself as "blacker" than Delacroix, demands new, innovative, cutting edge, more "urban" programming. So Delacroix (like Max Bialystock before him) puts together the most intentionally offensive black show he can imagine -- a new generation minstrel show -- to teach his boss a lesson. And of course, it becomes a monster hit. This film works a lot like Chicago and Cabaret -- by the end of the story, we realize we're complicit in this horror. We've been enjoying this incredibly entertaining minstrel show (starring Savion Glover!), laughing at the jokes, being wowed by the tap dancing, and suddenly we're slapped back to the reality that even in the 21st century, we can still accept a minstrel show as entertainment. In fact, we just did. We accepted blackface. Is it because we know Spike Lee wrote and directed it? Does that give us permission to enjoy it somehow? It's a movie that leaves you with a lot of questions. About yourself.

I consider Bamboozled a musical even though the music is pretty much limited to the TV show sequences. But I think it says a lot about American popular entertainment and a lot about the power of music (and therefore, musical theatre) to manipulate. The music works much the same way it works in any Kander and Ebb musical. It's an amazing piece of film making and dead-on social commentary. And while we're here, I should mention that Spike has also made two other excellent musicals, School Daze and Mo' Better Blues, and he also filmed the brilliant stage musical Passing Strange.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974) used to fall under the Guilty Pleasures category. But since directing Rocky Horror, and studying it and writing about it, I gained a lot of respect for Rocky, and by extension for other films like it, Shock Treatment and Phantom of the Paradise. I often recommend Phantom of the Paradise to people, and they ask me what it's about, and I open my mouth and nothing coherent comes out. (I know, I know, so what's new?) It's just really weird. Lately, I've started describing it as a cross between Rocky Horror and Phantom of the Opera (the novel, not the icky pop opera), maybe with a touch of The Abominable Dr. Phibes thrown in. The Paradise score by Paul Williams is sort of fun trashy pop, not the greatest songs you'll ever hear, but all so perfect for this film. And it stars the amazing but odd Jessica Harper, who did quite a few really cool weirdo movies in the early 80s. It's kitschy and campy and glitzy and glammy and so much fun!

I almost also included on this list The Apple, sort of a cross between Rocky Horror and Phantom of the Paradise -- fun movie but just not enough room here for them all... Although by mentioning that, I've actually now included it, haven't I..?

All That Jazz (1979) is Bob Fosse's masterpiece of artistic autobiography, fully equal to Fellini's 8 1/2, Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, and Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. For those of us who've read every book ever published about the musical theatre, almost everything that happens in this transparently autobiographical film has an obvious parallel to Fosse's real life, even to the extreme point of Fosse's girlfriend Ann Reinking essentially playing herself. But like the Fellini, Sondheim, and Woody Allen pieces, All That Jazz is about the struggle between art and life, when both demand a hundred percent. And because it's Fosse, it's also wildly entertaining, smart and sexy, dark as pitch, and gorgeous to look at. I think All That Jazz is even better than Fosse's Cabaret.

Mack the Knife (1989) is really The Threepenny Opera, in a new version that purists might not like but I really love. Raul Julia repeats his performance as MacHeath, from the 1976 Lincoln Center production (which is my favorite Threepenny cast album), and his supporting cast includes Richard Harris (as Peachum), Roger Daltry (as the street singer), Julie Waters (as Mrs. Peachum), and Clive Revill (Money Matthew). It seems to me that this is the perfect Brechtian movie musical. When the music starts, the actors just turn to the camera and start singing, something you almost never see on film. And you can just tell how much fun they're all having chewing the scenery and singing and dancing through this uber-dark musical. They've cut some of the score, but it's really rowdy and gritty and funny and nasty, and in the opinion of this Brecht fan, I think Bert would love this movie. In a way, it's very subversive film making -- MGM crossed with Brecht and Weill... Unfortunately, this film has never been released on DVD; but it is available on VHS (and not copy-protected, so you can burn it onto DVD).

Cradle Will Rock (1999) is Tim Robbins' smart, colorful exploration of Marc Blitzstein's amazing 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock, one of my all-time favorite shows, and the one with the coolest history of any Broadway musical -- it's the only musical ever to be shut down by the U.S. federal government for its subversive content. Robbins' film isn't an adaptation of the show (though Orson Welles, its original director, did write a screenplay), but an exploration of its political and historical context, in a way using it to represent a whole lot of different political and social movements happening in the 30s. Robbins has collected together several true stories with similar thematic threads to weave in and around the story of the creation of The Cradle Will Rock. Interestingly, the events in the movie didn't really happen all at the same time; Robbins collapsed them together to make more obvious their connections, and it really works. Like Bamboozled, this isn't a movie with a lot of music, but we see a fair amount of recreated performance footage at the end (though the material is slightly altered from the actual show), and this historic stage musical is at the center of the whole movie. It's one of my favorites. In fact, this film convinced me to produce Cradle with New Line, recreating that historic first night. The energy at the end of the movie is intoxicating, and that's really what it was like for us in performance every night.

I was really torn whether to include on this list Pennies from Heaven (1981) or Dancer in the Dark (2000). Both are such cool films (both total freaking downers too). But I think Pennies from Heaven is the more interesting movie. It's essentially a very stylistic 1930s melodrama about a romantic triangle between a man (Steve Martin), his wife (Jessica Harper), and his mistress (Bernadette Peters), amidst the squalor and struggle of the Depression. But periodically throughout the film, the oppressively realistic sets open up into huge MGM fantasy soundstages and this dark, dreary, depressing story becomes escapist fluff for just a moment, with the actors lip-synching to period recordings. These aren't really their voices, the movie reminds us. They're not really happy, even though they're dancing. She's still single and pregnant. What's fascinating about the movie is that the shadow of that depressing real world hangs over every cheery, flashy musical number, giving it all an ironic edge, almost an indictment of escapism and its failure to grapple with real life. Another thoroughly Brechtian film but also a really well made movie musical.

Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) is like Rocky Horror meets Re-Animator meets Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, if you can imagine that. It was first a stage show, now a cult movie musical, written by Darren Simth and Terrance Zdunich, and directed on stage and screen by  Darren Lynn Bousman. The story takes place in a dystopian future (aren't they all?) where organ transplants become fashionable and they can be financed! But when you fall behind on your payments, they repossess your organ. This movie is so much fun and has a great cast including Anthony Head, Paul Sorvino, Sarah Brightman, and doing surprisingly well, Paris Hilton. The score (58 songs!) is solid rock and roll, but don't listen too closely to the lyrics -- it'll just ruin it for you. Just go for the ride and you'll have a blast.

Show Boat (1936) is on this list because I think Show Boat is misunderstood. I saw so many boring productions of this show when I was a kid and I hated it. Then in 1986 I saw Show Boat at the Muny in a really smart, exciting production, and I realized it's not the show that sucked; it was the directors! But part of the blame lies with that awful, over-wrought, clumsily rewritten and dumbed-down (ask me how I really feel!) 1951 MGM film version -- I hate it. But since that was released, everybody thinks that's what Show Boat is. Well, it's not. This 1936 film version, adapted for the screen by Oscar Hammerstein himself, with a couple new songs and some of the original cast, is as close as we'll ever get to seeing the original production in 1927. And I really love this version -- it's rowdier, funnier, sexier, much higher energy. It's still very old-fashioned, don't get me wrong, but it's a very cool glimpse back into history to see what people actually saw that first night in 1927. And that's pretty cool. If you love musical theatre and hate -- or haven't seen -- Show Boat, give this one a try. It's finally available on DVD for the first time.

And as I did on my other list, I'll break my own rule again and add one more. It's Todd Haynes' brilliant 45-minute indie film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988). Like a couple of my other choices here, it's not a full-out musical but music moves its story forward. It tells the story of pop legend Karen Carpenter's battle with anorexia and the exploding cultural influence of the Carpenters and their music in the 1970s -- and all told using Barbie dolls. Yes, you read that right, Barbie dolls. And you'd be amazed at how quickly you accept this bizarre narrative device and how easily you get sucked into this very sad story that says so much about our culture. Because there's so much music in it, I'm going to declare it a musical for the purposes of this list. But interestingly, the film is also illegal because Haynes didn't get permission to use the Carpenters' songs (like they would've said yes...). So the film has only existed all these years in bootleg copies. A lot of them. But thanks to technology, you can now watch the entire film online.

So there you have it. Ten... shit... eleven really cool movies that are either musicals are pseudo-musicals, some of which you've probably heard of or seen before, hopefully a few you haven't. There's nothing I love more than sharing musicals so consider this my Christmas present to you. If you're lucky, you'll have a little time off, so watch some musicals! Merry Christmas, everybody!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. Despite the quote in the blog title, I thought about including Rob Marshall's amazing and unfairly maligned Nine, which I really, really love, but there just wasn't room on the list... It's still worth a watch though...

P.P.S. Several months after publishing this post, I wrote another post listing the ten coolest books on musical theatre, as a sort of companion to this list, if you wanna check it out... And then there's also my list of Top Ten Political Musicals...

The State of the Art

I had a really eye-opening experience a few days ago. I'm a member of a Facebook group called Forgotten Musicals. I had spent only a little time reading the posts in this group, but I mainly visited because there are some wonderful photos and posters of obscure musicals in their photo gallery.

So a few days ago, I posted in this group a link to my last blog post, which was essentially a list of ten really cool but less mainstream musicals that I think people ought to be aware of, shows like Bat Boy, Love Kills, High Fidelity, The Blue Flower, bare, A New Brain, Andrew Lippa's Wild Party, Passing Strange, and a few others. Mostly newer shows, but some older. I thought the Forgotten Musicals group would enjoy talking about these lesser known shows.

But the responses from this group really surprised me...

It turns out the group is less about obscure musicals and more about old obscure musicals. The last time I visited the group, they were talking about Drat! The Cat! (and yes, if you must know, I do own the cast recording on vinyl!)  But because I'm around the New Liners so much, I rarely talk to anyone anymore who still loves the older shows more than what's being written now.

And that really made me stop and think. I've written several blog posts over the last year or so about the end of the Rodgers and Hammerstein era. (And now here's another!) And yet, I don't dislike those old shows. I just find this moment in our art form's history so exciting and so transformative, and I guess my recent blog posts are my way of working through what I think about the fading away of the kind of musical I grew up on...

I'm pretty okay with it...

There were three categories of responses to my post in the Forgotten Musicals group. Some of them already knew the shows I was writing about and really hated them. I mean, Fucking Hated Them. Some of them just weren't interested because they really only like The Classics, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Jerry Herman, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, et al. Those folks wanted to know why there weren't more "traditional" shows on my list. We all know those, don't we? And they were offended at what they perceived to be a put-down of their classics. They seemed to feel like my blog post was forbidding them to love their favorite shows anymore. Which it wasn't. But a few in the group loved reading about these newer shows; they knew some of them, hadn't heard of others, and they enjoyed the optimism I expressed for the future of our art form.

It was the first time I really understood that there's a rift in the world of musical theatre lovers and practitioners right now, which I suppose is only natural at a time of change like this. (It happened in the late 60s/early 70s too.) My personal opinion, which I've stated here more than once, is that the classics are wonderful, some of them masterpieces, but they don't really speak to our world anymore. Their content, their conventions, their values, and often their musical language trap them in mid-20th century America, when the country was still as rural as it was urban, before rock and roll, before the Sexual Revolution. America is a different place now, and we're a different people. We even look different as a nation. And we're also different as an audience from what we once were -- today, American audiences are better educated, more sophisticated, more culturally literate, more ironic, and we consume a bigger variety of entertainment than ever before in our history. So we expect more from our culture than we used to, even if we don't consciously realize it. We expect complexity and irony and an acknowledgement of the darker side of life. We expect relevance. The old conventions just don't cut it anymore. You just can't put Babes in Arms in front of a contemporary audience without putting them to sleep or annoying them or both.

It was a sobering revelation for me, when I saw the revival of Rent a few weeks ago, to realize that even the still very relevant Rent is now a period piece! I saw the original right after it moved to Broadway in 1996, and now that makes me feel old. If Rent is getting old, what does that say about Show Boat (1927) and Oklahoma! (1943)? That they are irrelevant museum pieces? Oh shit, I just said it again.

I still love listening to cast albums of Mame, Hello, Dolly!, My Fair Lady, The Music Man, Fiddler on the Roof. (Now that I think about it, though, I don't really listen much anymore to Rodgers and Hammerstein scores.) I still love those old shows and I still know most of their lyrics by heart, but for me they're the artistic equivalent of an eight-track tape player. It might still work, might still get the job done, but if your iPhone is handy, you'll probably pass by the eight-track, right?

I referred in my last book to people who think musical theatre should have stopped evolving in 1964, right after Fiddler on the Roof opened -- that was experiment enough! When I wrote about these folks, I meant it as a bit of a caricature to make a point. But I think some of the people who were upset by my blog post really would be just as happy if Lerner and Loewe and Jerry Herman were still writing musicals in exactly the same 1950s style.

My initial reaction to that is horror. How could they not want our art form to keep living and growing and evolving? The whole point of human storytelling -- and musical theatre as a subset of that -- is to understand ourselves and the world around us, to make order out of the chaos, to get at some truth about the human experience. Not the human experience sixty years ago, but today.

I think the difference between them and me is that they're looking back while I'm looking forward. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, but it does separate us. I'm lucky because I get to keep loving those old shows even though I prefer what's happening in our art form right now. I adore My Fair Lady, but if I have a choice between that and Bat Boy, I'll take Bat Boy.

Bat Boy is about the world we live in now, and I find that a lot more interesting and exciting than sitting through The Sound of Music yet again. As someone who has studied and analyzed both old and new musicals for my books, I can say this with confidence: by a lot of measures, many of them admittedly subjective, I honestly believe that the music, the lyrics, the storytelling, and the stagecraft in the musical theatre today is much stronger, more sophisticated, and more richly emotional than it was during the less daring "Golden Age." Essentially equivalent for their respective periods, Damn Yankees is inferior in nearly every way to Bat Boy. Musical comedy has evolved. And likewise, "Light My Candle" in Rent works so much better than the "Bench Scene" ("If I Loved You") in Carousel.  Maybe the Carousel scene worked awesomely in 1945, but "Light My Candle" works awesomely now.

I ultimately deleted my original post from the Forgotten Musicals group and all the comments with it. I guess that wanting to listen to Jerry Herman and Cole Porter all the time is no different substantively from wanting to listen to Beethoven and Bach all the time, right? It's just not my thing. I'd rather listen to Tom Kitt and Bill Finn and Andrew Lippa and Larry O'Keefe.

To each his own...

My iPhone has eighty cast albums loaded onto it at present, everything from Bat Boy and bare to My Fair Lady, Hello, Dolly!, The Music Man, and Gypsy. I even have High Button Shoes loaded. I enjoy listening to those old shows, but they are from another time. That doesn't make them less good, but it does make them less interesting.

I don't mean to offend those who disagree with me. All of this is only my opinion, but it is informed by thirty years of making and writing musicals and fifteen years of writing about them. I am so thrilled when I see the future of our art form laid out in front of us, and for me, the past just can't compare. A few weeks ago, I saw five incredibly different, incredibly wonderful musicals in New York and it filled me with such optimism. Young people are turning on to musical theatre like they haven't in decades. Young writers are creating incredible new work. Famous pop and rock songwriters are turning to musical theatre projects more and more. We New Liners already have a list of 10-12 really cool new shows that we'd like New Line to produce in the coming seasons.

Our art form is at the peak of its powers. It has never been more alive or more forward moving. And I think that is cause for great joy, for continual celebration, and for a big, resounding Fuck Yeah!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

Songs for a New World

I've spent my life exploring and promoting the musical theatre, and in my adult life, continually defending the musical theatre as a serious, important, vigorous art form. I sometimes call myself, half-jokingly, the Prophet of Musical Theatre (depends on the shit I'm smoking). So in that vein, here are ten shows you might or might not be familiar with, but should be, shows that are exceptionally cool, fascinating works of the musical theatre, shows that challenge and expand the idea of what a musical can be, and all of which deserve more productions and more attention. (In a few days, I'll make a companion list of cool movie musicals...)

Not incidentally, New Line has produced all but one of these shows. The links go to New Line's webpage for each show. And don't argue with me about what shows are on my list. This is just my opinion -- you're welcome to another...

Kyle Jarrow's Love Kills might just be the most intense, ballsiest piece of theatre I've ever encountered. A four-character walpurgisnacht unfolding almost in real time, it follows two (real-life) teenage spree murderers in the over-night custody of a Nebraska sheriff and his wife, in 1958. The score is an explosion of raw emo rage and deeply felt pain, regrets and delusions, and even a sort of redemption. It's apparently too raw and ugly for the New York commercial theatre to dare, but it is one of the coolest shows I've ever worked on in my life. New Line presented the world premiere of Love Kills in 2009 and got rave reviews for it. There have been a few more productions since then, but not as many as this show deserves. If anybody's ballsy enough to take this one on, you can reach Kyle through his website.

High Fidelity is a brilliant, insightful, funny, truthful, and ultimately joyful celebration of rock and roll and the people who live their lives to it, much more faithful to the original novel than the film version is. (It occurred to me when we did the show in 2008 that the main characters are the people Hedwig is talking to in her rock anthem "Midnight Radio.") It was cursed with a terribly misguided Broadway production, by a director and designers who didn't understand their own show and who apparently mistook these very complex characters and relationships and this often funny but fundamentally serious story for The Pajama Game or Mame. But Hi-Fi is so much more than that, a smart, beautifully, artfully crafted piece of storytelling, by composer Tom Kitt (Next to Normal, Bring It On), lyricist Amanda Green (Bring It On), and bookwriter David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole, Good People, Shrek). This is not old-school musical comedy. This is an adult story about a complicated, adult world. And it uses music in ways other musicals don't, exploring the characters through their musical vocabulary and styles, providing rich, often subliminal information about who these people are, what they value, what they want, what they believe in, but also significantly, what they're missing, what they don't know, where they've gone wrong. The music in this show is not just accompaniment, but an evolving, changing character all its own. In some ways, the music becomes the story's antagonist in Act II. The original production staff (and the perhaps understandably clueless critics) thought the show was a romance, even a romantic comedy; but it's actually a classic hero myth. It isn't a story about Rob and Laura; it's about Rob learning to grow up. It's a companion piece to Company.

New Line presented the first production of the show after its aborted Broadway run, we sold out all but one performance, and we got incredibly enthusiastic rave reviews. The Ladue News called our production the best show of the year. Now other companies across the country are finally producing it and productions rights are finally available through Playscripts, Inc.

Bat Boy, created by the dream team of Keythe Farley, Brian Flemming, and Laurence O'Keefe (Legally Blonde, Heathers), is a genuine masterpiece of serious comedy, a laugh-out-loud, outrageous rock and roll satire of American morality, sexuality, politics, and religion; and at the same time, a deeply emotional tragedy about facing the consequences of our choices, about the past never really being past. It's got one of the best scripts I've ever worked on and a score that is unmatched by any other musical comedy, brilliantly crafted and endlessly surprising. Bat Boy is arguably a genuine masterpiece of the neo musical comedy form. New Line has produced this show twice (selling out the entire run both times) and we will produce it again. It elicited from Judith Newmark at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch one of my favorite review quotes ever: “So weird. So smart. So shocking. So entertaining.”

When people ask me what's my favorite musical, the number one spot goes to either Bat Boy or High Fidelity, depending on my mood. No other shows compare to these two...

The Blue Flower is one of the strangest shows I've seen but also one of the most beautiful and most powerful. Jim and Ruth Bauer's rock-country-Kurt Weill score and collage-like script follow a group of artists through the incredibly tumultuous changing of the last century, exploring how the massive, wrenching changes in the world affected their lives, their relationships, and their art. Set a century ago, it also chronicles these times we live in today as powerfully as anything on stage. Its long journey to off Broadway was less than rewarding, with its run there cut short -- again not really a show for New York commercial theatre -- but hopefully it will have a long life in regional theatres and small art theatres around the country. It's a thrilling piece of theatre that adventurous audiences would love to experience. You can hear some of the songs and buy a studio recording of the score on their website.

Might New Line produce it at some point? Yes we might.

bare is yet another show that was not well served in New York. Its brief off Broadway run was the inevitable result of a director and designers who didn't quite know what to do with it. The too-old cast (all looking like they'd just stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog) and their terrible soap opera acting didn't do this difficult, tricky show any favors. When taken seriously, it's a powerfully dramatic story about five teenagers in a Catholic boarding school, grappling with their sexuality and the failure of every institution around them. The score is an inventive mix of alt pop and emo rock, though with an harmonic and structural vocabulary far beyond most pop, and yet every song still works as both pop music and theatre music. There is a studio recording available on iTunes, but you'll have to wade through some really bad acting to get at the great music and lyrics. When New Line produced bare here in St. Louis in 2011, not only did people come see it four, five, six times, but we also got audiences from as far away as Seattle, New Jersey, Nebraska, Virginia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. It's a show that requires strong singers who are amazing, truthful actors to keep the story from crossing over into melodrama. But when it's done right, it fucking works! And it speaks to today's youth -- tomorrow's theatre audience -- as powerfully and truthfully as any other piece of theatre I've ever encountered (American Idiot might equal it). One of the reasons we produced bare was to show young audiences that there's a place for them at New Line too.

Bob Carlton's Return to the Forbidden Planet may be the oddest show I've ever worked on, an early neo musical comedy, but also one of the most fun, coming close to rivaling Bat Boy. It's based on The Tempest and the classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet which is also based on The Tempest), with a score of classic rock and roll songs from the 1950s and 60s. The dialogue is Shakespeare's, a crazy quilt culled from a dozen or more of the Bard's plays with great skill and wit; the story is wacky science fiction (watch out for the Id Monster!); and the songs include "Good Vibrations," "Teenager in Love," "Great Balls of Fire" (for a meteor storm!), "She's Not There," and others that are all hilariously well integrated into the story, so well integrated you almost can't believe it. It's laugh-out-loud funny but also surprisingly emotional and powerful at the end. I keep lobbying my friends who are high school drama teachers to produce this show -- both kids and parents would absolutely love it, it can be as big or small as they want, and it's a fun, easy introduction to the ever awesome Will Shakespeare...

My favorite review of our Forbidden Plant came from Paul Friswold at the Riverfront Times: "This is no parlor trick of a musical; there's a rich vein of Shakespeare's favorite ingredient -- the wondrous depths of the human heart -- that elevates the show from cunning stunt to artful meditation on the destructive nature of power and the redemptive power of love.”

Oh hell yeah!

Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party is a brilliant, shattering, pulse-pounding thriller set in the decadent demimonde of late 1920s New York. Based on the notorious book-length poem, it captures the potent cocktail of bewildered innocence and worldly cynicism at the fiery peak of the Jazz Age. A stylistic cross between Chicago and Cabaret -- but much, much darker -- it's the story of a sick, destructive relationship between vaudeville dancer Queenie and vaudeville clown Burrs, both intent on hurting each other as publicly as possible. So they throw a party to end all parties, and as the guests arrive, we meet an assortment of people living on the fringes of society, and we can taste the heady blend of tabloid sizzle, hot jazz, and show biz. After a long night of sex, drugs, and drink, Burrs' jealousy erupts and a romantic double-triangle ends in tragedy. This is a smart, tough show with a score that keeps one foot in period jazz and the other in contemporary rock, with a wailing electric guitar continually reminding us that this is Now as much as it's Then. It's a true masterpiece of contemporary musical theatre, and it's a shame that a third of the amazing, almost nonstop score was not included on the cast album.

A New Brain is William Finn's best show. As much as I love Spelling Bee and Falsettos, this is something really special, utterly unlike any other piece of theatre you'll ever see -- funny, sad, crazy, subtle, and so very, very truthful. Semi-autobiographical and defiantly surrealistic, we spend almost the entire show inside the mind of Gordon Schwinn, the central character who collapses in the first scene from an arterial venous malformation in his brain. For most of the evening, we swim around in his head, in half-conscious memory, hallucination, even coma. We navigate talking frogs, sail boats, kiddie TV, overbearing mothers, and surgeons with tickets to Chicago, and we watch this stand-in for Finn as he contemplates his mortality and worries that he'll die without leaving anything of value behind. Despite its darkness and craziness, it manages to be one of the most life-affirming, most heartfelt musicals written in the last two decades, perhaps a show only someone who has actually faced death could have written. I defy you not to be touched by "I Feel So Much Spring."

Two Gentlemen of Verona is a forgotten gem from a rich, adventurous time in musical theatre, the late 1960s and early 70s. Originally intended just to be a production of Shakespeare's play with some new music by Galt MacDermot (Hair), it soon morphed into a wacky, joyful rock musical that beat out Stephen Sondheim's Follies and Grease for the Best Musical Tony. Set in Renaissance Verona and Milan – or maybe it's New York City in 1971 – MacDermot, playwright John Guare (Six Desgrees of Separation, The House of Blue Leaves, etc.), and writer-director Mel Shapiro took one of Shakespeare's least produced (and messiest) plays and breathed outrageous, new, cross-dressing life into it. It's a smart, high-energy, romantic comedy that explores issues of race, gender roles, the politics of war, and the sad reality that most men really are pigs. The story follows lifelong friends Proteus and Valentine who leave their rural hometown of Verona to experience life in the big city of Milan -- exactly as Shakespeare had done just before writing the original play...

New Line's production of Two Gents last spring got the kind of reviews an artistic director dreams of... Harry Hamm at KMOX said, “Shakespeare has never been this much fun!” Steve Callahan at KDHX called it “the most purely enjoyable evening of theatre I've had in a long, long time.” Christopher Reilly at The Patch said, "It'll be the most fun you have at the theater this year.” Chris Gibson at BroadwayWorld said, “I honestly can't recall when I've ever witnessed an audience laugh at and enjoy Shakespeare more. . . brilliantly executed and funny as hell.”

That's what I'm talkin' about.

Passing Strange was just too adult, too complex, too nuanced, and too artsy to survive the commercial theatre scene in Manhattan, but luckily, Spike Lee preserved the original production on film, and theatres around the country are now picking up the show and giving it the further life it deserves. From the mind of genius singer-songwriter-performance artist Stew and his collaborator Heidi Rodewald, this is a daring new rock musical that blurs the line between rock concert and musical, that takes its audience on a journey across boundaries of time, place, identity and theatrical convention. This is Stew's only partly fictionalized autobiography, the honest, heartfelt, and hilarious story of a young bohemian who charts a course for The Real through sex, drugs and rock and roll. Loaded with poetic, soulful lyrics and overflowing with passion, the show takes off from middle-class America on a worldwide quest for personal and artistic authenticity. New Line's production a couple months ago was showered with raves.

And there are the ten shows. But there's one more, a show that really stands by itself, it's just that cool...

The opening night of Marc Blitzstein's masterpiece The Cradle Will Rock made theatre history -- the only musical ever shut down by the federal government for its subversive political content. (Check out Tim Robbins' film Cradle Will Rock, for the cool backstory or watch original producer John Houseman tell the story.) But this show is also the very first neo musical comedy, decades before the form took hold, as well as a masterpiece of agitprop theatre, every bit as potent now as it was when it opened in 1937. Today in 2011, as Republicans across the country try to roll back union rights, this unashamedly pro-union musical is perhaps more relevant today than at any other time since its creation. Blitzstein called the show “a labor opera composed in a style that falls somewhere between realism, romance, vaudeville, comic strip, Gilbert & Sullivan, Brecht, and agitprop.” Nice mix, huh? It was the first American musical from a truly working class perspective. It laid the groundwork, in its politics and its episodic construction, for later shows as varied as Cabaret, Hair, Pippin, Chicago, Assassins, and Rent. And like Chicago, it is thoroughly of its time and yet it doesn't feel dated. There are just as many whores in politics, religion, academia, and the arts today as there were in the 1930s. As televangelists make millions and live in gilded mansions, as politicians receive gifts and campaign contributions from giant corporations, foreign powers, and other special interests, The Cradle Will Rock will always seem as if it could have been written this year. That's a shame for America, but good for the show...

And here ends my list of the Top Ten... er... the Top Eleven shows that deserve your attention... I'm sure you can think of some others. In fact, I can already think of some others... But we'll leave that for another day.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. After I published this post, I got some very intense and surprising feedback about it, so I wrote about that and what I think it says about the evolution of the art form, in a companion post a few days later...

Also, several months later I wrote another post listing the ten coolest books on musical theatre, as a sort of companion to this list... And then there's also my list of Top Ten Political Musicals...