There's Only Us

Art explores and explains life. That’s the whole point of art. Can art explain Donald Trump and this Moment of MAGA, this angry, dark, cultural and political cloud hovering over us? Or more to the point in this case, can musicals help us understand Trump and MAGA?

Yes. They can. I think.

Full Disclosure: I’m a liberal. I voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and the election results stunned me. I’ve spent my adult life studying human behavior, emotions, motivations. As someone who directs musicals, writes musicals, and writes about musicals, that’s a huge part of my job. For a long while, I have felt like I generally understood people in a fuller way than most of us do. I have the great luxury of running New Line Theatre, and one of the perks is that I choose our shows, so I never have to work on mediocre material. Ever. We produce only the smartest, most interesting, most insightful, most well-made musical theatre. Our next show, Rent, will be our 100th production, and each new show has been a master class for me in human psychology, sociology, culture, politics.

But the Great Plague of 2020 really shattered me. Overnight, theatre disappeared. For a really long time. There’s no disputing the fact that Trump’s apathy and shocking scientific ignorance prolonged the pandemic significantly, adding tens of thousands to the lists of the dead – including many theatres across America.

The election of 2024 broke me again. Suddenly the world didn’t make sense to me. I discovered that I didn’t understand all I thought I did. What do I do with that?

I discovered that a lot of people (half the American electorate?) have little or no capacity for empathy, that elementally necessary human ability to understand and even feel how another person feels. I discovered an appalling new Trumpianic permission structure for being really selfish and really mean – or maybe it’s more accurate to call it an encouragement structure. It’s not just allowed; it’s celebrated. What do I do with that?

I face all this both on a personal scale and on a national scale, as the Trump team methodically tears apart every agency and institution that serves and protects our basic humanity, and that allows us to collectively care for and lift up each other, including “the Least of These.” Trump and his acolytes are metaphorically spray-painting a giant swastika over the Golden Rule. What do I do with that?

But I also face this darkness on a local level, as the director of the Missouri Arts Council, Michael Donovan, continues his year-and-a-half campaign against our company. Just a few weeks ago, he took our grant away, right in the middle of this season, blowing a huge hole in our budget. He just canceled our contract. No reason given. We lost $16,000. We have no idea why he's doing this, and he refuses to explain or answer any questions. Why is he trying so hard to hurt our small, 34-year-old company? And again, what do I do with that?

Well, theatre is life explained, they say. So then musical theatre is emotional life explained. So can we look to our musicals to better understand any of this?

We storytellers, we who make art, are supposed to be the ones who find meaning in it all. The whole reason humans tell stories is to make sense out of life, to make order out of chaos, to connect us all through the shared experience of being human in this time and place. We learn about ourselves and the people and world around us by sharing our stories. They teach us lessons, they show us our history, they explore human conflict and communion, they deliver truths that we need, and they help us understand ourselves as well as each other.

Can they still do all that, even now?

All of this selfishness and apathy I witness is why live theatre is both awesome and necessary. It’s hard to disconnect when you’re in the same room with the storytellers and an audience. The more we connect, the better humans we become. The more we understand others and their experiences, the better we understand ourselves and the more fully we live.

The thing a musical does best is emotional connection, because the abstract language of music conveys emotion much more effectively than words can. It’s hard to sit in an audience and not forge a connection with the characters in Rent or Come From Away or A Strange Loop, or yes, even Cats. We are those characters onstage, in all their flawed humanity, so we connect with them. We are reassured as we sit in the darkened theatre that everybody goes through trials and tribulations, and that we all survive them. Sharing stories exercises our empathy muscles, and it reminds us that we are not alone -- even when it really feels that way.

I’ve always believed that the musicals our company produces matter to people, that they help us make sense of our own lives and the lives around us. So it stands to reason that I should turn to those great storytellers to help me navigate through these times, doesn’t it? After all, why do we share stories? Precisely because we are not alone; because we all share so many human experiences, even though we may not always be aware of it.

Because really, there are no Others. Or, as Rent might put it, "There's only Us."

When an artist shares a story with an audience, they connect, not just to each other, but to all the rest of us too -- “connection in an isolating age,” as Jonathan Larson wrote in Rent. But there’s a four-way connection in a live performance – among the actors onstage, among the characters inside the story, between the actors and audience, and among the audience.

The Rent kids, the Spelling Bee kids, Celie, George Seurat, Edgar the Bat Boy, Cry-Baby Walker, Sweeney Todd, Hedwig Schmidt, Fredrik and Desirée, Veronica and J.D., Queenie and Burrs, even Frank N. Furter and Sondheim’s assassins – all of these characters and many others – seek one central thing.

Connection.

And in the real world, that’s harder than ever right now, in this toxic culture of ours. While social media has connected us in ways we could never have dreamed before, it also has accidentally given us powerful tools to demonize and Other-ize – and to lie without consequence.

We are still in the infancy of the Information Age, and we’re still learning how to navigate its treacherous waters. Too many of us have not yet learned how to distinguish between legitimate information and bogus information online; because the One America News site looks on the surface as legit as the New York Times site, so those who don’t know any better don’t know any better.

Couple that with the fact that many on the political Right are motivated by fear right now, mostly of the inevitable Browning of America; and this heady brew of fear manifests itself as serious anger and outrage, often over things that don’t exist or aren’t true. Many MAGA Republicans fear the Other, so they don’t seek out connection. But we all crave human connection (just look at the ubiquity of social media), so those who fear those connections often create for themselves even more disconnection, which leads to even more anger and outrage, as they come to perceive the world only in terms of Us vs. Them.

And then Trump and the conservative media universe tell these people every day that they are right to feel that way.

Many people think social media is the problem, but it’s not. Connection is connection, whether it’s in person or not. The appeal of connection is not only the proximity of other people’s physical bodies; it’s also about emotional and social connection, and Facebook does delivers that, if you can curate your list of friends nimbly enough. (I do wonder if maybe kids should be kept off social media, but that’s another discussion.)

And let’s be honest, for those of us working in the theatre, connection is the central appeal, the act of coming together for the common purpose of storytelling to share with others, creating the quite legitimate “magic of theatre” that binds us more powerfully than “civilians” will ever understand.

Musicals have always reflected their times, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes accidentally. In the 1930s and 40s musicals were primarily about assimilation, about fitting into a community. Either the hero would assimilate or he’d be removed. In other words, the hero had to be either “Us” or “Them.” Either he belongs there or he is the Other. This theme was so prevalent in large part because many of these shows were written by American Jews who had fled Europe, who worked hard to assimilate into American culture.

In the 1960s and 70s, many musicals turned instead to the Hero Myth, a personal journey set largely outside any community, as Americans looked inward and grappled with the moral complexity of the Sexual Revolution, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and lots more. A Hero Myth story doesn’t need a “community,” so theatre producers didn’t have to hire big choruses.

Starting with the dawn of the new Golden Age of musical theatre in the early 1990s, many musicals turned to stories about connection, in response to the selfishness and disconnection of the 1980s.

Our musicals always reflect our collective lives. In my books of musical theatre essays, I love to explore the political and social context in which a show was written and debuted, because our art always reflects our culture and politics. The greatest musicals hold on to that relevance over time. As examples, we worked on Rocky Horror a few months ago, and we were stunned at how relevant it felt -- still? again? The same thing is happening with Rent as we work on it now, and I expect the same when we do Bat Boy in the fall.

The Information Age will still be tough going for a while, as we learn collectively how to live in this new technological paradigm. It won’t be easy anytime soon, but in the meantime it’s up to us artists to provide that life-giving connection whenever and wherever we can. In fact, this post is an early draft of an introduction to a book I'm working on, in which I'm going to try to answer these questions.

To quote actor Ben Kingsley, “The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that’s what the storyteller is, and I think it’s important to appreciate that.”

Director Gregory Mosher said, “I have great faith in audiences. We only create problems when we treat them as customers instead of collaborators in an artistic process. . . We can let audiences down in all kinds of ways: by being dishonest with them, by betraying our own intentions and, therefore, betraying the audience’s trust. All they ask the artists to do is what the artists want to do. Audiences say, ‘I want to see what you want to show me.’ All they want is human connection, and we betray them if we don’t deliver that.”

That’s our job, after all: Connection in an isolating age. I wonder if Jonathan Larson suspected that Rent would still feel up-to-the-minute thirty years later. He probably did.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

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