“I desperately want to grab these adorable, beautifully awkward kids at BroadwayCon belting their hearts out to “Let it Go” and “This is Me,” slip them Kate Bush, Bjork, and David Bowie cds (or physically transmit mp3s/ spotify playlists to their brain???) and be like, “Psst. This is musical theatre too, but better!”
There was a time in which show tunes were popular music. Composers like George Gershwin and Irving Berlin put broadway on the map by taking the music that’s popular at the time: jazz and ragtime and using it to tell stories onstage. Actors and Lawyers and all those in between were humming the latest Gershwin and Berlin tunes on their way to work. Now, my mom couldn’t name a single song from a Tony Award nominated Best Musical this year (aside from Frozen’s “Let it Go.”) What happened? It wasn’t until Lin Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster Hamilton that pop music charts were graced my musical theatre songs. The album debuted at number 12 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, the highest entrance for a cast recording since 1963.
With the musicals on the 1930s, Gershwin and Berlin took the popular music of the day–jazz standards–and created their showstopping musicals. Then, Rodgers and Hammerstein came in the ‘40s and ushered in the “Golden Age of Musical Theatre” with their hit Oklahoma. Other famous composers that started hitting the stage were Frank Loesser and Jule Styne. While these composers created some of the most prolific musicals ever–Guys and Dolls, Carousel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes–they drastically differed from the direction that popular music was going. The late ‘40s and 50’s saw the emergence of Rock and Roll. Stars like Elvis Presley (even though he stole his music from black artists) and Chuck Berry dominated American households. At the same time, King and I and The Music Man dominated The Great White Way. There was a major disconnect in vinyls sold to theatrical households and vinyls sold in the households in the rest of America. That disconnect didn’t really put a dampener on the success of musicals since Rodgers and Hammerstein revolutionized the narrative of musicals keeping audiences enthralled for decades.
We are no longer in the Golden Age of Musical Theatre. We’re struggling to create lasting pieces. With Broadway becoming less and less accessible, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get consistent audiences. Why is the typical “musical theatre sound” so reminiscent of musicals created in the ‘50s and ‘60s? If popular musicals of the earlier times were created with popular music, why don’t popular musicals of our time really use popular music? How can we tell contemporary stories or stories that resonate with contemporary audiences without contemporary music? This year, we saw several revivals this year that tried to bring contemporary sounds to the stage, but they lacked contemporary storytelling. The Spongebob Squarepants Musical featured a soundtrack compiled by a large number of famous contemporary artists which seemed like a step in the right direction toward bringing musical theatre back into the public eye. Maybe to find solutions, we need to look past Broadway. I found some inspiring sounds Off-Broadway. I discovered The View Upstairs by Max Vernon almost a year ago, and it changed my life. It was a new story about an old, forgotten story. It’s incredibly queer and incredibly fresh. The music lives and breathes like some of my favorite songs that I could buy on iTunes. It was also the first time I had every heard a drag show onstage. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing about Vernon’s other works: KPop (through my teacher Amanda Morton) and The Tattooed Lady (through my own two eyes.) Vernon is committed to telling stories with the voices of our generations rather than generations past. Vernon takes inspiration from some of their favorite artists Joni Mitchell, Stevie wonder, Laura Nyro, the smiths, sonic youth, Siouxsie and the banshees, the cure, Radiohead, Roxy music, David Bowie, x in order to establish a musical vocabulary for their masterpieces. I asked them what they thought about the importance of contemporizing musical theatre. They believe that the use of contemporary sounds engages with a contemporary audience, and that engagement is what turned musicals like A Chorus Line into legends. In order to create musicals that will last in the canon rather than these little supernovas that burns really brightly for a couple of months and are forgotten forever, we need to start really creating stories that reach our audiences with music that will reach our audiences.
“If you are not writing work that engages your peers and future audiences you are creating art that is dead on arrival. You will never do Cole porter or Sondheim better than they did themselves so stop trying.” -Max Vernon
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