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Where is the Musical Going?Dateline: 26th January, 2003In the last twelve months we've looked at music theatre one a number of occasions - theatre spectacle in April, the next step in its development in June, musicals based on pop bands' work in September, and "the end of music theatre as we know it" in November. 'Nuff said, you might think, but then I read what Graham Whitlock of Dreamarts Youth Theatre said in his interview with Philip Fisher:
Hip-hop musical The Bomb-Itty of Errors arrives at the New Ambassadors in May, after making a bit of a splash in Edinburgh at last year's Fringe, and just last week we had news that the Theatre Royal Stratford East is to present Da Boyz, a hip-hop version of The Boys from Syracuse, later this year. Is this a way forward for the musical? The apologists for hip-hop will tell us that it is. The musical needs to appeal to young people, they say, and hip-hop has a great following among the young. Thus, they reason, a hip-hop musical will pull in the young punters and incline a new generation towards music theatre. That reasoning, however, is somewhat shaky: "I will go to a hip-hop musical" does not follow inevitably from "I like hip-hop music". A musical is more than music: it is music theatre, and that theatre part is important. Dancing to a particular style of music at a disco or listening to it at home or on your Walkman is not the same as going to a theatre. For a large percentage of young people - and an even larger percentage of those for whom hip-hop is the music of choice - the theatre is a foreign country and it is going to take more than putting a hip-hop label onto a show to attract them across the doors. - particularly at the prices charged for most musicals, even well outside the West End. And even if a small percentage of them do go, how small a percentage of that small percentage would then go on to want to watch Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sondheim, or even Lloyd Webber? I am very wary of quick fixes. Suggestions that X will be the salvation of music theatre because it will attract a new audience should be treated with enormous scepticism. What will "save" music theatre is not hitching it to a specific style of music, no matter how popular it may be at a particular moment. What it needs is an injection of energy, of freshness, of the sort that West Side Story brought to the fifties and Jesus Chris Superstar to the seventies. What we remember about those two seminal shows is not just the music, but the whole effect on a genre which was becoming tired. This is why Mamma Mia! and We Will Rock You and others of the same ilk will not have the influence their great predecessors had, for what theatre history will remember of them is the music of Abba and of Queen, onto which a story has been tacked. WSS and JCS, on the other hand, redefined the musical. In fact, West Side Story began the process which, to some degree, Superstar competed. Then, as now, the form had become, if not moribund, at least on the way there. The Broadway/Hollywood musical which flowered with such shows as Oklahoma!, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, and so on, had passed it peak and was beginning to become repetitive. Then, as now, inferior product was being produced, weak both in libretto and music, a pale imitation of what had gone before. A shot in the arm was needed and WSS provided it. Where will the needed shot in the arm come from today? Not, I submit, from back-catalogue musicals or those built around a particular musical style, but from a different direction entirely. I foresee a move away from the big spectacular musicals - a form which probably reached its peak with The Lion King - towards what we might call the chamber musical, the sort of show which is emerging from off-Broadway and London fringe experiments: shows such as Six Women with Brain Death, for example, or Falsettoland. Time will tell! Articles Indices:
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