AMERICAN THEATRE | Is the Musical Progressive?

The following essay received’t be present in Laurie Winer’s new guide, Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical, to be printed this week by Yale University Press, although it touches on lots of the similar themes and reference factors; a evaluation of the guide will be discovered right here.

As in lots of subcultures, musical theatre lovers have secret handshakes that enable us to acknowledge one another. Say you’re chatting with a bunch and out slips the phrase, “And things being as they are…” If, earlier than you possibly can utter one other syllable, somebody emphatically interjects, “The back of the police station is out!”, you understand you’re together with your individuals.

We are a comparatively tiny group that glories in our smallness, who can recite in our sleep each nuance of each lyric from each nice forged album. Arcane trivia spills from us like attraction from Robert Preston. Kevin Daly, a theatre connoisseur on Twitter, has turn into one thing of an artist on this type of basic musical converse. He punctuates a few of his funniest feedback with, “This is for about six of you” or, “I was very popular in high school, can you tell?” He presides over a universe that worships woman deities of a sure age: Bea Arthur, Dorothy Loudon, Barbara Harris, Barbra Streisand, Imelda Stanton, Chita Rivera, and naturally Angela Lansbury, the one and solely Mame (Daly remains to be incensed that the costumes weren’t acknowledged by the1966 Tony nominating committee). One day he would possibly observe, “Sigmund Romberg didn’t have to go that hard when he composed the ‘French Military Marching Song’ for The Desert Song. Follow me for this and other hot takes from 1926,” and one other day drop this gem:

I know, Kevin, I do know.

As subcultures go, ours is traditionally one of many funnest. We are entertaining, witty, bitchy, but in addition beneficiant, life-loving, and, sure, progressive. Our basic musicals are on the appropriate facet of historical past, grounded in forward-thinking values and a perception in justice for all and devastating ridicule for bigots. At the identical time (cognitive dissonance!) our foundational works are clearly merchandise of their very own time, and thus stuffed with racism and sexism that have to be addressed ultimately when they’re restaged. In her 2021 thesis paper for Wellesley College—“I’m an Indian Too”: A Contemporary Indigenous Reclamation of Racist Musical Tropes— Native American Kimimilasha James rightly factors outs that Twentieth-century musicals allowed “white people to define everybody else’s racial category,” and that songs from such musicals as Peter Pan and Annie Get Your Gun “contained a variety of tropes that would come to denote Native Americans,” tropes that had been actively hurtful to Indigenous individuals. She additionally notes, once more rightly, that when Cher poses, as she has through the years, in Indigenous garb as a “Pocahottie,” she contributes to “the hypersexualization of a group of women who have the highest sexual assault rates in the country.”

What these separate truths imply for the way forward for the canon (and for comedy) is but to be seen. I might solely wish to add that, for a female-identifying baby, Tiger Lily is the best character in Peter Pan—approach cooler than Wendy—and that Annie Oakley is a magnificently impartial heroine in a protracted line of sturdy ladies put forth by the American musical from its very inception (try Show Boat). You win some, you lose some.

In this sense, theatre administrators have a superpower that movie administrators don’t: They can touch upon an previous textual content within the present second. In his 1994 staging of Carousel at Lincoln Center, for example, Nicholas Hytner had Billy Bigelow sadly shake his head “no” when he hears his spouse Julie Jordan inform their daughter that it’s attainable “fer someone to hit you—hit you hard—and not hurt at all.” Indeed, as a result of Billy, the one who dealt these blows, is shaking his head from past the grave—paradoxically, the place the place he has lastly realized to be human—the whole manufacturing says no to Julie’s logic as effectively.

And Julie—who would match proper in alongside Tosca, Mimi, Norma, Carmen, Manon, Violetta, Lucia di Lammermour, and Cio-Cio-San—is an anomaly in musical theatre, whose ladies are more likely to insist that you don’t rain on their parade, significantly whereas they’re defying gravity. In the musical Ragtime, lyricist Lynn Ahrens wrote one of the stirring tributes to the awakening of a feminist in “Back to Before.” Even extra shifting than that’s the second when that very same character, generally known as Mother, is pressured to step up and turn into a complete human being. Her husband is on his technique to the North Pole with Admiral Perry, and he or she alone should determine what to do when a Black child is discovered partially buried in her yard, and its mom is about to be taken to the charity ward after which to jail. As she decides to soak up each the mom and baby, she asks herself what motion her husband would have taken if he had been current:

You would have
Gently closed the door
And gently turned the important thing
And gently instructed me to not look
For worry of what I’d see
What type of girl
Would which have made me?

The awakening conscience is one thing the musical celebrates—a not insignificant or apparent worth in modern America. Remember Jean Valjean and his resolution to step ahead because the bread thief somewhat than let one other man go to jail for his crime? As he wrestles with the issue in “Who Am I?,” a excessive flute (or synth) accompanies his progress, rising pressing as he reaches his epiphany—he has no selection however to disclose himself. “If I speak I am condemned,” he causes. “If I stay silent I am damned.” That flute (or synth) is the musical equal of a thought that gnaws at you till it consumes you, and you’re modified. Do the appropriate factor. Care about others, even strangers, even poor strangers with no energy or recourse in anyway.

As I stated, ours is a joyous subculture. I believe this springs from the communal essence of it: We are all collectively in the identical room, the viewers, the artists, the spirit. You can’t assist however really feel bonded with those that breathe the identical air if you find yourself experiencing the elegant—and even the ridiculous. As the saying goes, a shared pleasure is doubled and a shared grief is halved. And a perception within the communal good fuels the progressive ethos of the musical play in addition to a lot of the ecstatic experiences we now have in a theatre.

It’s hardly an accident that one of the recorded and cherished ballads within the repertory is named “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. The concept of a collective good is strewn all through Hammerstein’s work, together with what might be essentially the most well-known anti-racist track ever to emerge from a musical, “You’ve Got to Be Taught.”

Even although we musical lovers are, as in contrast with film followers, say, a small a part of the nation’s cultural life, a tiny subculture, we all know that what occurs on Broadway tends to matter, although it could take years to seep into the broader world (check out the profession of Stephen Sondheim). That’s why greater than 40 producers, together with Jennifer Hudson, Don Cheadle, Mindy Kaling, and RuPaul Charles, gathered sources to carry Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop to the Lyceum Theatre final yr. This brash, humorous, and heart-rending musical concerning the difficulties of a homosexual, Black musical theatre author whose household thinks he’s going to hell, ran for a bit of greater than 300 performances, an honest run, which adopted shut on its Pulitzer Prize for drama and final yr’s Tony for Best New Musical. When it closed in January, Jackson stated he noticed the present as burning “like a supernova across the firmament for as long as it can. And then the loop itself closes. And then, after this, maybe some other people will start the loop again.”

Probably like many individuals now not younger, I don’t wish to see the reveals that fashioned me and my dad and mom earlier than me being assigned to the mud heap. I additionally consider, with an optimism partly nurtured by the musicals of the previous, that the shape will proceed in all its hoary glory, as a result of, regardless of the difficulties, most theatre artists think about it a privilege and a calling to ship the type of ecstatic experiences the shape is able to. These musicals, those so charmingly championed by the likes of Kevin Daly, are works that, when produced brilliantly, are capable of maintain us, renew us, ship us again out to the world restored and capable of courageous life once more…till the following time we are able to return to the theatre and lapse right into a collective puddle of pleasure and tears.

As Daly as soon as put it: “As it was at the overture and shall be at the exit music, bliss without end. Amen.”

Laurie Winer (she/her) is a former drama critic and a founding editor on the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

Related