ASK ANY SOPHISTICATED NEW YORK theatergoer about the current condition of the Broadway musical, and he will turn Ancient Mariner as he begins a raving recitation of everything that has gone wrong. He will speak with disapproving horror of the greatest-hits shows–barely plotted affairs that string together beloved pop and rock songs by acts like ABBA, the Beach Boys, and Elvis Presley in a manner more suitable to second-rank Las Vegas hotels than to the Great White Way. He will note the decidedly eerie parallel between this trend and two equally nightmarish ones that preceded it. First, the takeover of Broadway in the 1980s by insipid British musicals with horrible scores and amazing sets, followed by the takeover in the 1990s by various theatrical versions of Disney cartoons. To think, he will moan, that this treacle is all that’s left of the form that once gave rise to Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Frank Loesser!
Now, cries of woe about the condition of the New York theater have been constant since 1927, when George Jean Nathan, the preeminent drama critic of his day, dubbed Broadway the “fabulous invalid.” Broadway these days is little more than a cultural afterthought, whereas in Nathan’s day it was one of the mighty pillars of American entertainment. So those who care about it, or feel invested in it, are more than ordinarily tempted by a nostalgia as thick as lard. What our Ancient Mariner of Broadway fails to see is a shocking but thrilling fact: Just like the city that houses it, the Broadway musical has risen from a long decline and has entered a new Golden Age.
In the past four years, audiences have been electrified by a string of delightful and delirious new musicals. Just this month alone, two shows–Spamalot and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels–opened to screams of joy from thousands of theatergoers who leap to their feet nightly to offer heartfelt standing ovations. These shows are following on the heels of Wicked and Avenue Q, both of which opened in 2003; Hairspray, which opened in 2002; and Urinetown and The Producers, both of which opened in 2001. Three of these musicals–The Producers, Avenue Q, and Hairspray–are among the very best that Broadway has ever seen. Wicked seems certain to join them in the pantheon at intermission time, because its first act is flawless, but it falls apart in its second half. The others are wonderfully enjoyable, but their musical numbers aren’t quite good enough for them to be considered classics.
Five of them are adaptations of movies–a trend that has given rise to some worried clucking by those who seem to have forgotten that almost every memorable musical from the first Golden Age was an adaptation of a previously produced play. In the case of The Producers, Hairspray, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the shows are vast improvements on their originals in almost every way. Two of them are fanciful pastiches–Avenue Q, a takeoff of Sesame Street in which the Muppets grow up and become twentysomething Ivy-grad strivers in Brooklyn; and Urinetown, a surprisingly funny spoof of the agitprop musicals written by the Stalinist playwright Bertolt Brecht (in collaboration with the great composer Kurt Weill). And one, Spamalot, is a blend–it’s a fanciful pastiche of its own source material, the great 1975 movie comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
But mostly what they share is just how rollicking they are. Their authors and directors are absolutely determined to show audiences a really, really, really good time, and they throw it all at you–magical stagecraft, wildly inventive choreography, infectious humor. They want to lift your spirits and make you giddy, and they succeed.
Spamalot, which some people think is going to be the biggest hit in Broadway history, is so eager to please it’s like a manic puppy. It begins, for no reason whatever, with a hilariously cheesy dance number set in Finland, with crazed Finns slapping each other upside the head with raw fish. In Act Two, the show’s sole female character has been missing from the stage for about 20 minutes, so she emerges from the wings and begins to sing, “Whatever happened to my part?” And the sequence in the original Monty Python movie, where knights in full armor sing about eating “ham and jam and Spam a lot,” becomes a 10-minute production number that turns Camelot itself into that second-rank hotel in Las Vegas.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, a much more satisfying show, takes the movie’s tale of two con men working the Riviera and whips it into an effervescent froth. The elegant con man (played by Michael Caine in the film and by John Lithgow here) nearly gets trapped into marriage with an oil heiress from Oklahoma who sings excitedly of her home state that “the leading cause of death is melanoma.” The more raffish con man (an overdone Steve Martin on film, the insanely great Norbert Leo Butz onstage) sings of his dream to be in a world where “the centerfolds roam . . . Hef will have me over to play some naked twister, / Blotto in the grotto with a playmate and her sister.” It’s a pity that David Yazbek’s brilliant lyrics aren’t matched by his own music, which tends toward the toneless.
Once upon a time, musicals were more traditionally known as “musical comedies.” That ended when the writers of musical comedy decided they wanted to be artists and not just entertainers, to use the form to explore issues and try out creative concepts. Their ambition ushered in the age of the Eat Your Spinach Musical, in which audiences looking for some singing and dancing had to endure the evils of imperialism, the rise of Nazism, the corrosive quality of the contemporary American marriage, and the tragedy of AIDS.
The day of the Eat Your Spinach Musical has passed. Now is the time of the Anything for a Laugh Musical. And it turns out that, by embracing the more comic aspects of musical comedy, the Broadway theater is undergoing an unexpected but entirely welcome creative renaissance.
John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
