Tuesday, January 5, 2010
EVERYBODY DO THE PROPAGANDA: While big "classic" musicals are dropping like flies on Broadway right now (Ragtime and Finian's Rainbow will each close at a total loss in the next few weeks, and the allegedly nightmarishly bad Birdie revival bidding bye bye shortly), it's a fascinating season for new musicals, with the Fresh Prince/Jay-Z-produced afropop musical Fela! being joined by Green Day's American Idiot this spring. (Also coming--the Nathan Lane/Bebe Neuwirth Addams Family musical, which got mixed reviews in Chicago, and a musical about a mythical legendary gathering of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis.)
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Matt, you mean legendary, not mythical.
ReplyDeleteDid the quartet actually happen? I thought it was constructed for the show.
ReplyDeleteThe Million Dollar Quartet
ReplyDeleteA little bummed I'm not going to make it to NYC before Finian's Rainbow closes - the female lead was a college friend (with whom I've since lost touch). I saw her in several college productions - it'd be nice to see her in something on a much grander scale.
ReplyDeleteSaw Addams Family in Chicago. It's good, but has some definite pacing/repetition issues, and the set design and staging tends to overshadow the music (which has a number of nice themes but not so many standout pieces). Still, it's very well done overall and hopefully will do very well on Broadway; it's probably going to become the next Wicked.
ReplyDeleteIt will be interesting, at least from this outsider, to see how those three are received. I am utterly ignorant of musicals, but I have a vague sense that there are basically three kinds of musicals -- (1) what I think of as traditional Broadway music that grows out of vaudeville and gradually takes on a jazz sound (culminating in Bernstein); (2) an entirely distinct era of mostly pop-oriented (but full-orchestra) music that leans heavily on power ballads and soaring choruses, beginning with and, admittedly or not, building on Andrew Lloyd Webber; and (3) a newer contemporary-music kind of musical, often with rock band instrumentation or rock-music writing (Green Day; Duncan Sheik; Paul Simon) that kind of rejects Broadway songwriting but pumps non-Broadway songs through a full-Broadway performance filter. Rent is kind of a transition between category 2 and category 3. Am I wrong about this? I could be completely wrong about it.
ReplyDeleteSo obviously the Green Day musical goes in that latter category, and I'm assuming that Addams Family goes into the ALW-era category. The Afropop thing probably goes in the last category, although maybe it's something completely different. Over time, it will be interesting to see how the three types of musicals (obviously much of it revival mode) peform relative to each other. Do you see increasing acceptance of what you don't think of as traditional Broadway songwriters? Or do you expect the second category (e.g. Wicked; presumably Addams Family) to remain dominant?
And which idiom will be that of the inevitable mopey teen vampire musical? The audience seems to be category 3, but category 2 does have an obsession with magic and horror.
Apologies if this is all really stupid, because, again, everything I know about Broadway I learned (a) here; (b) on So You Think You Can Dance; and (c) lurching for the button to change the channel when anything Broadway-y comes on.
Not to mention that "Next to Normal," a very strange, but great musical, which is still running and is entirely worth seeing.
ReplyDeleteI'm sad, but not surprised, to see Ragtime go. It was a good, but not great, production. And to stick around, it had to be great.
Guest, I think you've pegged the types of B'way musicals well, but there seems to be a fourth type I'm noticing, or perhaps it's a subset of your third category: the musical based on harmonies rather than melodies, more interested in complex music and plotting rather than being grandiose/loud/hip. I'm thinking of musicals here like "The Light in the Piazza," "The Last Five Years," and pretty much anything by Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel, Jason Robert Brown, or Chris Miller/Nathan Tysen, who wrote just that kind of musical that's coming to my theater this spring. I'm not sure if I like it yet.
My theater will be holding its annual online auction fundraiser in April - it includes lots of B'way theater tickets, often with special perks (show merchandise, backstage visits with actors, backstage tours, etc.). If it's okay, I'll post a link when it goes up in a few months.
Ragtime was a very good production. But unfortunately, it was a good production of a show that just tries to do too much with too little and as such, strives to achieve mediocrity at best. Without the spectacle-sized production, the more impressionistic look of this new production emphasizes the fact that the characters are mere sketches at best and that there's way too much plot for the audience to have enough time to connect with the characters in a meaningful way so that the characters' developments have any impact.
ReplyDeleteI thought the Addams Family had significant problems, and found the fact that the story depends on a "rape is funny!" plot point troubling. As someone else pointed out in the NYT article about it today.
ReplyDeleteThat would turn me right off of it, Adlai. Seriously, in 2010, that's a plot point?
ReplyDeleteSue, please do post the link!
Expecting very good things from Million Dollar Quartet (know the director who is marvelous, and heard excellent feedback from the Chicago run). Need to plan a weekend to go see that and American Idiot (we know someone in it, heard people loved it in Berkeley, and the kiddo is a huge fan of Green Day anyway).