Where Have All the Musicals Gone?

Madonna was spotted texting during Act Two—the light shining up from her phone was the giveaway. A rap and hip-hop history musical about a Republican hero can’t be good—but it is, and it isn’t a snide caricature of American history. Hamilton is the hot ticket of the moment in New York. Amongst the privileged old mostly white folks who have already seen it are Julian Lloyd Webber, Paul McCartney, all the Clintons, and Mrs Obama. Andrew Hamilton, the founding father on the US ten-dollar note, shot dead by Aaron Burr, “embodies hip-hop”, says Lin-Manuel Miranda—he should know, he wrote the music, lyrics and book, and stars as Hamilton. Based on a biography by Ron Chernow, the writing style may not exactly match Hamilton’s contributions to the Federalist Papers:

Hey, yo, I’m just like my country
I’m young scrappy and hungry
And I’m not throwing away my shot.

Miranda’s earlier hip-hop musical, In the Heights, covered its ten-million-dollar investment in ten months, and ran on Broadway for 1184 performances—there was a short Melbourne season earlier this year. Hamilton premiered Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in February before moving uptown to the Richard Rodgers Theatre in July. Whether the history rap will bloom or bomb in its much larger new home, where success will be achieved by attracting both an elusive young audience and an older musical-going audience, will be worth following.

Hamilton may be rap and hip-hop but it is presented as familiar musical theatre. To check out what else is happening in musical theatre you could stay at home and download two recent offerings from the UK’s Digital Theatre. Inexpensive to rent or buy, these performances would, if seen in an Australian theatre, cost up to a hundred dollars each. Digital Theatre has teamed up with Perfect Pitch, a production company set up to promote new musical theatre. Theatre performer and company patron Michael Ball sets out their commendable-sounding aims:

What we try and do is find, encourage, nurture new musical writing talent in this country. It’s what we have to do. Musicals are the lifeblood of the theatre. We have to find new talent, we have to encourage them.

Defect is one of their new musicals, not available online:

Old tensions are reignited when the murder of the most senior Nightwalker fuels more hatred of their kind. In this proud and seemingly civilised society, the police abandon the streets allowing a right wing organisation—The White Knights of the Sun—to gain popularity via sophisticated social media campaigns … A dangerous romance begins with the affable Terry, a trainee priest and wannabe rockstar.

It’s not always helpful being helpful. The one-act musicals online, filmed on stage during live performances, are Lift and From Up Here. Warning: Perfect Pitch is a not-for-profit theatre company funded by the Arts Council England.

In Lift a Covent Garden busker (George Maguire) introduces a group of people thrown together in the railway station lift. Time freezes as their “one minute in a lift” becomes our eighty minutes as the Busker invents stories about them which they sing and act out. The cast list identifies them simply as “French Teacher”, “Secretary”, “Lap Dancer”, “Ballet Dancer”, “Bright Young Thing”, “Athletic & Wearing a Thong”, “Tall, Dark & Handsome”. Lift’s music and lyrics are by Craig Adams, book by Ian Watson.

The advertising promises “a witty and provocative musical exploring connections and relationships in city life”. Soon, after a musical opening by the cast which brings back memories of Rent and Company, the Ballet Dancer (Jonny Fines) is receiving oral sex from another male and sings an appropriate song. Musically, and visually, it doesn’t have quite the same impact as “Oh What a Lovely Morning” in Oklahoma. Stephen Fry is also a Perfect Pitch patron: “I think we sometimes forget in Britain just how extraordinarily good we are at musicals.”

At some point the thirsty roots of modern culture sank through internet screens into the rivers of pornography which run below, and the hidden matter segued into the aboveground culture making crudity, vulgarity and perversion acceptable. You do not have to spend time watching internet porn to be touched by it: it has been assimilated into the mainstream. At a local supermarket, near the confectionery, is an elegant DVD sales unit featuring a tasteful black-and-white photo of a young woman and her lover, her arms in bondage above her head. Outside, in the central corridor of the shopping complex, a big poster with the same image is fixed on the wall of a busy electronics and entertainment store. The sadomasochistic film Fifty Shades of Grey is being sold as home entertainment. That could not have happened if our society had not been prepared by pornography. Male–male fellatio in a bright new musical that will probably pop up in drama school productions is accepted without comment. Periodically we are warned of the influence of internet pornography on children, Sunday night television criminals, and popular culture. But the influence on the cultural elite is seldom referred to. Pornography is no longer the undergrowth of literature, it is literature (and Twitter). Strangely, porn and political correctness exist side by side in our culture. In the current Broadway revival of Gigi a favourite song, which Variety deemed “potentially creepy”, has suffered inept sexual reassignment. The old Maurice Chevalier hit, “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”, is now sung by the female cast—which is even creepier.

In Lift the stories invented by the Busker are limiting accounts of sexual frustration. As he names each man Gabriel, and each woman Sarah, things do get slightly confusing for the viewer. The lesbian French Teacher (Julie Atherton) is sent to the Lap Dancer (Cynthia Erivo) by her girlfriend (never seen). The Lap Dancer, who is miserable and has an interest in drugs, gives her relationship counselling—she is also teaching the gay Ballet Dancer to drive. In another of his onstage sexual encounters he has difficulty concentrating on what is happening when the road code drifts into his thoughts. The Ballet Dancer has his own issues: gay in London, straight in Newcastle. When not consulting a psychologist he ogles the posterior of the Bright Young Thing (Luke Kempner) and, not knowing his identity, spends all his time in an internet chat room pretending to be a girl and exchanging messages with him. The actors playing the two Americans stand between them and act as living avatars to their messages. Probably in the audience some people (like Madonna at Hamilton) were themselves texting as this was playing. The lesbian French Teacher sings a song about her girlfriend in Paris, “Lost in Translation”. Bright Young Thing’s Secretary (Nikki Davis-Jones) pines for him and then meets the shy Busker: they admire the view over London. The two American tourists make a joke.

About halfway through, the play signals that it is coming to an end, and then restarts. About this point in a theatre you would probably be realising that the seat isn’t very comfortable. Traditional musicals were structured with song points where the audience was hit with big numbers. Act One would typically end with a showstopper. This is where you get “Give My Regards to Broadway” (George M), “The Impossible Dream” (Man of La Mancha), “Before the Parade Passes By” (Hello Dolly), “Sunday” (Sunday in the Park with George) and “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” (The Sound of Music). After that you are keen to return to your seat for Act Two—and the promise of more. Those titles alone stir memories of the vitality of the old musicals. An eighty-minute musical is possible but it needs better construction than Lift, which just seems to roll on and on with a pleasant but not memorable soundtrack.

Julie Atherton and Nikki Davis-Jones are outstanding performers. As the French Teacher and the Secretary they each get to sing a song or two, but they could have done so much more. The eight cast members are asked their favourite musical. One of them doesn’t like musicals (this is the young man playing the gay Ballet Dancer), one doesn’t have a favourite, and the others nominate Miss Saigon, Parade (about the lynching of a Jewish factory manager after his conviction for raping and murdering a thirteen-year-old girl), The Last Five Years, Memphis, Rent and “Lift, of course!” The musical was probably written for an audience like themselves. Unfortunately, people like them don’t like musicals. And people who do like musicals would not enjoy this one. Lift is characters with music, rather than music with character. It ends up being neither Rent nor Company, nor memorably itself, but cabaret performances with gay sex and sex chat between songs.

From Up Here, by Aaron Lee Lambert, “contains strong language”. It started as a collaborative writing exercise for musical theatre students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Again strangers meet and sing; this time five people, with problems, on Brooklyn Bridge—seemingly the quietest place in New York. A young woman (Leila Benn Harris) and old man (Tony Kemp) meet. They have come to jump, but don’t. Three more characters come and go. Time passes. A young man takes photographs. A young woman just pregnant appears very pregnant and then with her baby.

The class exercise is finally, after undergoing much reworking, a class exercise with tepidness elevated to an art form. The musical score is unremarkable, undemanding, uninteresting, but not unpleasant. The idea of a musical with stop-you-in-your-tracks songs is absent. As you would expect in a piece about modern women and men which was born on campus the text is underscored with the boring wrong-headed gender platitudes prevalent in academia. On one hand these women are strong, sensitive, superior (to men) and intelligent. They are also victims (of men), submissive, mistreated and haven’t a clue regarding sexual reproduction. The performance was filmed at the Wilde Theatre in Bracknell, and received a “thumbs up” from the Bracknell News reviewer.

Both musicals would also elicit “thumbs up” reviews if performed on Australian stages, where small-scale handbag theatre has pushed out real dramas. Lift, with its eight-voice harmonies, would make it attractive for student productions in drama courses, and the gay sex would endorse the lecturer’s modish progressiveness. The musicals come from a well-intentioned idea of supporting new young talent, which in Australia would naturally be expected to be government-funded. Neither of these small plays would touch a large popular audience, and they are not trying to. Their crudities and vulgarity represent the enthusiastic adoption of barbarism as a cultural choice.

As our plays shrink to one-act performances, and classic plays are rewritten to be staged with diminishing directorial intelligence and increasing egotism, our theatre is under threat. What can seem alive and thriving in Australia Council-speak publications may be simply vulgar and dreary exhibitionism in reality. A French theatre critic, concerned with what is happening in his country, recently observed that in Paris each week there are about 400 performances; he then asked if any of this was truly theatre. Of that number about 150 were monologues, readings or single performances. He rightly pointed out that performers of monologues are not actors but storytellers. It’s time writers of monologues stopped calling themselves playwrights, and stopped taking theatre grants and awards for “plays” they have not written.

Theatre is in a sad state and government funding is not helping. A regional theatre company received state government money to commission what was called, even before it was written, “a major new work of national significance”. The work was completed and staged—for three performances. The author and the company get production credits, and nobody is concerned at the waste. If the state is to intervene and promote the arts, companies and authors should be rewarded for what they achieve, not for what they have promised to do—which in this case was not very much.

Traditional musicals were created in show business, by people who had learned the business. To survive they had to entertain a large and diverse audience, and offer value for money—in doing so they produced some of the best popular music of the twentieth century. Les Miz sings of revolution with both eyes on the box office. In the filmed Perfect Pitch productions there is not a member of cast who does not deserve to be on stage. The music is promising, and in Lift there are several songs which would work in cabaret. The sets are interesting and professional. The direction is sure, but both pieces are one-act, one-dimensional, and tepid. Nothing is truly bad, and nothing is very good. By contrast, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical of Hamilton seems alive, and unafraid of confronting the world outside preciousness.