In a New York Times Magazine interview with Frank Rich, Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930) told an anecdote as revealing as it was charming. Reminiscing about the New Haven opening of Carousel in 1945, when he was fifteen, the composer/lyricist recalled the emotional impact of the first act’s closing moments: ‘I remember how everyone goes off to the clambake at the end of Act One and Jigger just follows, and he was the only one walking on stage as the curtain came down. I was sobbing.’¹ In the next paragraph, however, Sondheim displays a more characteristic caginess when considering why Carousel is his second favourite score. (Porgy and Bess is his favourite.) After suggesting that he might be drawn to Carousel ‘because it’s about a loner [the protagonist Billy Bigelow] who’s misunderstood’, Sondheim dismisses the thought, calling it ‘psychobabble’.² Later in the interview, he returns to this somewhat defensive argument, noting that, after all, ‘the outsider is basic to a lot of dramatic literature. This country’s about conformity. And so nonconformity is a fairly common theme.’³

Nonconforming outsiders are indeed inherent in much dramatic literature. American musicals, however, have generally avoided them, and certainly their presence as protagonists in musicals before Carousel is rare. Even their existence as important supporting characters is unusual. Notable exceptions exist, of course. They include the mulatto Julie in Show Boat (1927), the discovery of whose racial heritage results in her dismissal from the showboat company and her subsequent tragedy, and Jud Fry in Oklahoma! (1943), whose angry isolation is voiced in the disturbing number ‘Lonely Room’. With the possible exceptions of Pal Joey (1940) and the opera-derived Carmen Jones (1943), however, musicals before Carousel were not about these outsiders. Instead, these were secondary characters whose conflict with society usually resulted in society’s triumph. Interestingly, each of these rather atypical works, with the exception of Pal Joey, had book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Sondheim’s mentor and close personal friend. Only after Carousel, which was also written by Hammerstein, do we find the outsider increasingly cast as the principal figure in a musical, particularly a musical with a score by Stephen Sondheim. Perhaps, as Sondheim acknowledges, this is because the nonconformity of the outsider is ‘obviously something I feel, belonging to a number of minorities’.⁴ (Sondheim is Jewish and gay.) Or perhaps such observations really are psychobabble. Either way, Sondheim’s body of work for the musical theatre thus far suggests that his early emotional reaction to a work about a disenfranchised member of society, a nonconformist, was an indication of the theme upon which he since has written many variations, each of them in a distinct personal style. He seems always to have been attracted to characters whose actions place them outside mainstream society. Neuroses are plentiful in these musicals, and they are found in characters whose complexities often recall the loner who troubled and moved the young Sondheim.

Sondheim’s first Broadway shows were West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959), for which he provided the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein’s and Jule Styne’s scores, respectively, and even they are concerned with outsiders and/or the disenfranchised. Already Sondheim’s lyrics create sharply drawn characters who express, among other feelings, a frustration with, or even contempt for, mainstream society. West Side Story, for example, concerns several layers of social ostracism: a white gang (the Jets) aggressively treats a Puerto Rican gang (the Sharks) as outsiders from American society, and the Sharks deeply resent and violently challenge that status; both gangs are disenfranchised from society in general (in the clever lyrics of the number ‘Gee, Officer Krupke!’, the Jets chronicle their misfit status); and the lovers Tony and Maria are rejected by both gangs because of their relationship. Sondheim’s lyrics for the show create an expressive vernacular that emphasises the strained social relationships between the two gangs. Gypsy’s Mama Rose thumbs her nose at ‘respectable’ bourgeois society: ‘they can stay and rot’, she sings, ‘but not Rose’. Only at the end of the show, when Rose breaks down in ‘Rose’s Turn’, does the audience see the toll that this disenfranchisement has taken. Furthermore, both of these early works also feature a motive common to several of the later works: the outsider’s ability, or at least hope, to escape reality through dreams or dreamlike fantasy. West Side Story contains a dream ballet in which the two principal characters imagine a life in which none are outsiders; and Gypsy is full of Rose’s leitmotif ‘I had a dream’, with which she confronts various crises.

Many of Sondheim’s subsequent outsiders also express themselves in or through dreams, or in dreamlike detachments from reality. In Follies, for instance, the neurotic and emotionally frazzled characters take turns performing acts in an imaginary and nightmarish vaudeville. Much of the action of Company (1970) occurs in a timeless and dreamlike suspension of reality in which Robert, an emotionally detached bachelor, comes to grips with what he really wants from life. In the second act of Sunday in the Park with George (1984), the twentieth-century George is consoled and inspired by the dreamlike apparition of Dot, a character from another century (and another act), and in Assassins (1991) the characters fervently, if desperately, believe that ‘Everybody’s got the right to their dreams’.

A consideration of Sondheim’s scores as representations of the outsider provides an entrée to discussing some of their general and specific stylistic traits. These traits create what Sondheim scholar Steven Swayne has called Sondheim’s ‘multiple musical voices’, many of which are imitative or referential.⁵ Specifically, argues Swayne, Sondheim exploits this ‘range of musical voices in pursuit of his singular voice: the voice of character delineation’.⁶ While Sondheim’s principal purpose, therefore, is the clear depiction of individual characters, his means for achieving it are as diverse as the concepts for the shows in which those characters exist.

The introduction previously of the word ‘concepts’ in turn demands mention of the term ‘concept musical’, for it is often applied to Sondheim’s work in general and relates specifically to any discussion of his means of creating characters for a given show. Joanne Gordon sums up this term as follows:

In other words, Gordon continues, Sondheim ‘develops a new lyric, musical, and theatrical language for each work. Sondheim’s music and lyrics grow out of the dramatic idea inherent in the show’s concept and themselves become part of the drama’.⁸

Two compositional techniques especially facilitate Sondheim’s ability to change musical languages without losing his own ‘singular voice’: the use of motives, or short, recognisable musical ideas that sometimes represent non-musical concepts or characters and that are often used as structural cells for lengthier musical statements; and the use of pastiche, which is the presence of music and/or musical styles from various sources in a single work. While the first of these is observable as early as Company and, after Sweeney Todd (1979), becomes increasingly important, the second appears as a recognisable trait even earlier and is variously exploited by Sondheim in nearly all his works.

Company, then, serves as an early example of one way Sondheim uses motives to define the character of an outsider. Throughout Company, Sondheim uses a recurring motive, the ‘Robert’ or ‘Bobby’ motive, as a cell, or building block, for much of the score, as Stephen Banfield has demonstrated.⁹ (The motive, first sung to the words ‘Bobby, Bobby’, consists of a descending minor third followed by a descending major second. The initial pitch of each interval is the same.) What Banfield does not mention, however, is the careful utilisation of this motive in relation to Robert and the other characters, and as a musical symbol of Robert’s detachment from his married friends. It is heard almost immediately at the show’s beginning, and a development of it introduces the opening title song. After this, the motive is used between scenes and before, or as part of, musical numbers involving Robert and his married friends, a group from whom he is an outsider despite the mutual affection between them.

The motive does not introduce songs that involve characters or their observations without Robert, however. This is evident in ‘Little Things’, a commentary by the acerbic Joanne on another couple’s scene as well as on marriage in general, and ‘Sorry Grateful’, the men’s reflective answer to Robert’s question, ‘Are you ever sorry you got married?’ The motive neither introduces nor appears in songs that involve Robert on his own or without the couples, such as ‘Someone Is Waiting’, or ‘Barcelona’, his emotionally removed duet with a flight attendant. Although these numbers do not quote the motive, they are frequently built on it, often by inverting it, as Banfield points out. Perhaps the most dramatic use of the motive is in the dance sequence ‘Tick Tock’, omitted from the revised version of the show. In this number the audience hears taped dialogue of Robert and the flight attendant during sex. At a critical, post-coital moment, she says, ‘I love you’, and the motive is heard. It signifies what the couples all along have been wanting Robert to hear and experience; it represents their hopes fulfilled, as well as their presence in even his most intimate life. Robert, however, can only respond with ‘I … I …’, at which point the orchestra plays a dissonant fragment of the motive that signifies Robert’s inability to express what everyone else wants him to express.

The central character’s inability to respond reinforces his outsider status in the world of the married and emotionally committed. It is a telling moment, harking back to an earlier moment in the second act when, in the course of a production number, several couples perform a call-and-response tap dance break; when it is Robert’s turn, there is a call but no response. Robert’s motive, therefore, is expressive of the gulf between Robert and the couples, between Robert and thoughts of marriage and between Robert and any kind of emotional commitment. On his own Robert can only recall the motive by transforming it into something else. Woven into the show’s texture, the motive and its transformations, along with the accompanying lyrics, create a web that is present in some form throughout the show, and that defines Robert as a singular figure on the outside of a world of couples. This kind of motivic development is later greatly utilised by Sondheim, especially in Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods (1988).

Plate 17 Production of Company in 2001 at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre (formerly Missouri Repertory Theatre). Left to right: Kathy Barnett, Tia Speros, Cheryl Martin, Paul Niebanck, Lewis Cleale (as Robert, the ‘other’ who is unable to make a connection with his friends).

Photograph courtesy of Kansas City Repertory Theatre

Sondheim’s use of pastiche appears even earlier, as previously noted. In Anyone Can Whistle (1964), his second produced show as both composer and lyricist,¹⁰ Sondheim made use of what he calls ‘traditional musical comedy language to make points. All the numbers Angie (Angela Lansbury, one of the show’s co-stars) sang in the show were pastiche – her opening number, for instance, was a Hugh Martin–Kay Thompson pastiche. The character always sang in musical comedy terms because she was a lady who dealt in attitudes instead of emotions.’¹¹ Interestingly, Sondheim has also said of this show that, ‘Essentially the show is about, on one level, non-conformity and conformity in contemporary society.’¹² Although the show ran for only nine performances, the score is original and often memorable, and it explores subjects like sanity, depression and twentieth-century fears with a decidedly musical theatre vocabulary.

Sondheim also uses the vocabulary of the musical theatre in Follies (1971). Because Follies, in the words of director/producer Harold Prince, ‘deals with the loss of innocence in the United States, using the Ziegfeld Follies … as its metaphor’,¹³ musical pastiche is a natural choice for realising that metaphor. Here, however, Sondheim gives resonance to characters who, unhappy with the present, look back to a past best recalled by its music and by their memory of having sung it. (The characters are former showgirls and their husbands, and the title refers to their former employment as well as to their personal delusions.) As Joanne Gordon observes, ‘The work is a voyage into the collective unconscious of America’s theatrical imagination. Nostalgia is not merely the mood, it is the subject matter.’¹⁴ To this end, Sondheim writes musical numbers that recall the past eras referred to in the script and for which the characters express nostalgia, as well as numbers that are ‘book’ songs sung by the characters in the unhappy present. Because the script calls for the representation of the characters in their past youthful days as well as their present middle age, Sondheim sometimes combines the two styles of writing and creates a surreal blend of past and present.

The pastiche numbers, however, are most effective in the last section of the show, a kind of musical revue–nervous breakdown in which each of the four principal characters expresses his or her individual neurosis. Sally, a former chorus girl who is now unhappily married to a travelling salesman and living a nondescript suburban life in the American Southwest, expresses her long-standing love for Ben, a friend’s husband whom she has quietly loved for years, in a Gershwin-like torch song. The rather mousy and decidedly unglamorous Sally stands alone in a circular spot, clad in a clinging silver gown evocative of Jean Harlow, and passionately sings ‘Losing My Mind’, one of Sondheim’s most powerfully emotional love songs. Her husband Buddy, on the other hand, sings a patter song about loving one woman (Sally) but finding affection only in the arms of another. The upbeat and funny vaudeville quality of the song, a baggy pants routine, barely masks Buddy’s desperate frustration with a lifetime of watching his wife love another man. Phyllis, Sally’s former best friend and the wife of the man Sally loves, has a production number that speaks of her schizophrenia: ‘The Story of Lucy and Jessie’ depicts Phyllis as a young woman, warm and loving but fearful of life, and as a middle-aged woman, classy but emotionally dead. The irony is that each wants to be the other. This number recalls both Cole Porter and Kurt Weill, especially ‘The Saga of Jenny’ from Lady in the Dark.

The final number in this follies of the mind is for Ben, Phyllis’s husband and the man loved by Sally. This is a top hat and tails number that also recalls Gershwin or, perhaps, the syncopated dance tunes of Irving Berlin. As Ben swaggers to the song, cane in hand and backed by the ensemble, he quite literally falls apart, forgetting his lyrics and losing control until the nightmare takes over and the revue literally explodes in a cacophony of musical fragments and shadowy images. Sondheim’s choice of material to parody in this final section of the show is what makes the numbers so effectively devastating, and it is his most powerful and successful use of pastiche up to that point. His portraits of the neurotic and troubled characters are almost painful to watch, and they are created with great sympathy for the individuals who yearn for a time that was not nearly as happy, or tuneful, as they like to remember.

The complex web of relationships that forms A Little Night Music (1973) is one of outsiders. Of all the characters, Henrik most exemplifies this state. He goes from being a misfit at the seminary to being a misfit at home to being a misfit at Mme Armfeldt’s estate. Indeed, before gathering with others at the estate for a weekend, Henrik notes that ‘the devil’s companions know not whom they serve, / It might be instructive to observe’. Henrik eventually does more than observe, however. Before the end of the weekend, and after contemplating suicide, he runs off with his father’s young bride, who also realises her emotional and chronological distance from her husband and the others. The flight of Henrik and Anne propels the plot to its conclusion, in which the various characters rediscover their relationships and their places inside – or outside, as the case may be – the society around them. Desirée, the principal female character, compares the group of adults to clowns in ‘Send in the Clowns’, Sondheim’s most famous song. After a statement of the song’s titular command, Desirée changes her mind. ‘Don’t bother’, she reconsiders, ‘they’re here.’

One of the most original creations for the musical theatre Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) is filled with outsiders, colourful characters who are all dispossessed persons, outsiders in nineteenth-century London. Sweeney Todd, alias Benjamin Barker, a half-mad barber bent on revenge, comes to London to murder Judge Turpin; when the intended victim escapes Todd’s blade, Todd swears to kill all who visit his barber’s chair until he cuts Turpin’s throat.

In ‘Epiphany’ Todd’s inner need for revenge is awakened to some of the angriest and most disturbing music ever written for the musical theatre. In the subsequent duet ‘A Little Priest’, Todd and the resourceful Mrs Lovett, who loves him, devise a plan to solve both of their problems – Todd getting rid of his murdered bodies and Mrs Lovett finding a source of meat for her pies. The cannibalistic fantasy, with its grotesque lyrics that describe how members of various professions would taste, appears as a light-hearted waltz. The counterpoint between the lyrics and the music accentuates the macabre nature of the duet.

The idea of using the waltz idiom to accompany dark and menacing lyrics was of course nothing new. Sondheim himself had used it throughout A Little Night Music, but in Sweeney Todd the style took on an even more demonic character. This would become manifest in two numbers in Assassins, as we shall see: the opening sequence, where ‘Hail to the Chief’ is transformed into a waltz, and ‘Gun Song’, where the carefree waltz is the musical identifier in a number that celebrates the weapon of assassination.

In the fairy-tale-based Into the Woods (1987), Sondheim once again has nontraditional characters as the central figures in his musical. Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Jack (of beanstalk fame), Rapunzel and even Snow White appear in this musical about outsiders, all of whom have their own personal issues, working together to solve bigger problems. Encased in a larger tale of a baker and his barren wife who is under the spell of a witch, the stories of the familiar fairy tales are enhanced through their dramatic and musical treatment. Rapunzel’s Prince and his brother, Cinderella’s Prince, sing the waltz duet ‘Agony’, and the instructive ballads ‘No One Is Alone’ and ‘Children Will Listen’ have enjoyed lives of their own outside theatrical contexts. ‘No One Is Alone’ is a benevolent anthem to outsiders – people are never completely disconnected from others in their thoughts and actions.

Before turning our attention to Assassins, a veritable treasure chest of otherness that will occupy the rest of this chapter, we must acknowledge two other shows with scores by Sondheim that further demonstrate varied conditions of outsiders: Passion (1994) and Bounce (2003). The former concerns the life-altering and transformative love of a sick and physically unattractive woman – an outsider in every sense, from her physical to her emotional isolation from society – while the latter considers the troubled relationship of two entrepreneurial brothers who find it impossible to sustain themselves within the confines of society. The scores for these two shows inhabit different stylistic worlds, Passion rising to operatic heights through some of Sondheim’s most exquisite music and Bounce recalling a more traditional Broadway style not unlike the earlier Merrily We Roll Along. Despite their being wildly different, each of these shows nonetheless provided Sondheim with additional sets of characters whose status as outsiders he could musically confirm.

It is in Assassins, however, that Sondheim is at his best portraying the neurotic outsider. Nowhere in Sondheim’s work is this character type created with more explicit sympathy, humour or irony. Assassins is a troubling work that perplexed and even angered some critics and still has the power to disturb American audiences.¹⁵ In this piece all the characters are would-be or successful assassins of American presidents. They are also unhappy loners and, from society’s perspective, losers. In Assassins, furthermore, Sondheim and the playwright John Weidman suggest that, with the exception of John Wilkes Booth, none of these singular figures acts out of any specific political motivation. Instead, their acts are explosive expressions of their hopeless and powerless positions in a system that seems, to them, to have been designed for the well-being of someone else. Individually and as a group, these men and women feel cheated and deprived of a happiness they view as their right. They express these feelings in one of Sondheim’s most accomplished scores. How he gives voice to these outsiders, and how his technique for doing this is unique in this work, is fascinating.

Weidman and Sondheim, who had earlier collaborated on Pacific Overtures (1976), created Assassins after the model of a vaudeville-like revue, a choice that contributed in several ways to the successful presentation of the disenfranchised titular characters. It encouraged Sondheim to exploit pastiche in new and sophisticated ways. Previously, as noted, the composer/lyricist used familiar and traditional musical theatre song styles to underscore aspects of situations and characters. In Assassins, however, the reach of Sondheim’s stylistic net is much wider. The sources for his pastiche include pre-existent and often familiar pieces of music from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1980s. He also parodies familiar popular song styles from nineteenth-century parlour songs to 1980s pop love songs, as well as popular dance styles such as cakewalks, Sousa marches and hoe-downs. Non-musical sources include historical poems, lyrics, interviews and quotations. In addition, historical characters are interwoven throughout various eras to create relationships that would have been chronologically impossible. Such an extended use of historical materials, musical and textual, is unprecedented in Sondheim’s work. He exploits these sources to probe the troubled psyches of deeply disturbed, and disturbing, outsiders.

By taking the familiar vocabulary of American music and using it to give voice to the disenfranchised and the desperate, moreover, Sondheim uses pastiche to particularly ironic effect. Comfortable and sometimes comforting styles of American popular music are used to depict an underside of American society, a depiction that in turn causes discomfort. Sondheim recasts or de-familiarises the comfortable styles by using them for characters who make us squirm but whose disenfranchisement, we begin to see by the show’s end, is just as American as the ‘comfortable’ musical space it inhabits. When Sondheim uses popular song styles in ways that subvert the connotations they have carried for a century or more, he is taking a drastic stylistic step, one that cannot but disturb and unsettle American audiences. Sondheim thus creates a network of textual references to give individual numbers, and even the entire score, meanings they might otherwise lack. The whole work is a carefully spun web of various references that maintains cohesion in part through the manipulation of these references and the viewer’s assumed knowledge of them. This combination of references, demonstrated shortly, is adroit and powerful.

The vaudeville model for Assassins allows each character to have his or her appropriate turn, or specialty number, each following the other in no particular order and each in a different musical style. Giuseppe Zangara sings his Sousa-inspired number strapped in an electric chair, looking as if he might at any moment make a Houdini-like escape; Charles Guiteau sings and dances a jaunty cakewalk up and down the hangman’s scaffold; and Samuel Byck dictates monologues into his tape recorder as if performing stand-up comedy. This combination of seemingly unrelated styles and personalities is, of course, characteristic of American vaudeville, which was derived from, and often satirised, established genres of entertainment. The unrelated styles also allow the distinctness of each character from the others, as well as from society in general. The individual messages from the fringe are similar, but they are spoken with different musical vocabularies.

The choice of the vaudeville model no doubt also suggested the nonlinear structure for Assassins. Like Follies and, especially, Company, the show moves smoothly but non-chronologically through time. Sometimes its dejected historical characters meet in locations nonspecific to any one time period: a saloon in downtown New York City, for instance, that looks the same today as it did in 1900. Other times, however, the setting is almost painfully specific: the penultimate scene takes place in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, just before the assassination of President John Kennedy. Sondheim also creates extended musical scenes through collections of numbers related by dramatic content and musical styles. ‘How I Saved Roosevelt’ is a collection of closely related but meaningfully contrasted dances. ‘Gun Song’ is a collection of waltzes, each of which deals with a different aspect of handguns and features a character from a different era. These waltzes are stylistically diverse, but they are connected by a refrain and preceded, as well as followed, by a sombre ballad, also a waltz. ‘The Ballad of Guiteau’ mixes hymn, parlour song and cakewalk. Stephen Banfield has called these sequences ‘suites’.¹⁶

The focus of one of these suites (‘How I Saved Roosevelt’) is Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian immigrant who, in February 1933, attempted to kill President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Miami. He failed, but he managed to wound several others, including the mayor of Chicago, Tony Cermak, who subsequently died from his wounds. After Cermak’s death, Zangara’s life sentence was changed to death by execution in the electric chair. Zangara’s only political agenda was his simple if fervent anti-capitalism: he was neither an anarchist, a socialist nor even a communist. He bore no grudge towards any individual figure, including Roosevelt.

While ‘How I Saved Roosevelt’ creates a vivid portrait of Zangara, it also contrasts him with a group of patriotic Bystanders, as Sondheim calls them, all of whom claimed to have thwarted the assassination attempt. These individuals each received and enjoyed much attention in the press and became momentary celebrities for their claims of having saved FDR. The contrast of Zangara’s passionate anti-capitalism with the all-American absorption with self-promotion and celebrity in the press creates the bipolar perspective of the musical scene. When we add to this the fact that before Roosevelt’s appearance, a band gave a concert at Bayfront Park’s new bandshell,¹⁷ we have the makings of a musical number, and it is from here that Sondheim works his magic.

Through an onstage radio, we hear the activities at Bayfront Park: a performance of Sousa’s march ‘El Capitan’, an announcer’s description of the festive scene and then of the unsuccessful assassination. The announcer summarises the ensuing events, ending with, ‘We take you now to a group of eyewitnesses who will tell us what they saw.’ The lights come up on five Bystanders and, as the band resumes ‘El Capitan’, they begin singing.

Sondheim’s choice of ‘El Capitan’ is interesting. One of Sousa’s best-known marches, it, too, is a pastiche of unrelated musical numbers from Sousa’s most successful operetta, also titled El Capitan. This lighthearted work is also concerned with political insurrection and turmoil. After opening his number with a direct quote of the march’s four-bar introduction in 6/8 time, and thus emphasising the diegetic aspect of the march being played in Bayfront Park, Sondheim builds a melody related to Sousa’s, albeit more of a recognisable reminiscence than a direct quote. In the third strain of the march Sondheim changes the character through a shift to sustained quartal harmony (i.e. harmony based on fourths). This serves as Zangara’s introduction into the number, and the lights come up on him confined in the electric chair. In the middle of this section, after the minor mode unambiguously appears, Zangara’s music is transformed into a tarantella.

Whereas the character of the Sousa march indicates the patriotic American middle class and its capitalist system, the tarantella is, in this context, distinctly ‘other’ and foreign. Its heritage as a folk dance reflects Zangara’s poor Italian background and provides a clear contrast to the Sousa march’s more bourgeois origins. Since both are in 6/8 time, transition from one to the other is relatively simple.

After Zangara’s interlude, the strains of ‘El Capitan’ return, and the Bystanders begin again. After they sing the same musical material as in the opening section of the number, Sondheim takes another surprise turn and introduces ‘The Washington Post’, another Sousa march that operates on more than one level. The first, of course, is that the ‘The Washington Post’ represents the establishment press to whom the Bystanders are so eagerly and self-importantly telling their stories. The other level is that of yet another dance style. After its composition by Sousa in 1899, ‘The Washington Post’ was chosen by a group of dance instructors as suitable for a new and fashionable dance called the two-step, which in many places is still referred to as ‘The Washington Post’. This dance, then, implies another contrast in social class.

When the music yet again returns to ‘El Capitan’, a Bystander refers to Zangara as ‘Some left wing foreigner’. Zangara, however, refutes the term ‘left wing’ with a chilling section best described as a miniature mad scene. Here the orchestra plays dissonant snippets of the march melodies in counterpoint to Zangara’s increasingly higher, and increasingly intense, vocal line. After asserting ‘Zangara no foreign tool, / Zangara American! / American nothing!’ Zangara begins asking about the photographers. He sings, ‘And why there no photographers? / For Zangara no photographers! / Only capitalists get photographers!’ Odd though it is, this ranting is based on fact: in its report of Zangara’s execution in March 1933, Newsweek reported that Zangara said, ‘No camera man here? No one here to take picture? Lousy capitalists! No pictures! Capitalists! All capitalists! Lousy bunch! Crooks.’¹⁸

What Sondheim does with this outburst is particularly ingenious. Zangara’s diatribe about photographers equates him with the Bystanders, who are smitten with the press and excited by their importance to it. To point out this new, if fleeting, relationship between Zangara and the Bystanders, Sondheim again quotes the second strain of ‘El Capitan’ and has Zangara sing a counter-melody while the Bystanders sing the original melody. Zangara’s identifying tarantella, then, transforms into an integral section of the march. After Zangara asks, ‘And why there no photographers? /…/ Only capitalists get photographers’, he comments ‘No right! / No fair / Nowhere!’ as the Bystanders sing, ‘I’m on the front page – is that bizarre? / And all of those pictures, like a star!’ The implication is that, for at least this one moment in his life, Zangara envies the capitalist middle class more than perhaps he ever dreamed possible, even as he distinguishes himself from them. Because of Zangara’s presence on stage with the Bystanders, the original lyrics for this phrase in Sousa’s operetta are almost eerie: ‘Gaze on his misanthropic stare. / Notice his penetrating glare.’ As both Zangara and the Bystanders reach the end of the number, Zangara sings, ‘Pull switch!’ and a hum of electricity accompanies the number’s final cadence.

Sondheim again references and/or quotes other texts, musical and non-musical, in his portrayal of Charles Guiteau in ‘The Ballad of Guiteau’. On the surface an affable lunatic who shot James Garfield to preserve the country and promote the sales of his book, the singular Guiteau is given a pathetic and angry underside. This is done in part through recalling writings by the character as well as subsequent folk songs about him. (Indeed, the body of extant folk songs about political assassination in fact suggests that Assassins is the latest in a long line of works in popular genres about this aspect of the American character.)

On the day of his execution, Charles Guiteau wrote a poem that begins, ‘I am going to the Lordy; / I am so glad. / I am going to the Lordy / I am so glad. / I am going to the Lordy, / Glory Hallelujah! Glory Hallelujah! / I am going to the Lordy.’¹⁹ This poem intrigued Sondheim, who first encountered it in the short play by Charles Gilbert that inspired Assassins, and he opens Guiteau’s number with its first lines. They are sung hymn-like and unaccompanied, and Sondheim continues to use the line ‘I am going to the Lordy’ as a recurring refrain between the number’s sections. The contrast of Guiteau’s fervent yet hymn-like poem with the musical styles that follow it suggests Guiteau’s mental imbalance, a trait the audience has already seen. He is glib, frequently charming and completely insane.

Sondheim first contrasts Guiteau’s mad hymn with a parlour song in 3/4 time sung by the narrating Balladeer. The opening lines also recall the opening exhortation of the folk song mentioned earlier, which is, ‘Come all ye Christian people, wherever you may be, / Likewise pay attention to these few lines from me.’ Sondheim distils this to ‘Come all ye Christians, and learn from a sinner’.

Musically, Sondheim constructs a useful structure for all this textual reference. As noted earlier, the opening is an unaccompanied hymn sung by, and with lyrics by, Guiteau himself. Because the lights come up to reveal him at the foot of a scaffold, his reference to ‘going to the Lordy’ is amusing. The music, however, is a straightforward and almost austere hymn, sixteen bars of increasingly wider intervals. The initial hymn section segues into the Balladeer’s triple-time parlour song. The parlour song leads into a sixteen-bar cakewalk refrain for Guiteau, by the end of which he has danced himself one step closer to the hangman’s waiting noose. The upbeat character and tempo of the dance are reflected in Sondheim’s optimistic lyrics for Guiteau. Each refrain begins ‘Look on the bright side’ and continues with appropriately optimistic homilies that, along with the cheerfulness of the cakewalk, provide ironic contrast to the ominous scaffold on which they are delivered. The first two statements of the refrain are upbeat, but the third is slower, more resolute and accompanied by strong chords played on the beat, and ends abruptly after only four bars. At this point, Sondheim returns to the hymn. Now, however, it is played as a resolute and forceful dance: a danse macabre. At the end of the forceful hymn section, the Balladeer begins his refrain, this time in the previous fast tempo, and he and Guiteau sing an extended ending. As the refrain and the number are finally allowed to conclude, Guiteau is blindfolded and, as the lights black out and the final chord is played, the Hangman pulls the lever that releases the trap door under Guiteau.

The implications of the cakewalk, of course, are fascinating. The dance was originally a dance of outsiders, created by plantation slaves as a means of ridiculing their white owners. It was theatrical from its conception, with its prancing, high steps, its forward and backward bowing and its practice of dressing up in costume to impersonate others. Later, when the cakewalk was included in minstrelsy, it included acknowledgement of the audience. The cakewalk was eventually accepted by all of society, and it became quite popular with American and European dancers, white as well as black. Guiteau’s self-consciously theatrical performance of the number recalls the cakewalk of minstrelsy and its winks and bows to the audience, and the absurdity of its urgent cheerfulness, under the circumstances of its performance, suggests Guiteau’s insanity. The changing reception of the cakewalk, furthermore, suggests Guiteau’s desperate desire for the respectability he thought fame and success would bring. Interestingly, the nature of the cakewalk, in its origins and later as a popular dance, was competitive. The slave who best impersonated the masters was rewarded with a prize – a cake – and later dancers also competed for prizes and acclaim. In Assassins, the disenfranchised seek a prize withheld by society, and their increasingly angry demand for that prize culminates in the powerful musical number ‘Another National Anthem’. Guiteau’s cakewalk simply and subtly drives home the idea that he, like each of the characters, is waiting for a prize, but not necessarily the noose and trap door.

The skill demonstrated in the creation of these two musical numbers suggests why Stephen Sondheim is among the most accomplished and influential composer-lyricists of the American musical theatre. His mastery of the styles that inform the score for Assassins is nothing less than stunning, and each musical number displays a virtuosity similar to that found in ‘How I Saved Roosevelt’ and ‘The Ballad of Guiteau’. Even the musical interludes refer to music other than that in Assassins and at one point are self-referential: Samuel Byck’s first monologue, a humourous if unsettling message to Leonard Bernstein dictated into a tape recorder, ends with Byck singing Sondheim’s lyrics to ‘America’ from West Side Story. Sondheim then parodies Bernstein’s music for ‘America’ to close the scene. First quoting the number and then paraphrasing it, Sondheim uses his own work as a historical source. The moment is as chilling and ironic as it is amusing. Later, before the scene in the Texas School Book Depository, Sondheim uses actual recorded music – The Blue Ridge Boys singing ‘Heartache Serenade’ – to give the scene an especially eerie sense of reality that is made surreal when John Wilkes Booth appears before Lee Harvey Oswald.

Drawing on the body of American popular culture to give voice to the characters as well as to make critical commentary about them, Sondheim leaves the audience with the act of assassination as a collective cultural memory that uncomfortably lingers. The bitter observations of ‘Gun Song’, for instance, have the capability to haunt the viewer long after the final curtain. The communal desperation of ‘Another National Anthem’ fades into the quieter desperation of Lee Harvey Oswald, whose violent act, still vivid in the minds of many in the audience, is the climax of the show. There is no song for Oswald because his feelings have already been anticipated and expressed: he is the culmination of all the assassins and all the songs that have gone before him. Of course, he too is the victim of assassination, an act that provokes the final chorus of ‘Everybody’s got the right to be happy’.

This one score, perhaps the most indigenously ‘American’ of all Sondheim’s output given its sources, displays a master at a high point of his career. Assassins is representative of Sondheim’s work in its use of pastiche, its experiment with form and its representation of outsiders looking at a society that, for whatever various reasons, excludes them.

In all his work, Sondheim’s musical languages are varied yet identifiably his own; perhaps they are more like different accents of the same language than altogether different languages. His harmonic vocabulary is vast and he alters it somewhat with each project; but the end result is always recognisably his.²⁰ His musical treatment, as well as the vocabulary of the lyrics in his own scores (Sondheim has criticised some of his earlier lyrics as inappropriate),²¹ displays an unerring sense of character as well as theatricality, and no false note or word appears in any of his mature work.²² Returning to his scores again and again, the listener is continually informed, surprised and entertained by them. In Assassins Sondheim’s musical pastiche is a tool for revealing aspects of the American national psyche, including the American proclivity for assassinating elected leaders. The initial and nervous critical reception of Assassins in the United States perhaps suggests that Sondheim reveals too much too clearly. Each of his works operates in similar, although outwardly different, ways.

The sensitivity that caused the fifteen-year-old Stephen Sondheim to cry at the first-act curtain of Carousel is still present in his maturity. Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Assassins and Passion are each as heartbreaking as they are disturbing and amusing. In Assassins Sondheim’s outsiders find a national anthem for all the ‘others’ as well as for themselves in a musical score of inordinate richness. In musical after musical Sondheim offers a moving reminder about those people who ‘can’t get in to the ball park’, and he offers this reminder in a most American way: through the voice of America’s own songs.

Can one recapture the excitement that A Chorus Line brought to Broadway? The Broadway musical seemed moribund in the middle of the 1970s. The big hits of the previous decade, such as Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof and Man of La Mancha, had closed and the era of the great musical plays that followed the Rodgers and Hammerstein model was over. Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince combined for major artistic successes between 1970 and 1973 with Company, A Little Night Music and Follies, but their appeal was limited, as can be seen by the length of their runs and mixed commercial success. The rock musical had become a Broadway reality with Hair, Two Gentlemen of Verona and other shows, but rock was a new musical language that many in the traditional Broadway audience had not yet accepted. Creators of the musical theatre searched for a new mould that might combine new musical styles and contemporary thinking with tradition, building upon the genre’s proud history. A Chorus Line did all of this as a veritable celebration of Broadway dance and dancers, bringing new life to the genre and taking it into the colossal hit era of 6,000-performance runs.

Those who saw A Chorus Line during its original run will not easily forget it. The plot was minimal and somewhat artificial, but the characters were engrossing. We recognised types of people that we knew and with each part of their stories our fascination grew. The singing and dancing had a special immediacy because, within the world that the director Michael Bennett magically created, we knew that these characters would express themselves through music and movement.

The creators of A Chorus Line built upon decades of Broadway history when dance was integrated into the musical as a crucial part of character development and dramatic impact. It had taken years in musical comedy to integrate plot and significant aspects of the music, but by the time of Show Boat (1927) and Of Thee I Sing (1931), song placement had become more careful in some shows and plots sometimes advanced during songs. Although this trend could hardly be described as linear, by the time Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote Carousel (1945), songs were often an important part of the plot, and extended musical sequences were more common.

The integration of dance with a show’s plot was a slower process. Victor Herbert, a Broadway pioneer in several areas, wrote some of the first dance musicals, such as The Lady of the Slipper (1912).¹ In such shows, Herbert used dance for spectacular effect and throughout entire scenes, surpassing its more common use for variety. The famous team of Vernon and Irene Castle was hired to show the latest ballroom steps, but they were dismissed in Philadelphia because part of their work seemed too suggestive. During the 1920s dances would follow a song, and various stage personalities offered dance specialties that had nothing to do with the plot. For example, according to Hugh Fordin, the Sunny star Marilyn Miller interrupted Oscar Hammerstein II as he described the plot, wondering when she would do her specialty tap number.² There were a number of fine dancers on Broadway in the 1920s, including Fred and Adele Astaire, Ann Pennington and Marilyn Miller, who helped introduce dance as a way of describing their characters, but for the most part dance remained part of the musical’s quest for variety. Most shows included dances added solely for entertainment; A Connecticut Yankee and Show Boat were two exceptions. Dances designed by such leading choreographers as a Busby Berkeley were fairly predictable and resulted only in the credit line ‘dances by’.³

As Hollywood musicals appeared and confirmed the public’s interest in watching stars dance (perhaps a metaphor for what could not be shown), Broadway followed suit. Ethan Mordden describes the continued development of the character dance in ‘Clifton Webb’s unassuming soft shoe or Tamara Geva’s ballet glide’ and the continued popularity of the kick line.⁴ (The latter, of course, never died; A Chorus Line exploited the appeal of the long, shapely female leg and a line’s drilled precision.) By the second half of the 1930s, however, more ambitious dances appeared in shows, first and most famously in On Your Toes (1936), with a score by Rodgers and Hart and direction by George Abbott. George Balanchine, the famed Russian choreographer, worked on the show and was the first honoured with the credit line ‘choreography by’. His major contribution was the ballet ‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue’, danced by Ray Bolger, Tamara Geva and George Church. Abbott remembered the segment as ‘one of the best numbers I’ve ever seen in the theatre, both musically and choreographically’.⁵ The show also included an intentionally over-the-top ballet in the first act, ‘Princess Zenobia’. The dances were part of a story about a vaudeville hoofer trying to make it in ballet. The dances were praised at the time, but, as Marian Monta Smith has noted, they were seen as an exception and the production had little immediate influence.⁶ Balanchine continued to work on Broadway into the 1950s, but there are few other shows for which his choreography had a lasting influence.⁷

It seems significant that George Abbott directed On Your Toes, because he went on to be a major influence on the continuing integration of the musical and on two important choreographers who later became directors. As extensive use of dance became part of the musical, the director emerged as the figure who assembled the show’s elements into a creative whole. By the 1960s, several of the most important directors were choreographers. Two of these, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse, worked with Abbott and learned to direct the book from him. The line continues with Hal Prince, who, although not a choreographer, also explored the musical’s greater integration. He began his Broadway career working for Abbott in the early 1950s and learned direction from both Abbott and Robbins.

The greater integration of dance, specifically ballet, into the musical required the willing cooperation of Broadway creators and understanding talent from the ballet world, a combination that came together in Oklahoma! Rodgers, Hammerstein and the producers Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild sought to make ballet part of the show’s plot apparatus and hired Agnes de Mille as choreographer. She had handled Western themes with her 1942 ballet Rodeo, with music by Aaron Copland. De Mille’s work in Oklahoma! is legendary, from her insistence on real dancers and separate rehearsals to her battles with the director, Rouben Mamoulian.⁸ Such dances as ‘Laurey Makes Up Her Mind’ at the end of the first act changed Broadway history. De Mille’s dancers served as substitutes for most of the principal actors during the ballet and helped make convincing the notion of Laurie dreaming her way to a choice between Curley and Jud. De Mille’s use of counterpoint in her ballets, with characters doing different movements at the same time, added to the visual appeal.⁹

Broadway creators are nothing if not imitative, and several immediately capitalised on the new idea of taking the highbrow art of ballet into the middlebrow world of the Broadway musical. De Mille played a major role throughout the 1940s. She next worked on One Touch of Venus (1943), with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ogden Nash, who coauthored the book with S. J. Perelman. A show about Venus coming to life invited fanciful ballets. De Mille contributed ‘Forty Minutes for Lunch’ in the first act, where Venus meets New York workers in Rockefeller Center, and ‘Venus in Ozone Heights’ as the second act’s dream ballet, where the goddess discovers suburbia. De Mille went on to Bloomer Girl (1944), with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E. Y. Harburg, where she contributed a ballet based on an ‘Uncle Tom’ show and a Civil War ballet in which female dancers expressed the feelings of those watching husbands and sons go off to war.

De Mille returned to work with Rodgers and Hammerstein as choreographer for Carousel, where her dances again played a major role in plot development. The opening ballet-pantomime introduces the setting and mood, and in the second-act dance, Billy Bigelow’s daughter expresses her frustration. De Mille next choreographed Brigadoon, Lerner and Loewe’s breakthrough hit, including atmospheric Scottish dances and the chase ballet in the second act. De Mille became the first choreographer-director in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro (1947), where she tried to unify a rambling plot, a singing Greek chorus and many musical numbers calling for motion. She included a fantasy ballet where, in a manner reminiscent of Our Town, characters both living and dead appear. The show would have challenged any director, but it did give de Mille a chance to develop comfort with all types of stage motion.

Agnes de Mille’s peers, who helped dance become a more important part of the Broadway musical, included, among others, Jack Cole, Michael Kidd and Jerome Robbins. Cole helped establish the Broadway vernacular dance tradition with his imaginative use of steps from ethnic and ballroom dances and acrobatics, often set to big band music.¹⁰ He also added ballets to shows, such as his slow-motion softball game in Allah Be Praised (1944). Michael Kidd choreographed Finian’s Rainbow (1947), Guys and Dolls (1950) and Can-Can (1953), showing an admirable range; his major success as a choreographer-director was Li’l Abner (1956). Jerome Robbins, one of Broadway’s most important choreographers, was the first dancer to become a truly successful director.

Jerome Robbins straddled ballet and Broadway for much of his career, but worked little on Broadway from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. His first major ballet was the popular Fancy Free in 1944, created with the composer Leonard Bernstein. They brought the ballet’s energy, references to vernacular music and dance and a plot concerning three sailors on leave in wartime New York City to Broadway in On the Town, which also involved the lyricists and book writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green and director George Abbott. Much about the show was memorable (see Chapter 11), especially its frenetic energy and constant motion. In her autobiography Distant Dances, Sono Osato, a ballet dancer who played Ivy Turnstiles, describes her work with Abbott and Robbins.¹¹ Abbott directed the book scenes, but Robbins had a free hand with the dances. The two major ballets were ‘Miss Turnstiles’ and ‘Gabey in the Playground of the Rich’, the latter a dream ballet near the end of the show. Both helped propel the story. Osato danced the latter ballet with a dancer substituting for the actor who played Gabey. Abbott allowed Robbins to show how dance could be incorporated in varied situations, helping lead finally to shows such as West Side Story.

Robbins continued to work on Broadway as well as in ballet and modern dance. In 1945 he contributed the ballet ‘Interplay’, with music by Morton Gould, to the vaudeville Concert Varieties.¹² In December of that year, Billion Dollar Baby opened, starring the dancer Joan McCracken with choreography by Robbins. Far more famous is Robbins’s work with George Abbott during the 1947–48 season, including High Button Shoes (1947) and Look, Ma, I’m Dancin (1948). Abbott directed and wrote High Button Shoes, a fast-paced farce built around Phil Silvers. The score was Jule Styne’s first for Broadway. He considered himself a songwriter, but Robbins convinced him to score the ‘Mack Sennett Ballet’, where Keystone Kops and a bear chased the leads. All finally land in a pile topped by a flag-waving policeman. The number was repeated in the retrospective Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989). Look, Ma I’m Dancin was a vehicle for Nancy Walker conceived by Robbins. Walker played a brewery heiress who becomes a patron for a ballet company and finally dances with it, a hilarious possibility given her clowning skills. Robbins’s ‘Sleepwalker’s Ballet’ was one of the highlights in a show that ran for only six months because of Walker’s ill health. Robbins also worked with Abbott on Call Me Madam, a vehicle for Ethel Merman with a score by Irving Berlin, but the show is remembered more for its star and score than for its dancing. Abbott reports that Robbins started rehearsals early to create his dances, but the major number was removed before opening night. Abbott reveals his faith in spoken materials, predictable for one of the genre’s best book directors: ‘Time and time again the ambitious dance effort will fail, whereas something conceived for practical purposes and on the spur of the moment will be a success. This is equally true of songs.’¹³ Abbott’s type of show, the fast-paced comedy, however, was in decline, as dance became a more integral part of the musical.

In 1951 The King and I opened, a much-loved show by Rodgers and Hammerstein that included Robbins’s lengthy ballet ‘The Small House of Uncle Thomas’, which offers interesting commentary on the plot’s theme of East meeting West. The dance also appeared in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.

In 1954 Abbott gave Robbins billing as co-director for The Pajama Game (considered later), partly because of his success at working with such dancers as the star Carol Haney. The show’s choreographer was Bob Fosse, and other important newcomers to Abbott’s team were the producers Hal Prince and Robert E. Griffith, who later produced West Side Story.

Robbins earned his first full credit as a Broadway director in Bells Are Ringing, a show with little important dancing, music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Comden and Green and a delightful star in Judy Holliday. It ran for two years. At this point Robbins was ready to spread his wings by taking on both direction and choreography. He realised this ambition the following year with West Side Story.

West Side Story (1957) marks the full integration of dance into the Broadway musical and the true arrival of the choreographer-director. Plans for a modern version of Romeo and Juliet involving Robbins, Bernstein and Arthur Laurents had started as early as 1949.¹⁴ Their original thought was that the lovers should be Catholic and Jewish and the story should occur around the time of Easter and Passover, but they were unable to work together with any consistency and the project was shelved. Bernstein and Laurents ran into each other in Beverly Hills in August 1955 and decided to move the story to New York’s West Side and pit gangs of Puerto Ricans against the white ‘Americans’.¹⁵

As director and choreographer, Robbins was responsible ultimately for the full integration of each element into a dramatic whole. He believed in method acting, dividing the cast into the two gangs and forbidding them to socialise on the set. His intensity in rehearsal was legendary. Carol Lawrence, who played Maria, remembers working with Robbins: ‘You have to understand that Jerry Robbins was the motivating force in all of this. He was the eternal perfectionist. The fact that one can never attain perfection did not deter him for a second. That was what he wanted and if he ended up killing you in the interim, well that was okay too!’¹⁶

West Side Story was cast from a pool of dancers. Even the romantic leads, Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert, had extensive dance training. In effect, Robbins choreographed every movement in the show. Dance provided motion in the action sequences (such as in the ‘Prologue’ and ‘The Rumble’), and served as an expressive device both for inarticulate characters (‘Dance at the Gym’ and ‘Cool’) and in numbers designed to release tension (such as in ‘I Feel Pretty’ and ‘Gee, Officer Krupke!’).¹⁷ How dependent the show was on dance became clear when the company arrived at the Washington theatre for its out-of-town try-out and discovered that the stage was significantly smaller than at the Winter Garden in New York, for which it was choreographed. Carol Lawrence remembers that Robbins had to rework the ballets and ‘there was so much dance, almost nothing but dance in the show.’¹⁸

Bernstein wrote the dance numbers as well as the songs. Robbins was a close collaborator, often suggesting musical changes and at times making them himself. Bernstein showed notable command of Latin dances and various types of jazz, producing a score that still sounds contemporary. Especially effective moments include the mambo in the ‘Dance at the Gym’ and the rich references to cool jazz in the song ‘Cool’. Bernstein uses melodies from the songs in dance sequences to great dramatic effect, such as the tune ‘Maria’ in the ‘Maria Cha-Cha’ of the ‘Dance at the Gym’ sequence, heard there before Tony sings the song for the first time. The song ‘Somewhere’ also appears in dance passages, tying the dream sequence between Tony and Maria to the show’s plot.¹⁹

West Side Story was Bernstein’s last important Broadway show, but Robbins continued to work there consistently into the mid-1960s. Two of his West Side Story collaborators – Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim – joined the composer Jule Styne on Gypsy in 1959. Choreography was far less important here than in some of his previous shows, but Robbins again showed his deft staging touch, beautifully evoking vaudeville and burlesque while allowing room for one of Ethel Merman’s greatest roles. His next show was Fiddler on the Roof (1964), another triumph of mood and atmosphere in a book musical. Along with the set designer Boris Aronson and the costume designer Patricia Zipprodt, Robbins convincingly recreated the Jewish shtetl of Anatevka. Robbins designed some of his most imaginative dances, using both Jewish and Russian elements to add to the show’s true-to-life quality. Two memorable sequences included a joint dance by Jewish and Russian characters in the inn and the bottle dance at the wedding. Robbins’s next, and last, Broadway show was the anthology Jerome Robbins’ Broadway of 1989.

The next great choreographer-director in the line of Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins was Bob Fosse (1927–87), a dancer from Chicago who began his career in vaudeville and burlesque.²⁰ As noted earlier, George Abbott was important to Fosse’s career development, hiring him as choreographer in The Pajama Game (1954). Unlike Robbins, Fosse came to Broadway through the world of ballroom and ethnic dances, showing the influence of Jack Cole’s jazz-dancing techniques. Fosse’s dances for The Pajama Game, especially in ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’, kept up the frenetic pace popularised by Abbott and Robbins. For the star Carol Haney, with whom Fosse had worked in Hollywood, he created ‘Steam Heat’, which she danced with Peter Gennaro and Buzz Miller. The show bubbled over with major dance numbers, including ‘Once a Year Day’, ‘7½ Cents’, and ‘I’ll Never Be Jealous Again’. Fosse also worked with Abbott in Damn Yankees (1955), which included a number of dances based upon typical baseball moves and ‘Who’s Got the Pain?’, conceived for Gwen Verdon, Fosse’s third wife and frequent collaborator. Fosse also worked on the film versions of The Pajama Game (1957) and Damn Yankees (1958). In 1956 Fosse assisted Robbins with the choreography for the Broadway show Bells Are Ringing, including the number ‘Mu Cha Cha’. Fosse’s last show with Abbott was New Girl in Town (1957): their break-up was caused by Abbott’s moral objections to Fosse’s dream ballet in a bordello. Fosse often cultivated the suggestive in his dance routines, perhaps an influence from his days in burlesque. Christine Colby Jacques, a dancer who worked with Fosse on Dancin’, notes that he often ironically parodied suggestive movements:

Plate 18 Ann Reinking, P. J. Mann and Christine Colby Jacques in ‘Stout-Hearted Men’, a dance number from Bob Fosse’s Dancin’, in 1979.

Photograph by Martha Swope © The New York Public Library

Fosse became Broadway’s third important choreographer-director in the late 1950s, starting with Redhead (1959), a vehicle for Gwen Verdon, including the dances ‘Pick-Pocket Tango’ and ‘The Uncle Sam Rag’. Fosse shared director’s credit with Abe Burrows in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), where Fosse did the ‘musical staging’.

Fosse’s next show was Little Me (1962), starring Sid Caesar. Among the dances was the effective ‘Rich Kid’s Rag’. His next major work was for Gwen Verdon in Sweet Charity (1966), which Fosse conceived, directed and choreographed. His dances included ‘I’m a Brass Band’ for Gwen Verdon (with the male chorus performing his trademark posture of locked ankles and a backward lean), ‘Big Spender’ for the hostesses at the Fandango Club and ‘The Rich Man’s Frug’, a satire of recent dance fads in discothèques. Fosse struggled through the film version of Sweet Charity, but resurrected his career by directing the highly successful film adaptation of Cabaret (1972), winning the Oscar for best direction. He also directed and choreographed the film All That Jazz (1979), which many considered Fosse’s autobiography and included brilliant dancing segments.

Fosse’s last three Broadway shows included some of his most popular work. Pippin (1972) had an anemic plot, enlivened by Fosse with characters based upon commedia dell’arte clowns and several large-scale song and dance numbers, and assisted greatly by the energy and gregarious personality of Ben Vereen. Chicago (1975) was yet another show starring Gwen Verdon, joined by Chita Rivera. They played murderesses who form a nightclub act. Fosse’s staging was lean and effective with dance an integral part, led by Verdon and Rivera, who allowed Fosse to parody their fading youth in brief costumes and suggestive poses. The show is a series of vaudeville acts, each advancing the plot, with a band on stage. Fosse’s choreography made frequent use of the soft-shoe and Charleston, emphasising the 1920s setting. Dancin’ (1978) was Fosse’s answer to A Chorus Line: another show about dancing conceived in a workshop situation. Using music by many composers dating back to Bach, Dancin’ includes no plot and little singing. Critics offered mixed reactions but the audience did not, propelling Dancin’ to a run of 1,774 performances. The show was a monument to Fosse the entertainer and his eleventh Broadway hit in a row. His final Broadway show was the unsuccessful Big Deal (1986). A retrospective of Fosse’s work, Fosse, ran on Broadway and in the West End and toured in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Richard Maltby Jr, Ann Reinking and Chet Walker conceived it with the assistance of Gwen Verdon. Reinking has had a successful career as a choreographer, for example, following Fosse’s work in the hit revival of Chicago that ran for years on Broadway (starting in 1996) and in the West End (starting in 1997).

Another of Broadway’s important choreographer-directors was Gower Champion, who started as a Broadway dancer in the 1940s. He went to work in Hollywood, and then returned to Broadway as choreographer-director of Bye Bye Birdie (1960), a fairly simple show whose major dance was the wild ‘Shriners’ Ballet’. His next show was Carnival (1961), where Champion brought the audience into the action by dispensing with the curtain and using aisles for entrances and exits. The memorable choreography included the ‘Grand Imperial Cirque de Paris’. Champion’s biggest hit was Hello, Dolly! (1964). Although more famous for the title song and Carol Channing’s inimitable presence, the show benefitted enormously from Champion’s staging, which included extensive business from the dancers. He made Channing the centrepiece whenever possible and crafted one of the greatest entrances in theatre history with the hilarious ‘Waiter’s Gavotte’ before Dolly Levi descends the stairs at the Harmonia Gardens (see illustration in Chapter 10). The extensive use of choreography was also found in ‘It Takes a Woman’ and ‘Before the Parade Passes By’. Champion’s career continued for another fifteen years with both hits and flops, including I Do! I Do! (1966), The Act (1977) and 42nd Street (1980). The latter was an unabashed return to the days of tap-dancing chorus complete with story and music from the 1933 movie by the same name. Champion died the day the show opened.

Although not a choreographer-director, Hal Prince has played a major role in the development of the musical since the 1950s.²² Like Robbins, he learned his craft from George Abbott. He played a role in several of Abbott’s shows during the 1950s and emerged from the older man’s shadow when he produced West Side Story with Robert E. Griffith in 1957. Following Griffith’s death in 1961, Prince produced such shows as She Loves Me (1963) and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). He made his directing debut with Cabaret (1966), a book show that he treated like a concept musical, with an inspired staging that commented on the story through the cabaret entertainment. Its run of 1,166 performances did much to establish Prince as one of the most sought-after new directors. In 1970 he began his artistically successful collaboration in concept musicals with Stephen Sondheim in Company (1970), Follies (1971) and A Little Night Music (1973), three shows without conventional plots where staging played a huge role. Prince pushed staging nearly to extreme limits in Follies, helping to create the spectacular effect of a theatre crumbling, but at the same time losing $685,000 during the one-and-a-half-year run. In the 1980s and 1990s, Prince worked on some of Broadway’s biggest successes with scores by Andrew Lloyd Webber, but his artistic vision had the most influence in the 1960s and 1970s, when he played a major role in the continuing integration of music, dance and drama in the musical. Like Robbins, he wielded great power in a production and helped make the director one of Broadway’s most important figures.

The next important choreographer-director was Michael Bennett, creator of A Chorus Line. From a young age he showed great interest in dance and made his professional debut while still in his teens in a stock production of West Side Story. He later toured Europe in the show and became intimately familiar with his idol Robbins’s work. Bennett became a Broadway gypsy in the early 1960s but worked in no memorable shows. He choreographed stock productions and achieved his first Broadway credit in A Joyful Noise (1966), which ran for twelve performances.²³ Critics praised Bennett’s work, as they did his dances for Henry, Sweet Henry (1967), also a flop. Bennett finally worked on a hit in Promises, Promises (1968), directed by Robert Moore. The final version of the show included only one major dance number, but, as Ken Mandelbaum reports, ‘Bennett was able to make an enormous contribution to the show by weaving scene into scene, staging marvelous “crossovers”, with secretaries spinning through revolving doors in stylised movements reminiscent of … “go-go” steps.’²⁴ Promises, Promises was the first show where Donna McKechnie was Bennett’s principal female dancer. She eventually became for Bennett what Gwen Verdon was to Bob Fosse. Bennett and McKechnie were also married for a time.

Bennett’s next show as choreographer was Coco (1969), a vehicle for Katherine Hepburn directed by Michael Benthall. With both star and director working on their first musical, Bennett’s role was very large. He choreographed dances around a largely stationary, charismatic star and worked on book scenes; Mandelbaum called Coco Bennett’s ‘unofficial directorial debut’.²⁵ He gained valuable experience in the concept musical Company (1970), working with Hal Prince. Bennett had considerable influence on the show’s staging, especially in the musical numbers, such as ‘You Could Drive A Person Crazy’, ‘Side By Side By Side’, ‘What We Would Do Without You’ and ‘Tick Tock’, Donna McKechnie’s memorable solo dance. Bennett wanted to direct, but worked with Prince on Follies (1971), this time billed as co-director. Reviewers recognised his important contribution to the show’s staging, especially in numbers like ‘Who’s That Woman?’ Walter Kerr wrote in the Sunday Times: ‘Michael Bennett’s dazzling dance memories and perpetually musical staging are as seamlessly woven into [Sondheim’s musical] personality as they are into Prince’s immensely creative general direction.’²⁶

Bennett had become highly regarded for his imaginative staging ideas and was ready to direct on his own. Before A Chorus Line he directed two non-musical plays and Seesaw (1973), a troubled musical that he took over in Detroit and brought to Broadway for a respectable ten-month run. Bennett received full artistic control over the show and brought in his usual assistant choreographer Bob Avian along with the dancers and choreographers Tommy Tune, Baayork Lee, Thommie Walsh and others, several of whom later worked in A Chorus Line. Seesaw had a successful national tour and made Bennett a major player in the Broadway community.

A Chorus Line started with Bennett’s inspiration to do a show about dancers, a group he did not believe received its due on Broadway.²⁷ Along with Tony Stevens and Michon Peacock, with whom Bennett had worked in Seesaw, he arranged a meeting to discuss with eighteen colleagues on 18 January 1974. It was an extraordinary evening on which many felt moved to tell their life stories.²⁸ Bennett recorded the tales, as well as the conversations at the second such session on 8 February. After initial work with the tapes by Stevens, Peacock and the dancer-writer Nicholas Dante (whose story became the character Paul in the show), Bennett bought the rights to the raw material for A Chorus Line.

Bennett, Avian and Dante held more interviews and framed the show as an audition where dancers were encouraged to tell their stories. Early in the process Bennett decided to cast the show before even writing it and sold the workshop idea to Joseph Papp of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Papp agreed to pay Bennett and the dancers each $100 per week and let them work in his Newman Theater. Workshops had been used in plays for years, but A Chorus Line was the first musical produced through this method.

Bennett assembled his creative team. The co-writers were Bennett and Dante. Marvin Hamlisch became the composer and Edward Kleban the lyricist, both writing songs in the workshop. The first workshop, beginning in August 1974, lasted five weeks of fourteen-hour days, and after auditions included several of Bennett’s favourite dancers. At the end of the workshop, however, they had only staged a few numbers. A second workshop began in late December, for which Bennett brought in writer James Kirkwood to help Dante with the script. The second workshop yielded a workable show. Kirkwood recalled the process:

Along with the character Zach came Cassie, his ex-lover, a small plot around which the remainder of the show could form. The workshop was highly collaborative, contributing to the final product’s seamlessness. It is impossible to sort out who was responsible for each contribution. For example, Bennett often asked another dancer, such as Avian, McKechnie or Baayork Lee, to design steps that he could edit.

Formal rehearsals began in March 1975 with the first preview on 16 April 1975. The buzz around Broadway was that the show was a sure hit, and tickets at the tiny Newman Theater (299 seats) were scarce. The public remained infatuated with the show through the official off-Broadway opening on 21 May 1975 and the move to the Shubert Theatre for its Broadway opening on 19 October 1975. A Chorus Line ran for fifteen years, paving the way for the megamusicals of the 1980s and 1990s, but without the huge stage effects that mark many of those shows.

Bennett brought to A Chorus Line rich Broadway experience as a dancer, choreographer and director, and the vision to forge an unconventional show. Placing the story in the context of an audition gave the audience the feeling of peeking backstage, even though the device was essentially unrealistic. Of course no Broadway director would have cared about the life stories of auditioning dancers, but these real-life vignettes did help to give the show a sense of truth.

Although some of his signature numbers in other shows involved elaborate costumes and sets, Bennett realised that A Chorus Line would work best with a nearly bare stage and rehearsal clothes as costumes. He satisfied the audience’s craving for Broadway glitz in the closing number, ‘One’, performed by the entire cast in full costume, but that seemed appropriate because the chorus had been chosen and it was time for the show to open. What is missing in the closing number is the star behind whom one assumes the chorus might be dancing.

The show’s intensity came from its rapid pace and lack of intermission. In earlier shows Bennett had used ‘cinematic’ techniques of directing, fading from one scene to another through action on stage, as in the dancing secretaries between scenes in Promises, Promises. Such continuity and rapid pacing have long been part of the musical comedy, and were a major part of George Abbott’s work in the 1930s. Prince and Bennett used the technique in Follies, and in A Chorus Line one finds its full realisation. The curtain never does go down during the show. Bennett had found success with montage scenes before, and designed his masterpiece in the long ‘Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love’ (Martin Gottfried notes that it is one-fifth of the length of the script³⁰), where the characters explore the pains of adolescence. Much of the show’s action seems to occur in real time, a huge tribute to Bennett’s direction.

Another major factor in the show’s success is its saturation with dance and the various levels at which the audience perceives the dancing. One expects dancers to demonstrate their talent at an audition, so the audience accepts it as the show’s basic language and revels in watching those auditioning learn the steps, some succeeding and others cursing their efforts. Dance enters the characters’ stories as they are told, such as the delightful tap dance ‘I Can Do That’, in which Mike tells of his early and natural talent. Finally, dance allows characters to express deeper feelings, especially Cassie in ‘The Music and the Mirror’, McKechnie’s memorable solo number in which she shows that Cassie has the talent to be a solo dancer, even if that career has not worked out. Soon thereafter, the audience learns the difference between solo and chorus dancing, as Zach berates her for not dancing in unison with the others.³¹

Sometimes lost in the excitement about the show is the music, but this is partly because of the convincing way that songs and dance music are integrated with the rest of the show. In an essentially plotless musical a song cannot advance the narrative, but it can fit in with the dramatic concept of the moment, and all songs do. Most help tell a character’s story, the only real exceptions being ‘What I Did For Love’ and ‘One’. Some have criticised ‘What I Did For Love’ as Marvin Hamlisch’s crass attempt at a hit song. The lyricist, Edward Kleban, hated it and wanted something different,³² but the song is meaningful. After telling the most dramatic story of any of the characters, Paul falls and re-injures a knee. His career might be over. Zach asks the dancers what they will do when they can no longer dance. Diana’s reaction is this song, which, in the musical language of a 1970s pop anthem, answers the question by stating that one works for love of the art.

Like most Broadway scores, Hamlisch’s effort in A Chorus Line is eclectic, including a number of styles from twentieth-century popular music. ‘I Can Do That’, a tap number, has the rhythmic character of 1930s jazz with melodic blues touches. ‘One’, in the style of a 1930s soft-shoe, is a production number from the show the dancers are auditioning for, and excerpts from it sound throughout the score. ‘At the Ballet’ alternates between a rock beat and a waltz with effective musical representation of speech rhythms in the rock section. The montage ‘Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love’ is especially eclectic, befitting its length and complexity, with many characters interjecting segments of their stories. ‘Nothing’, part of the montage, combines an easy rock feel and the sound of a traditional Broadway ballad. The end of the montage borrows much from the sound of gospel music. ‘The Music and the Mirror’ provides another short tour of 1970s commercial music, moving mostly between jazz and funk.

It could be said that Hamlisch’s score is firmly rooted in the 1970s (as is obvious from the instrumentation on the original cast recording), but most Broadway scores are products of their time. A Chorus Line probably carries the deepest meaning for Americans who grew up in the two or three decades following World War II. Bennett made a show about himself and other people willing to make sacrifices to work in their chosen fields. Few who saw A Chorus Line were professional dancers, but almost everyone understands what it means to want something as badly as those dancers wanted a job. Despite his other shows, the most successful of which was Dreamgirls from 1981 (another masterpiece of integration of drama, music and dance), Bennett spent much of the remainder of his life overseeing A Chorus Line. He assembled touring companies and ensured that each company maintained the requisite energy and quality. A successful revival of A Chorus Line, directed by Bob Avian and with the choreography re-staged by Baayork Lee, opened on Broadway in October 2006 and ran 759 performances.

Tommy Tune is another important Broadway choreographer-director. Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1939, Tune danced in a touring company of Irma La Douce in the early 1960s. He choreographed the touring version of Canterbury Tales in 1969 and appeared in films. His first major Broadway credit was the number ‘It’s Not Where You Start (It’s Where You Finish)’ in Seesaw, which Michael Bennett allowed Tune to choreograph. After five years without Broadway work, Tune began a string of hits as choreographer-director of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978), which ran for 1,584 performances. Tune’s next success was sharing the choreography credit with Thommie Walsh in the New York version of the British show A Day in Hollywood, A Night in the Ukraine (1980). In 1982 he directed Nine, an adaptation of Federico Fellini’s film 8 ½. Walsh again shared the choreography credit and Tune’s innovative staging won a Tony. Tune won the Tony for Best Actor and shared the award for Best Choreography with Walsh for My One and Only (1983), a substantial reworking of Funny Face (1927). Tune then won Tonys for both Choreography and Direction in Grand Hotel (1989) and The Will Rogers Follies (1991). In both of these shows, Tune demonstrated his talent for mining the history of American entertainment for ideas and styles and then adding his own special energy and panache.

Choreographers and directors continue to strive to make the songs and dances of a Broadway score an integral part of the plot rather than a distraction from it. Examples of successful later efforts were Ragtime (1998), directed by Frank Galati with choreography by Graciela Daniele, and Wicked (2003), directed by Joe Mantello with choreography by Wayne Cilento. Although Wicked is not a huge dancing show, Cilento’s contribution to the stage movement is very important to the overall appeal. The road from Victor Herbert’s The Lady of the Slipper to the present is long and winding, but most stops along the way were attempts to improve the artistic integration of the Broadway musical: a seminal trend in the genre’s history.

Among the etymological legacies of the 1960s is the once ubiquitous family of musical categories distinguished by the word ‘rock’ somewhere within a compound name. Today one seldom hears such terms as ‘jazz rock’ or ‘symphonic rock’, but on Broadway the term ‘rock musical’ has retained currency, either as a show’s formal subtitle or as an appellation casually used by critics and others to describe a particular work. Yet despite widespread use of the term for nearly five decades, the ‘rock musical’ has remained an extremely pliable category, capable of embracing a wide range of characteristics.

Despite the lack of rigour with which the term has been used through the years, a number of common features identify ‘rock musicals’. Virtually anyone who has written on the history of the musical has remarked – positively or negatively – on the earliest appearances of rock-influenced music on Broadway from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s.¹ Hair, subtitled ‘An American Tribal Love-Rock Musical’, has been generally accepted as the first example of the genre. Almost immediately after that landmark show, other works appeared with similar subtitles, but there were also shows with rock scores that were never identified as such by their producers. In fact the latter case soon predominated, and consequently, many New York critics began to employ the term ‘rock musical’ to identify any stage work with even the slightest hint of popular styles.² Even twenty-five years after Hair, the closest thing to a definition of the ‘rock musical’ was John Rockwell’s brief discussion in his article on ‘Rock Opera’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. For Rockwell, both the ‘rock opera’ and the ‘rock musical’ were simply variants of their parent genres ‘in which the musical idiom is rock and roll’. Following the lead of New York newspaper critics, however, Rockwell identified two Broadway shows, Godspell and The Wiz, as ‘rock musicals’, even though neither was ever promoted as such. Similarly, Stanley Richards’s Great Rock Musicals lumps together a disparate group of shows – The Wiz, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Grease, Jesus Christ Superstar, Your Own Thing, Hair, Tommy and Promenade – as the leading examples of this genre.³

Despite the casual and often contradictory usages of the term, one can identify a number of New York productions generally associated with the term ‘rock musical’ and from them identify a series of categories and traits that might define this genre. Avoiding temporarily the question of precisely what the music in a rock musical is like – while acknowledging that rock (at any point in its history) differs significantly from Broadway’s traditional sound – four distinct categories of shows that use rock music emerge. First are those works – such as Hair and Your Own Thing – that were identified by their creators and producers as ‘rock musicals’ either by subtitles or in advertisements. A second category consists of works that began as concept albums – such as Jesus Christ Superstar – which were marketed and sold to fans of rock music before they were ever staged. The third and most arbitrary category consists of works – such as Godspell – that used rock styles, either in whole or in part, yet were never identified (at least not publicly) as ‘rock musicals’ by their creators, in advertisements, or by most critics. At the same time many shows that some critics label ‘rock musicals’ have music that is clearly not rock. Fourth are musicals – such as Grease – that emulate earlier styles of rock ’n’ roll. This category then leads to shows that simply appropriate old songs for their nostalgic value, as in Smokey Joe’s Cafe, now known as ‘jukebox musicals’. These four types are not rigid, of course, as some shows straddle categories.

While Hair stands as the first full-fledged rock musical, in the decade before that show, more than a dozen Broadway productions included one or more songs that drew on rock ’n’ roll or other related popular styles. The earliest of these, Mr Wonderful, which opened on 3 March 1956, showcased the talents of Sammy Davis Jr in a plot that portrayed this leading nightclub performer as a young unknown entertainer on the rise, who sang ‘rock ’n’ roll’. A first act number entitled ‘Jacques d’Iraque’ (pronounced ‘Jock d’Rock’) mimicked the twelve-bar blues progressions on which many early rock ’n’ roll songs were founded. A few other shows from the late 1950s, Ziegfeld Follies of 1957 and The Girls Against the Boys (1959), included similar isolated songs, chiefly as parodies of music favoured by teenagers. Still others, Copper and Brass (1957), The Nervous Set (1959) and Beg, Borrow or Steal (1960), confused Beatniks with rock ’n’ rollers.

Perhaps the first musical to use rock ’n’ roll songs in a serious way was Bye Bye Birdie (1960). This product of Broadway newcomers Charles Strouse and Lee Adams revolved around the televised farewell of Conrad Birdie, a rock ’n’ roll star who had been drafted into the army. The character and plot were shamelessly modelled on a conflation of Elvis Presley’s own 1958 departure into the military, his staged farewell and his earlier television appearances. Although the show-within-a-show storyline included two tame rock ’n’ roll numbers, Bye Bye Birdie owed its success to more conventional Broadway elements, including a light-hearted plot and a good variety of tunes in traditional musical comedy styles. The role of Birdie, as created by Dick Gautier in a lamé jumpsuit, was also just a caricature of Elvis, devoid of the physical and vocal sexuality that the model clearly had, and thus, even with its rock ’n’ roll elements, Bye Bye Birdie was not a rock musical.

Despite the success of Bye Bye Birdie, rock ’n’ roll made only sporadic appearances on Broadway over the next seven years. Shows like Do Re Mi (1960), Mr. President (1962), Sweet Charity (1966) and It’s a Bird, It’s A Plane, It’s Superman (1966), among others, included one or two rock-based numbers, but no producer had the courage to mount an entire show based on popular sounds. Such timidity was doubtless a reflection of declining economic conditions for New York theatres. Beginning with a strike in 1960 that raised labour costs significantly, Broadway experienced a series of disastrous seasons that reached its nadir in 1967 with the fewest new shows produced in Broadway’s recorded history. In those strained financial times, essentially conservative producers grew even more so and refused to back anything but escapist fare aimed at middle-aged businessmen and theatre parties from the suburbs. Such dated material exacerbated the problem by alienating youthful customers, who felt that Broadway was disconnected from the fundamental changes then being wrought in American society.

Despite Broadway’s inherent conservatism, the New York theatre community in the 1960s did include many devoted to revitalising the form and making it more relevant to modern life. Off-Broadway put rock music to use in a handful of shows that expressed youthful disaffection with society and especially the growing US military entanglement in Vietnam. The year 1967 saw the premieres of Tom Sankey’s The Golden Screw, the Mothers of Invention’s outrageous mixture of rock concert and theatre in Absolutely Freeeee and the anti-war Now is the Time for All Good Men, the first effort by Nancy Ford and Gretchen Cryer. A year earlier Megan Terry’s Viet Rock played briefly⁴; while most critics disdained the show, its influences would be felt almost immediately at Ellen Stewart’s La Mama Experimental Theatre Club. Myth would have it that Hair was a fluke creation by neophytes; James Rado and Gerome Ragni were both young veterans of the New York stage, and the classically trained Galt MacDermot was a successful composer of jazz and pop tunes. In 1965 Rado and Ragni were drawn into the anti-war movement, which they studied in the youth culture of New York’s Greenwich Village. Over the next two years they used La Mama’s workshops to transform their observations into a rough script that was soon making the rounds of New York producers.⁵

Joseph Papp agreed to mount a limited run of the music-less musical to demonstrate the social relevance of his new non-profit Public Theater. MacDermot came aboard to write songs, and in about two weeks he composed the first score of Hair. Gerald Freeman, the Public Theater’s artistic director, reworked the material into a loose story that revolved around the drafting of a young man named Claude and his indecision over whether to fight in Vietnam. That character stands in contrast to Berger, a high school dropout who leads a hippy commune. Instead of a logical narrative, Hair was more of a rambling diatribe against all authority figures and a glorification of drugs, free love, racial tolerance, respect for the individual and environmentalism. The most passionate moment came in the penultimate scene of Act 2, a stylised set piece that railed against the futility of war. The story ends with Claude accepting his call into the military, followed by his death.

When Hair premiered on 29 October 1967 as the Public Theater’s inaugural production, it was set for an eight-week run, but Michael Butler, a wealthy liberal with anti-war sentiments, wanted the show seen by a wider audience and thus took over as producer. The Papp production then moved uptown to a discothèque called the Cheetah for 45 additional performances and from there to the Biltmore Theatre, where it opened on 29 April 1968 and ran for 1,742 performances. Before it moved to Broadway, however, important changes were made to accommodate the production to a larger theatre and to sharpen its anti-establishment message. MacDermot composed thirteen new songs and Tom O’Horgan, one of the driving forces at La Mama, came in to direct.

Using the techniques of avant-garde theatre, O’Horgan sought to involve the audience as much as possible in the action by eliminating the proscenium’s fourth wall. The stage had no curtain, and cast members were continually moving into and throughout the audience. The band, enlarged from the five-piece rock group used in Papp’s production by the addition of four horns, was placed on stage. To be heard above the amplified ensemble, singers used hand-held microphones that they simply passed from one performer to another.⁶ To maintain naturalness, cast members were encouraged to improvise, and everyone in the company was expected to be able to cover any role. To emphasise the hippie lifestyle, everyday language, including profanity, was used freely, and the first act ended with a now famous nude scene, which audience members sometimes joined. In short, there was to be no theatrical artificiality in O’Horgan’s conception; rather, the show was to be more like a spontaneous ‘happening’.

Plate 19 The original production of Hair in 1968. Shelley Plimpton is on the mattress and the creators of the show, James Rado and Gerome Ragni, are in the group over her to the rear left. Jonathan Kramer is on all fours and in the foreground on the right is Hiram Keller.

Photograph by Dagmar

Hair’s music was quite unlike anything that had ever appeared on Broadway. While MacDermot’s songs were not cutting-edge rock, his arrangements were all in an unmistakable, amplified rock style, with prominent bass lines and strong backbeats. At the same time, nearly every song used the verse-chorus format long favoured on Broadway and eschewed the blues and other simple circular progressions from early rock ’n’ roll. MacDermot also used the harmonic language of mid-1960s rock, which stood in stark contrast to the often complex and sophisticated harmonies that had been heard on Broadway for years. Remarkably, at least five songs from Hair –‘Aquarius’, ‘Hair’, ‘Easy to Be Hard’, ‘Good Morning Starshine’ and ‘Let the Sunshine In’ – all became Top Forty hits. Indeed, ‘Aquarius’ became a virtual anthem for the youth movement in the late 1960s. Yet although MacDermot captured the sound of mid-1960s rock, his music remained within the bounds of what most Broadway audiences would accept, which was a remarkable achievement given the wide gap between Broadway and rock at the time. The majority of Hair’s songs are quite tuneful and many have remained pop standards, even if the show itself has aged poorly.⁷

The extraordinary financial success of Hair spawned the inevitable imitations. Within a season of Hair’s premiere, two new rock musicals were enjoying long runs off-Broadway, and by the early 1970s several dozen shows with pop/rock scores had been produced both on and off Broadway. Yet only one explicitly labelled ‘rock musical’ lasted a full season, while a few other shows with rock-tinged scores succeeded in varying degrees.

Your Own Thing, like Hair, premiered off-Broadway and remained there for its entire 933-performance run. Its plot, loosely adapted from Twelfth Night, concerned a marooned rock band in search of a gig, and the confusion between Shakespeare’s twins was reflected in gender-crossing hairstyles and clothing. Both the cast’s psychedelic costumes and the dialogue’s youthful slang date the production almost to the year. The show’s title, in fact, was a catch phrase of the day for an individual’s right to be free from the crush of society’s ways. Again as in Hair, an onstage rock band provided the music. Unlike Hair’s score, however, the music of Your Own Thing was utterly lacking in individuality; when this second rock musical closed, it vanished without a trace. Your Own Thing reflected its era’s preoccupation with the under-thirty generation, yet with its emphasis on young love – as opposed to the serious issues confronted in Hair – the show was closer to the old-fashioned boy-girl musicals of the 1930s and 1940s. Finally, Your Own Thing cost a mere $45,000 to produce. When the New York Critics’ Circle named it Best Show of 1968, producers surely noticed the substantial returns possible from the minimal investments that a rock musical required.⁸

In the five seasons after Hair, numerous other shows with rock music (or marketed as such) were premiered on or off Broadway, with those labelled explicitly as ‘rock musicals’ enjoying the least success. One exception, Salvation, began downtown in the spring of 1969 as a loosely structured rock concert with dialogue that parodied a revival meeting. When it moved uptown that autumn, critics hailed it as the ‘son of Hair’ and Broadway’s ‘second rock musical’,⁹ even though it played at an off-Broadway house above 70th Street. Salvation’s success enabled its co-creators, Peter Link and C. C. Courtney, to create a fully fledged musical two seasons later. Earl of Ruston – billed as a ‘country rock musical’ – told the story of their uncle Earl, the town ‘crazy’ of Ruston, Louisiana. Critics faulted the story for its lack of development, and the music – played by the obligatory onstage rock band – was considered a ‘disappointment’ after Salvation. Earl of Ruston folded after less than a week in May 1971.¹⁰ Three other rock musicals suffered similar fates. Billy, an adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, with music by bubble-gum–pop producer and performer Ron Dante, closed after just one night. Soon, the story of a rock musician who sells out for commercial gain, lasted just three performances in January 1971, and Hard Job Being God, attempting to trade on Godspell’s success, closed after only six shows in May 1972. All three were panned for poor music and weak books.¹¹

After Hair, Galt MacDermot wrote three more scores for Broadway. In 1971, Joseph Papp mounted Two Gentlemen of Verona, another update of Shakespeare, although less explicitly contemporary than Your Own Thing. Critics raved about the production, but only a few singled out MacDermot’s music, which Clive Barnes described as a mix of ‘rock, lyricism [and] Caribbean patter’ and ‘more subtly shaded and more variegated than his score for Hair’.¹² MacDermot’s two attempts in the following season, Dude and Via Galactica, both suffered from expensive, troubled productions. The score for Dude was praised, but the music for Via Galactica was seen as yet another step downward for MacDermot, who never had another Broadway hit.¹³

Following all of these failures, the designation ‘rock musical’ fell into disuse just as rock and pop styles began to find a place in New York’s theatres. Oh! Calcutta!, a long-running revue first produced in 1969 and remembered now only for its gratuitous nudity, had a small onstage band playing an eclectic mix of contemporary sounds that included rock. The Last Sweet Days of Isaac was a 1970 off-Broadway success that had a four-piece band playing ‘soft rock’.¹⁴ Two other shows, one a quick failure and the other a major success, demonstrated the growing symbiosis between Broadway and the recording industry. Georgy (1970) was an adaptation of the 1966 motion picture Georgy Girl and its popular title song. George Fischoff’s music was described as ‘mediocre, an easy-listening kind of rock crammed into a show-tune style, orchestrated with disinterest’, and Georgy closed after only four nights.¹⁵ Burt Bacharach’s score for Promises, Promises was certainly not rock, but the show’s title song did do well on the pop charts. The production’s real innovation was in the pit, where every member of the band, including four female backup singers, was miked. A sound engineer controlled the mix, which was sent out to the audience through loudspeakers on either side of the house. Audiences quickly came to expect theatrical performances to match the sound of commercial recordings.¹⁶

Interestingly, the only successful original rock musical that premiered in New York in the early 1970s was never explicitly promoted as one.¹⁷ When it moved uptown in 1976, Godspell was roundly panned for its saccharine book, weak score, amateurish staging and lack of dance movement, but after 2,118 performances off-Broadway, the show was essentially critic proof.¹⁸ John-Michael Tebelak had first drafted this modernisation of the Gospel of St Matthew for his master’s degree, and it was subsequently reworked at La Mama’s. There the original music was discarded, and a newcomer, Stephen Schwartz, was brought in to compose a replacement score.

Tebelak had envisaged Godspell as something for teenagers, and the show’s relentlessly upbeat tone and childlike innocence were perfect for its intended audience. The minimalist set vaguely resembled a bare schoolyard playground; the staging was just a series of sketches in which the small company acted out Biblical parables in imitations of television shows, comic strips and circus acts. The book made frequent references to current events, and the cast – costumed in brightly coloured rags and clown-like facial paint – often impersonated well-known performers of recent years. All of this also appealed to adults who might not have cared for the more realistic and scruffy hippies of Hair.

Schwartz’s music provided a good match for the production’s celebratory mood. Although the band was yet another four-piece rock ensemble, the addition of tambourines and acoustic instruments often gave the music the feel of folk-rock and even gospel. Other songs evoked the sound of black soul music, a strong country beat, various easy-listening styles and even a soft-shoe number. Despite its stylistic eclecticism, the score holds together well in the youthful celebration of spirituality that permeates Godspell.

Pippin, another Stephen Schwartz musical with a similar youth-in-search-of-himself plot, also enjoyed a long run in the early 1970s, thanks chiefly to Bob Fosse’s direction and choreography. Like Godspell, it too was never described as a rock musical, although a few critics noted various rock elements in the score, while also denigrating the show’s book.¹⁹ If not a genuine rock musical, Pippin nevertheless demonstrated the growing acceptance of a soft-rock sound on Broadway.

Only a few months after Godspell began its off-Broadway run, yet another youth-oriented rock musical with a religious theme opened in New York and thereby highlighted two emerging theatrical trends. With over 2 million copies of its double album sold long before its stage production opened, Jesus Christ Superstar (music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Tim Rice) abandoned the usual Broadway marketing model, in which ticket sales were the primary source of revenue and recordings only souvenirs, and instead followed the practice of pop music, in which live performances promoted recordings. Jesus Christ Superstar also reflected the rise of progressive rock in the late 1960s. With a sonic palette that admitted any sound source up to a symphony orchestra and an expanded harmonic vocabulary that ranged from nineteenth-century Romanticism to Stravinsky, progressive rock was able to sustain interest for the album-length works that this new style promoted. The same applied to a Broadway show.²⁰

The New York production was a note-for-note rendition of the album and included all the elements of progressive rock. The heart of the show’s sound is a six-piece rock ensemble, frequently augmented by a small orchestra on the recording or by synthesisers and a few horns in the theatre. The musical style, although strongly influenced by rock, already reflects Andrew Lloyd Webber’s trademark eclecticism. In the show, a hard rock tune like ‘Judas’ Death’ follows the campy ‘King Herod’s Song’, which is in the style of a vaudeville number, and a soft rock tune like ‘Everything’s Alright’ leads into a scene that includes recitative mixed with rock. One innovative element for Broadway is the frequent use of irregular metres, such as 5/4 in ‘Everything’s Alright’ or 7/8 in ‘The Temple’. In setting every bit of text to music, Lloyd Webber also went far beyond the alternation of spoken and sung passages typical of most Broadway shows, and for its use of recitative Jesus Christ Superstar stands closer to a rock opera, as the recording was billed.

The early 1970s was a high-water mark for the rock musical. The successful runs of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar proved that Hair was no fluke and thus solidified rock’s position on Broadway. Beginning in the 1970s, an ever-increasing number of shows had rock-influenced scores, yet very few of them – and no commercially successful shows for nearly two decades – were ever promoted as rock musicals. Simultaneously, the use of the term ‘rock musical’ by critics declined but never quite disappeared. Usually the term was applied to a show with a small ensemble and, presumably, music that approximated a rock or pop sound. For instance, The Lieutenant, a now obscure work from 1974 to 75 that dealt with the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre and closed after only nine performances despite much critical acclaim, was always described as either a ‘rock opera’ or a ‘rock musical’. Nothing was ever said about the sound of its music.²¹

From the 1970s onwards usage of the term ‘rock musical’ by critics became quite inconsistent. In 1975 The Wiz arrived on Broadway with a score that pulsed with the sounds of soul, gospel and other black pop and rock styles, and it was followed six years later by another musical built on the Motown sound, Dreamgirls. Neither was ever widely identified as a rock musical, although a few reviews of The Wiz did describe its score as rock or rock related.²² Reviews of Dreamgirls, however, focussed almost exclusively on the show’s lavish costumes, big dance numbers and high-tech stagecraft.

Between those two productions were two 1978 shows that some critics and music theatre historians consider rock musicals, even if others hesitate to use that label. The occasional identification of I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road as a rock musical may simply stem from its plot, which concerns a female singer preparing to tour with a rock band, and a soft-rock and pop score played by a small ensemble. Runaways was a story of adolescents forced to fend for themselves on the streets, and at least one reviewer compared it favourably with Hair, without calling it a rock musical. Its music included everything from disco and salsa to blues and country-and-western, and was performed by a six-piece ensemble.²³ Both shows, moreover, had originally been developed as limited-run off-Broadway productions by Joseph Papp.

Clearly more than just the sound of a show identified it as a rock musical. Small guitar-and-drum ensembles playing contemporary musical styles was a significant trait, and several failed rock musicals had nothing in common with Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar except for their small bands playing amplified music. At least part of a rock musical’s identity seemed to derive from rock’s status as an ‘outsider’ genre. Plots that dealt with issues important to young people in the 1970s – the Vietnam War (Hair and The Lieutenant), spiritual values (Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell), self-identity (The Last Sweet Days of Isaac and I’m Getting My Act Together) and the problems of growing up (Runaways) – also marked a show as something beyond the usual Broadway fare. Such topics did not usually attract financing from established Broadway producers, and thus many rock musicals were born and nurtured in places such as La Mama’s and Papp’s Public Theater.

The basic problem for rock musical composers was an old one, which New York Times critic Walter Kerr summed up in a review of Dude:

Thus, although a few shows may have succeeded on the novelty of contemporary sounds, the key to a winning production remained the integration of rock music with the book and the staging. Reviews of failed rock musicals in the 1970s suggest that there was often no compelling reason for the use of rock in a particular show and, moreover, that the music itself was frequently not very good. Admittedly, those productions usually also had serious problems with their books, staging and other elements, but it is almost impossible to find a failed rock musical in which critics praised the music and condemned the rest of the show.²⁵ In short, the fate of a rock musical hung chiefly on its music, which had to be both good – or at least inoffensive – and relevant in some way to the action on stage. Some Broadway producers, however, seemed to treat rock music as just another element that could be grafted onto a big-budget musical, and the results were sometimes spectacular failures.

Chess, a failure on Broadway in 1988, is a good example of a production that appropriated rock as its musical idiom for no urgent reason. Its plot concerns a championship chess match between an American and a Russian during the Cold War. The work, with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus (the male half of the Swedish pop vocal group ABBA), was initially issued in 1984 as a concept album and then performed throughout Europe in a concert version that generated two hits on European pop charts. Two years later, a London production began a three-year run, but in New York, Chess was a $6.6 million disappointment. Although the score included a variety of musical styles, rock numbers in ABBA’s trademark style – power ballads and songs with a strong dance beat – predominated. With no gradations in energy levels, the result, according to Frank Rich, was that ‘for three hours, the characters on stage yell at one another to rock music.’²⁶ Despite this sort of dramatic miscalculation, Chess contains some of the best pop/rock music ever used on the stage.

Such keen interest on Broadway in older, familiar rock and pop styles can be traced back to at least 1972, when Grease, ‘a new ’50’s rock ’n’ roll musical’, premiered. The story, set in 1959, was a nostalgic look back at ‘greasers’ and their girls, built around a simple teenage love story. After the turbulent 1960s, Grease was a gentle parody of almost idyllic times, with a series of faux fifties tunes that poked fun at the teenage angst of that era. The show’s success, despite mediocre reviews, was extraordinary, and Grease played out the decade on Broadway. Once it was apparent that imitations of old rock ’n’ roll could succeed on Broadway, the genuine article came into the theatre in Tom O’Horgan’s 1974 off-Broadway staging of the Beatles’ album as Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road, followed by Beatlemania (1977), a curious mixture of concert and theatre that ran for two years on Broadway. Early the next year, Elvis: The Legend Lives played briefly, only four months after Presley’s death. In 1982 Dick Clark tried to mount a broader retrospective, but Rock and Roll! The First 5,000 Years closed in only a week.

Just over a year later, however, a wave of nostalgia began to emanate from off-Broadway theatres, bistros and bars. And the Beat Goes On (1983) was a two-hour revue of sixties tunes at the Silver Lining, a downtown nightspot. Similar shows included the Motown tribute Ain’t No Mountain High Enough at Sweetwater’s; Lies & Legends: The Musical Stories of Harry Chapin at the Village Gate; and Beehive, which also opened at Sweetwater’s before moving to the Village Gate, where it ran for 600 performances. The most significant of these shows was doubtless Leader of the Pack (1984), a revue of Brill Building songs by Ellie Greenwich, whose life story served as a thin bit of connecting material for over thirty of her tunes, which played at The Bottom Line. A year later the show was retooled for Broadway, where it was met with reviews that ranged from indifference to outright loathing.²⁷ Nonetheless, Leader of the Pack was nominated for Best Show at the 1985 Tony Awards. Within months, a similar revue of Cynthia Weill and Barry Mann tunes, entitled Just Once, was playing at the Bottom Line.

Continuing this trend, Broadway in the 1990s saw the frequent return of older pop and rock materials. In 1989, Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story opened in London and a year later came to Broadway. Marketed as a ‘bio-musical’ and using Holly’s music, the first half of the show traced his rise, while the second act recreated his final concert. Five Guys Named Moe, a revue based on the music of Louis Jordan, the 1940s ‘King of the Jukebox’, whose jump blues pointed the way to rock ’n’ roll, did good business in the 1992–93 season. Smokey Joe’s Cafe, an expensively produced revue of songs by Leiber and Stoller, perhaps the most famous rock ’n’ roll song-writing team of the 1950s and 1960s, became the longest-running revue in Broadway history with its five-year run (1995–2000).

In 1998, Footloose, an adaptation of the 1984 motion picture of the same name began a nearly two-year run; in the autumn of 1999, a stage version of the 1977 motion picture Saturday Night Fever featured music just slightly revised from the Bee Gees’ film score. The following year, another relic from the 1970s, The Rocky Horror Show, which had played briefly and unsuccessfully on Broadway in 1975, returned to New York on the strength of its classic cult film version. Yet another musical that found new life in revival is Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers. When it first opened in London in 1983, it ran for only eight months, but successful regional productions eventually led to a 1988 London revival that ran for over 10,000 performances before closing in 2012. A New York production opened to poor reviews in 1993, but lasted for 840 performances on the strength of its word of mouth.²⁸ Blood Brothers has been a quiet phenomenon with younger listeners, especially teenagers, who apparently identify with the story of twins separated at birth whose reunion years later has tragic consequences, despite critical opinion that Russell’s music is simplistic and derivative.

By the 1990s major rock stars were being courted by Broadway, and in that decade several pop/rock songwriters of the first rank tried to compose Broadway musicals. Randy Newman’s Faust, described as a ‘rock ’n’ roll travesty of Goethe’s poem’, died in 1996 after try-outs in San Diego and Chicago but survived as a CD.²⁹ Although eagerly anticipated on Broadway, Paul Simon’s The Capeman – described in one review as a ‘pop-operatic retelling of a street gang murder in 1959’ – struggled through its previews only to be savaged by the critics on opening night.³⁰ The New York Times called the show ‘one solemn, hopelessly confused drone’ and went on to comment on its twin problems of integrating pop sounds into a theatrical work and the frequent lack of stage movement. As with Faust, a CD was issued before the stage premiere. Purely as a recording, The Capeman stands with Simon’s best work, but his laid-back mix of 1950s doo-wop and Latin rhythms lacks even the occasional energetic number that might have suggested some striking stage movements. In contrast, Elton John, working with Disney Theatrical Productions, scored a mega-hit with the long-running stage version of The Lion King (1997), while his Aida (2000) and Billy Elliot (2008) both earned multiple Tony Awards.

Finally, the continuing popularity of ABBA’s music has led to one of the most unusual musicals in Broadway’s history. The book of Mamma Mia! – a newly invented story about a young girl’s impending marriage – was written specifically to showcase twenty-seven ABBA hits from the 1970s and 1980s. After its 1999 London premiere, the show recouped its costs in less than seven months, and two productions were touring North America, one of which settled in October 2001 at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York. Despite less than enthusiastic reviews, it played for nearly fourteen years, becoming the eighth-longest run in Broadway history. A 2008 motion picture adaptation cleared well over a half billion dollars’ profit, and multiple touring and resident companies continue to do strong business, with no end in sight.³¹

The profitability of Mamma Mia! encouraged numerous producers to create new shows based on classic pop and rock tunes made famous by a single performer or group. Two of the more successful examples were Movin’ Out, a dance revue based on the songs of Billy Joel, which won the 2003 Tony Award for Twyla Tharp’s choreography. Likewise, Jersey Boys, a well-received show built around the music of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, won the 2006 Tony Award and continues to draw good audiences, especially tourists, a decade after it opened.³² This trend of constructing shows around old pop tunes has led to the emergence in recent years of the term ‘jukebox musical’.³³ Three expensive flops in 2005 – All Shook Up, featuring songs popularised by Elvis Presley; the eponymous Lennon; and Good Vibrations, a show based on the music of the Beach Boys, which some critics named dubiously as the worst show in the history of Broadway – have only reinforced the low reputation of this nostalgia-driven genre.³⁴ Three more recent shows managed to avoid both that stigma and the dramatic problems inherent in building a story around a limited repertoire by expanding sources. Rock of Ages cobbled well-known tunes from nearly a dozen classic rock bands of the 1980s into a score that attracted ageing baby boomers for five years, while Priscilla Queen of the Desert, based on the Australian film with a strong cult following, featured songs identified with the gay and transgender communities. Million Dollar Quartet used a pseudo-concert format to present a varied group of rockabilly songs as sung by Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis.

While it is doubtful that any of these backward-looking shows – from Grease to Mamma Mia! to Good Vibrations – truly deserves the designation of rock musical, all of them have been described somewhere as such. This linguistic imprecision, moreover, confirms the desire of producers to exploit the popularity of rock, while suppressing its rebellious spirit and most extreme sounds. Instead of the real thing, Broadway, at the end of the twentieth century, offered up a diluted pop sound and even an air of nostalgia that appealed to typically older theatregoers but still drew some younger customers into theatres. At a time when some form of watered-down pop-rock had become the lingua franca of Broadway,³⁵ one might have wondered if a genuine rock musical in the spirit of Hair was still possible.³⁶ Beyond the major theatres around Times Square, however, off-Broadway, experimental theatres and regional companies remained vital forces for reinventing the musical. In the late 1990s, two new works from those non-traditional milieus played in New York to excellent reviews and ignited a new wave of rock musicals.

Jonathan Larson’s Rent – winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, that year’s Tony Award and numerous other accolades – has been compared to Hair for its similarly stunning impact on a sclerotic theatrical world.³⁷ Rent’s genesis, likewise, mirrored the struggles of many early rock musicals, with a beginning in an off-Broadway theatre workshop and marginal financing. Larson’s death on the eve of Rent’s first preview, moreover, gave the opening an air of almost gothic tragedy and generated an extraordinary amount of publicity for the show.³⁸ In fact, Larson’s career had been on a slow but steadily upward trajectory well before Rent. Two awards in 1988–89 brought him to the notice of Stephen Sondheim, who then became a mentor, and a $45,000 Richard Rodgers Development Grant in 1994 paid for the first workshop performances of Rent.

In retelling Puccini’s La bohème, Larson transplanted the story of four struggling young artists to his own New York neighbourhood, the East Village, where Rado and Ragni had also found their inspiration for Hair. Larson based his songs and scenes on people he knew, but sentimentalised nothing. Nearly all of the principal characters are HIV positive, several are current or former drug users and a number are also gay. Mimi, Puccini’s meek, tubercular seamstress, is transformed into a dancer at a sadomasochism club, and everywhere are homeless people and other dregs of society. All of these characters are unflinchingly real, a point underscored by their ordinary clothing and an industrial grey set.³⁹ Larson made his characters sympathetic and even attractive by focussing on how they lived with their diseases and problems, rather than on their dying. To underline that point, Mimi does not die at the end of Rent, as she does in La bohème.

The vitality of Rent’s characters is emphasised by the pervasive rock feel of the entire score.⁴⁰ The show’s sound is anchored in the electric bass and drum set, which are the driving force in up-tempo tunes such as ‘Rent’ and ‘Out Tonight’, and even songs with more moderate tempos, such as ‘I’ll Cover You’, project a solid rock feel because of the strong support of bass and drums. Prominent acoustic guitars give the ballads – ‘Life Support’, ‘Without You’, ‘Your Eyes’ and ‘Will I?’ – a soft-rock feel, while the influence of gospel is evident in the celebratory tones of ‘La Vie Boheme’ and ‘Seasons of Love’. Remarkably, virtually all of the show’s songs contribute to plot or character development with a realistic text that includes justifiable use of common vulgarities. Larson’s artistic achievement is especially impressive when viewed against the backdrop of vacuous, big-budget entertainments that dominated Broadway at the end of the century, and his use of rock music to portray these gritty characters is exactly right. It is impossible to imagine how a more conventional Broadway score could tell this story as well.

Like Rent, Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998) exhibited a level of honesty about its subject matter seldom found on Broadway. Hedwig, the invented story of an East German transsexual who was the victim of a botched sex-change operation – played to sell-out audiences for two years, even though it was produced off-Broadway in the theatre of a seedy Greenwich Village hotel frequented by prostitutes and drug addicts. The show itself was more a glam-rock concert than a traditional theatrical staging, and its high-volume hard rock music went far beyond the bounds of any previous rock musical, with several numbers that exhibit a punk sensibility.⁴¹ Fifteen years later Hedwig returned, this time to a major Broadway house, where it played for over a year, with television star Neil Patrick Harris opening in the title role. It is a measure of how far rock (and the gender issues explored in Hedwig) had advanced on Broadway in those fifteen years that New York Times critic Ben Brantley could hail Harris as ‘a bona fide Broadway star … in this taboo-flouting tale of life on the margins.’⁴² When Hedwig received eight nominations and won four awards – Best Revival of a Musical, Best Actor (Harris), Best Featured Actress (Lena Hall) and Best Lighting Design – at the 2014 Tonys, it proved that even the most extreme rock sounds were now welcome on Broadway.⁴³

Even before Rent and Hedwig, rock had found a modest place on Broadway in a corner populated primarily by soft rock and recycled tunes. In the twenty-first century, however, rock musicals of all types and sounds have found success much more frequently, as seen in long runs and major awards. Jukebox musicals have led the way, notably Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys, while Hairspray, affecting a nostalgic mood like that of Grease, won the 2003 Tony Award for Best Musical on its way to 2,642 performances. Spring Awakening (2007 Tony Award for Best Musical) mixed alternative rock with other styles in a coming-of-age story that played for more than two years. Both Memphis (2010 Tony Award for Best Musical), combining a rock ’n’ roll theme with superb dancing, and Kinky Boots (2013 Tony Award for Best Musical), with Cyndi Lauper’s pop-infused score and a cross-dressing lead, played to mainstream audiences, suggesting again how readily rock and related styles are now accepted on Broadway.

Other notable rock musicals of recent vintage include American Idiot, a fully staged production of Green Day’s concept album that lasted for a full season on Broadway, and Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, a train wreck of a show best remembered for its multiple, but ineffective revisions of both book and score and stunts that failed and even injured cast members on several occasions. Despite an indifferent score by Bono and the Edge of U2, the show drew some of the highest weekly grosses in Broadway history, yet never came close to recouping its $75 million investment over 1,044 performances.⁴⁴ Off-Broadway continues to be a potent source of authentic rock musicals, with the critically acclaimed Murder Ballad, the multi-award-winning and politically cheeky Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and the over-the-top high school satire Heathers: The Musical, as only three recent examples worthy of notice.⁴⁵

With rock musicals now securely in ascendancy, one might wonder about the future. Newcomer Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, winner of the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical, hinted at some possibilities. With a story set in the Dominican neighbourhood of Washington Heights and lyrics set in hip-hop rhythms, Heights opened doors to two constituencies previously ignored on Broadway. Seven years later, Miranda has pushed the envelope even further with Hamilton, based on the life of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. With unqualified rave reviews,⁴⁶ performances sold out six months in advance, an interracial cast and a hip-hop score that went to number one on Billboard’s Rap Chart,⁴⁷ the show has taken Broadway in unforeseen directions. But isn’t that what great rock musicals have always done?

Nowhere in the realm of the musical theatre is technology more evident than in the world of the megamusical. These ‘larger than life’ visual and aural spectacles dazzle audiences and are among the most popular musical theatre works at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Les Misérables, billed as ‘the world’s most popular musical’, and Cats, heralded as ‘now and forever’, are but two shows where commercial slogans enlist, endorse and promote the genre’s mass appeal.¹

But what exactly are megamusicals? Terms such as ‘through-composed popular operas’ and ‘poperas’ have also been used to describe the phenomenon of sung-through musicals where set design, choreography and special effects are at least as important as the music. They are overtly romantic and sentimental in nature, meant to create strong emotional reactions from the audience. Stories merge aspects of human suffering and redemption with matters of social consciousness.

Aspects of the megamusical demonstrate a reinvigoration of nineteenth-century French grand opera. Whereas audiences in the late twentieth century were dazzled by stage effects such as the chandelier and underground lake in The Phantom of the Opera, the staircase in Sunset Boulevard, the barricade in Les Misérables and the helicopter in Miss Saigon, their nineteenth-century French counterparts saw the eruption of Vesuvius in Daniel-François-Esprit Auber’s La muette de Portici (1828) and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1836). In both megamusicals and French grand opera, striking things happen amidst imaginative surroundings. Regarding megamusicals, dramatically effective sets range from only tables, chairs and a pair of gates in Les Misérables to a staircase filled with ornately costumed mannequins and live actors in The Phantom of the Opera.

If one central figure had to be identified as the driving creative force behind this late twentieth-century genre, it would almost certainly be the producer Cameron Mackintosh (b. 1946). His collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber on Cats in 1981 transformed the style of musical theatre. His success at creating musical theatrical experiences can be seen in many of the shows that virtually define the megamusical, including Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon. His revivals of such classics as Oliver!, My Fair Lady and Carousel won critical praise, and the 1998 Royal Gala Performance, released on video as Hey Mr Producer! The Musical World of Cameron Mackintosh, was an all-star tribute to the producer. The video is self-described as ‘a magical night of theatre that could only take place in your dreams … until now’. The pure theatricality of Mackintosh’s vision – taking the aural and visual components and creating something greater than the mere sum of its parts and then marketing it with remarkable efficiency – defines so much of what makes the megamusical a critical part of today’s musical theatre.

While it is Mackintosh’s vision that defines the genre theatrically, parallels must be drawn between the English producer of three of the longest-running musicals of all time (Cats, Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera) and one of his nineteenth-century French predecessors, Louis Véron, director of the Paris Opera and a major force in nineteenth-century French grand opera. By definition, works in this genre related some sort of socio-political message through a grandiose medium that combined music, drama, dance, lavish costume and set designs and special effects. It comes as no surprise that the creators of Les Misérables, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, are French and that the original concept for ‘the world’s most popular musical’ was in the French language. French grand operas were frequently set against war backgrounds; likewise, the Schönberg–Boublil musicals La Révolution française (1973, Paris), Les Misérables (1980, Paris; 1985, London; 1987, New York), Miss Saigon (1989, London; 1991, New York), Martin Guerre (1996, London; revised 1998, London; revised 1999, West Yorkshire Playhouse) and The Pirate Queen (2006, Chicago; 2007, New York) all have war settings. Sharing the desire for bringing about some sort of social change with their nineteenth-century predecessors, Schönberg and Boublil include some sort of edifying message in their shows, whether it is the power of forgiveness in Les Misérables, the hideous personal consequences of war in Miss Saigon or the repercussions of deception in Martin Guerre.

Schönberg-Boublil musicals have their musical basis in folk-like melodies that are given a lavish treatment, largely through orchestration. This Gallic concept permeates their shows. Pentatonicism is especially prominent, creating a sense of populist fervour in Les Misérables, Orientalism (Vietnam) in Miss Saigon, medieval French folk music in Martin Guerre and Irish balladry in The Pirate Queen.

Mass choral numbers, generally accompanied by inventive choreography suggesting a specific time and place, are central to the musical and dramatic structure of each show. Social injustice in the nineteenth century dominates ‘At the End of the Day’, ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’, ‘One Day More’ and similar numbers in Les Misérables, while in Miss Saigon, ‘The Heat Is On in Saigon’ depicts Americans in Vietnam and ‘The American Dream’ incarnates the plight of Vietnamese wanting to emigrate to America. ‘Working on the Land’ celebrates the sense of community in Martin Guerre and ‘Welcome Home’ acclaims the supposed return of Martin Guerre to his native village. The driving rhythms throughout the last score accentuate both the folk element and the drama of the libretto.

Plate 20 The original London cast of Les Misérables, Palace Theatre, 1985.

© Donald Cooper, Photostage

Because of the Gallic musical theatre tradition of audience edification, each of the shows also contains at least one song of social injustice. ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ and ‘One Day More’ in Les Misérables offer a hope for a future free from oppression of any sort. In Miss Saigon, the anthem ‘Bui Doi’, accompanied by emotional photographic images, educates the audience on the plight of children fathered by American soldiers in Vietnam. Martin Guerre’s ‘The Impostors’ is an anthem of self-reflection, the characters begging themselves and the audience to look inward and see if they are truly as forthright as they themselves claim to be.

In Les Misérables Victor Hugo’s immense novel receives a three-and-a-half-hour musical treatment, long for a musical, but brief considering the vast amount of source material. The human condition, the focus of the novel, is also that of the musical. Jean Valjean represents the inherent good in every person while Javert symbolises its antithesis. A single act of mercy on the part of a bishop causes Valjean to radically alter his ways, and the sacrificial deaths of Fantine, Cosette and the students for the cause of justice, personal or social, are among the most poignant moments in the show.

Recurring melodies enhance developments in the dramatic plot. Valjean and Javert share much of the same music, thus demonstrating that they represent two sides of the same human condition. For example the music of Valjean’s ‘Who Am I?’ is the same as that of ‘Javert’s Suicide’. The finale includes reprises of several musical numbers, some with new texts, and ends with a ‘finale ultimo’ rendition of the show’s central anthem, ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’

Les Misérables epitomises the pan-national production of megamusicals. The show began life as an ‘arena version’ at the Palais des Sports in Paris on 18 September 1980. Cameron Mackintosh heard the recording of the production and subsequently took on the task of overseeing the show’s metamorphosis. The English-language result, a collaboration between Mackintosh and the Royal Shakespeare Company and first performed at the Barbican Theatre in London on 8 October 1985, was an immense success. It transferred to the Palace Theatre in the West End on 4 December 1985, and since that time has continued to draw packed houses.² On 9 October 2006, Les Misérables became the longest-running musical in the West End (as well as in the West End or on Broadway) with its 8,372nd performance. The New York production opened on 12 March 1987 and closed on 18 May 2003, after a staggering 6,680 performances. Colm Wilkinson dazzled audiences as Jean Valjean in both London and New York, as did Frances Ruffelle as Eponine. Patti LuPone, Alun Armstrong and Michael Ball were featured in the London production, while Terrence Mann, Judy Kuhn and David Bryant appeared in New York. On 9 November 2006, just three and a half years after the initial production closed, a Broadway revival opened at the Broadhurst Theatre, giving testament to the show’s continued popularity and viability as a New York tourist attraction.

Translations into many languages quickly followed. Within two years of the show’s London success came performances in Hungary and Iceland in the vernacular languages of those countries. Subsequent productions opened in Norway, Austria, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Spain, Israel, Japan, Denmark and Finland, each in the vernacular. Furthermore, recordings of the show have appeared in English, Hungarian, German, Swedish, Dutch, French, Czech, Danish, Hebrew, Japanese and Spanish. As of May 2017 Les Misérables has played in more than 349 cities in forty-four countries in twenty-two languages and has been seen by more than 70 million people worldwide.³ The historic tenth-anniversary concert that took place in the Royal Albert Hall on 8 October 1995 included a surprise grand encore that proved the international appeal of the musical. Seventeen actors who had played Jean Valjean in various national productions processed into the hall to sing the anthem ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’, each in his native tongue. Central issues associated with the megamusical – theatricality, social responsibility and international popularity – were evident in this celebratory encore. A twenty-fifth anniversary concert at The O2 in London in October 2010 featuring Alfie Boe, Norm Lewis, and Lea Salonga further acknowledged the show’s iconic status, along with a new twenty-fifth anniversary staging, a popular Schools’ Edition and the 2012 film adaptation starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway and Amanda Seyfried.

The international popularity of the megamusical led to several of its numbers being appropriated in high-profile instances. ‘One Day More’ was the theme song for the Democratic Party in the United States during the 1992 presidential election campaign and ‘Empty Chairs and Empty Tables’ became a commemorative anthem for victims of AIDS.⁴ When the French team entered the stadium for the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, it was to the strains of ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’; the song was also featured in the opening ceremonies of the 2002 World Cup.

Following the success of Les Misérables came Miss Saigon, Martin Guerre and The Pirate Queen. Miss Saigon, set in the final years of the Vietnam War, shares its plot with Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly. Lea Salonga and Jonathan Pryce captivated audiences and critics in both London and New York. Martin Guerre is set in sixteenth-century France against the backdrop of Protestant-Catholic religious conflicts. Its fundamentally folk-based musical style also includes sentimental ballads and dazzling dance numbers. The show has experienced numerous revisions during its existence; a 1999 cast recording made in conjunction with the West Yorkshire Playhouse documents the show’s continuing evolution. The short-lived The Pirate Queen told the tale of the sixteenth-century Irish chieftain and pirate Gráinne O’Malley and her efforts to resist the English conquest of Ireland through evocative quasi-bardic music.

While Schönberg-Boublil musicals address broad social issues, those of Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948) focus on personal healing or catharsis. But there is much more to Lloyd Webber’s approach to the musical theatre than this one central theme – commercialisation, pop icons and pure theatricality also loom large in his work. Although Lloyd Webber certainly has his detractors, his work has been widely recognised by both the public and theatrical professionals. He is the recipient of seven Tonys, three Grammys, six Oliviers, a London Critic’s Circle Award, a Golden Globe, an Oscar, an International Emmy and other awards. He received a knighthood in 1992 and was created an honorary life peer in 1997.

When The Beautiful Game (2000, London; revised as The Boys in the Photograph in 2009), Lloyd Webber’s twelfth work, opened in September 2000, it joined its West End siblings Cats (1981, London; 1982, New York), Starlight Express (1984, London; 1987, New York), The Phantom of the Opera (1986, London; 1988, New York) and Whistle Down the Wind (1998, London). Five Lloyd Webber musicals were thus playing simultaneously in London. In August 2004 Lloyd Webber’s thirteenth West End musical, The Woman in White, opened at the Palace Theatre, where it played for nineteen months. Love Never Dies, a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, opened in London in 2010; it closed for revisions and a new version appeared in Melbourne the following year. The diversity, popularity and longevity of Lloyd Webber’s canon is staggering.

The numbers speak for themselves as far as the success of Lloyd Webber’s shows is concerned. The original production of Cats has the distinction of being the longest-running musical in the West End and held the Broadway record of 7,485 performances until it was surpassed by another Lloyd Webber show, The Phantom of the Opera, on 9 January 2006. In January 2006 it was reported that Phantom alone had grossed more money than any other production on stage and screen (£1.7 billion/approximately $3.2 billion), surpassing huge money-making films such as Star Wars, E.T. and Titanic.⁵ As of May 2017 the show had played in 166 cities in thirty-five countries and had been seen by more than 140 million people in at least fifteen languages.⁶

Films and video versions provide another venue for dissemination, including the theatrical films of Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), Evita (1996) and The Phantom of the Opera (2004), and the home video versions of Cats (1998), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1999), Jesus Christ Superstar (2000) and Love Never Dies (2011). (See Chapter 20 for a discussion of these adaptations.) Lloyd Webber – artist, businessman and visionary – is doing something right.

Norma Desmond, the Phantom, Jesus, Joseph, Evita, Grizabella and the dancing chorus of Cats, and Rusty and the skating Starlight trains are all Lloyd Webber prototypes that have been elevated to pop icon status, placing them firmly in the twentieth-century lexicon of musical theatre characters. As postmodern hero-protagonists they all search for immortality, deliverance and redemption from some real, imagined or self-imposed darkness. They are true ‘superstars’, to use the Warholian term, created and lifted to this status by Lloyd Webber’s ‘music of the night’ and ‘technicolour’ imagination. His musical vision is as theatrical as it is operatic, and his imaginative approach is rejuvenating and resuscitating, if not revisionist. Credited with having composed some 350 songs, Lloyd Webber, in the words of his biographer Michael Walsh, is ‘a musical pack rat, salting away useful tunes in the knowledge that someday they will come in handy’.⁷ He is as acutely aware of the visual possibilities of representation and the utility and potential of stage technology. Furthermore, he is cognisant of the ‘really useful’ need for select collaboration with creative lyricists, designers and stage directors.

Founded by Lloyd Webber in 1977, The Really Useful Group Ltd is the organisation that administers the rights to all of the composer’s works from Cats onwards. The Group has offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Basel and Frankfurt. In addition to involvement in management, production, recording and music publishing, the Group also owns several London theatres, including Her Majesty’s Theatre (home of The Phantom of the Opera), the New London Theatre, the Adelphi Theatre (where Sunset Boulevard played), the Palladium, the Cambridge and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane (where Miss Saigon enjoyed its tremendous run).⁸ The Group also controls The Really Useful Store, where Really Useful Merchandise is sold. The branded products carrying logos of Lloyd Webber shows include everything from T-shirts to thermo-reactive mugs. Production, promotion and product manufacturing and marketing are therefore all under the auspices of the same umbrella organisation.

Lloyd Webber, a baby boomer, began composing at the age of seventeen. From an early age he had an interest in music, stagecraft and architecture and was fascinated by the musical stage and its treasures. As befits a true child of the 1950s, the evident influence of Elvis, rock ’n’ roll and the Beatles intermingles with his knowledge of Prokofiev, Puccini and the classical repertory instilled largely by his father, William S. Lloyd Webber, a church organist and professor of composition at the Royal College of Music and eventually director of the London College of Music. But it was with the American musical theatre and its composers that his infatuation grew. He cites Richard Rodgers as a primary influence and reveals candidly, ‘Musical theatre is the only thing that’s ever made me tick.’⁹

From his early ‘through-written’ or ‘through-composed’ techno-music spectacles to his later more traditional adaptations, Lloyd Webber establishes dramatic and musical primacy and admits, ‘I’m quite incapable of writing the words, but I lay out what I believe the libretto ought to be. That is one of my strongest assets.’¹⁰ His self-confessed first rule is ‘It’s not the subject, it’s the treatment’.¹¹ His librettos are cinematic, fantastic, dreamlike, sweeping, lush and conceptually rich in possibility. Whether developed from a film (Sunset Boulevard), a work of fiction (The Phantom of the Opera, Aspects of Love, Whistle Down the Wind, The Woman in White), a collection of poems (Cats), a Biblical or historical figure (Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph, Evita) or simply an imaginative idea (Starlight Express), Lloyd Webber’s (re)sources are magnified musically and theatrically.

As mentioned earlier, it is the search for some sort of redemption that connects all of Lloyd Webber’s lead characters. Perhaps this is the influence of his father’s involvement with Anglican Church music and theology. Lloyd Webber’s shows fall into two categories based upon subject matter: immortality musicals and intimate musicals (see Table 15.1). The immortality musicals fall into three categories: (1) those based on Biblical or historical figures, (2) those concerning some sort of competition and (3) those focussing on singular personalities who are in search of immortality.

In the Biblical musicals, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar, the title characters are imprisoned or destroyed by a group (Joseph’s brothers in Joseph; Judas, Pontius Pilate and soldiers in Superstar). At the same time, a character exists in each show who looks to the protagonist for redemption (Pharaoh in Joseph, Mary Magdalene in Superstar).

Both Joseph and Superstar incorporate a variety of pop-rock styles, including Elvis-style and calypso numbers in Joseph and various rock styles in Superstar. Joseph began life as a ‘pop cantata’ for the choir of St Paul’s Junior School at Colet Court, Hammersmith. It was first performed on 1 March 1968 in a concert at the Old Assembly Hall and lasted a mere fifteen minutes. It finally found life as a full-length production in 1973, after the success of Superstar. Further productions appeared, and the 1999 video/DVD release starring Donny Osmond, Richard Attenborough, Maria Friedman and Joan Collins made the show more accessible than ever. By contrast, Superstar began life as a double album. Concert tours of the rock opera followed, and a stage version ultimately emerged. The 1973 film version starred Ted Neeley and Carl Anderson, and Glenn Carter played the title role in the 2000 video/DVD version. Both shows, therefore, had origins that were atypical for canonical works in the musical theatre.

Lloyd Webber’s technicolour rendition of the Old Testament story of Jacob’s favourite son, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, is a sung-through loosely linked series of novelty numbers. The show is circular in nature, reflected in a line from the finale, ‘let us return to the beginning … any dream will do’. This concept of the dream reappears in Sunset Boulevard when Norma and her associates ponder ‘new ways to dream’. Joseph concludes with the knowledge that a lesson has been taught and learned. It is youthful, energetic, fast paced, lively and childlike, and its music is sweet and easily accessible, with ‘Close Every Door’ being the show’s most haunting original tune.

Whereas Joseph is buoyant and lighthearted, positive and uplifting, Jesus Christ Superstar is brooding and imbued with a dark sense of foreboding. The last week of Jesus’s life, his betrayal and Passion as seen through the eyes of Pontius Pilate, constitute the scenario. There are glorious moments of ‘Hosannah’ and the emblematic ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ fanfare, but the Judas character defines the piece. ‘King Herod’s Song’, a comic drag number reminiscent of ‘The Pharaoh’s Song’ in Joseph, provides humorous relief but is somewhat out of keeping with the mood sustained throughout the rest of the show. In the final moments of the controversial 1971 original Tom O’Horgan Broadway production, Christ appeared crucified on an inverted triangle some twenty feet in the air and was slowly projected forward from the back wall of the stage until he loomed over the orchestra as swirling, flickering light fragments flashed through the theatre to the musical accompaniment of the signature fanfare. The show won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Score.

The diversity of musical styles in Joseph and Superstar suggests the genre of the revue and is a significant aspect of Lloyd Webber’s overall musical language. This character-defining treatment through music would reappear in Cats, where each cat has its own type of music, and even more so in The Phantom of the Opera and Sunset Boulevard, where the music of the protagonist is decidedly distinct from the remainder of the score.

It was the rock opera concept of Jesus Christ Superstar that Lloyd Webber maintained in Evita, his third collaboration with Tim Rice and his third musical on a religious-historical theme. The show begins with an inventive and forceful prologue – on 26 July 1952, in a Buenos Aires cinema, the death of Eva Perón is announced. Argentina weeps, for they have lost a woman whom they considered a saint. The opera documents Eva Perón from her lowly yet ambitious beginnings to her influential position as ‘the woman behind the man’ of Juan Perón, president of Argentina, and her untimely death. Eva’s popularity grows to the point of deification, and her youthful death immortalises her beauty and strength in the operatic tradition of the dying heroine. The moral conscience challenging her rise to power appears in the persona of the revolutionary Che Guevara. Evita is cinematic and sweeping, a complex immersion into the political games of Argentina in the 1940s and the sexual politics of a passionate woman and her society. The libretto lends itself to the operatic formulation of Eva Perón as both an antiheroine and the personified conscience of a nation.

Like Superstar, Evita began its life as a concept album. The show was a turning point in the careers of both its composer and lyricist. It gave ‘the first real evidence that here was not simply a minor British talent with a knack for catching a pop wave, but a serious composer of depth, talent, and technique working in tandem with a lyricist of style and substance’.¹² In Evita Lloyd Webber rendered a score in ‘an original, vital melodic language that stamped his music as his own – and not as a collection of disparate influences’.¹³ The show received numerous Tony Awards, including one for Patti LuPone as Best Actress. ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ became a signature tune for LuPone, whose arm-raised final pose is one of the classic images of the musical theatre. For the 1996 film starring Madonna and Antonio Banderas, Lloyd Webber wrote a new song, ‘You Must Love Me’, earning him an Academy Award. Even though Evita was the third and perhaps crowning jewel in the Lloyd Webber–Rice collaborations, it signalled the end of their working relationship. The show solidified the reputations of both creators, and in the case of Lloyd Webber, his post-Rice works, while maintaining the fundamental approach to theatrical music, would expand his conceptual and musical horizons.

In the second type of immortality musical, competition musicals, some sort of contest takes place. In Cats, the winner goes to the Heaviside Layer (cat heaven) and in Starlight Express, the various toy train engines try to win the race to the ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel’. In both shows, it is the underdog who wins – the faded Grizabella defeats her fellow felines in Cats, and the steam engine Rusty conquers newer technologies in Starlight Express.

Lloyd Webber explores a variety of musical styles in both shows. Cats contains a wide range of songs, including an Elvis-style number. ‘Memory’, the show’s climactic point, is a sentimental ballad that has been championed by the singers Elaine Paige and Barbra Streisand, among others. Starlight Express includes rock, blues and country music throughout and concludes with a gospel finale, ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel’. In these shows, the mixture of musical styles and the search for a new life symbolised by light (a spaceship in Cats and the end of the tunnel in Starlight Express) is a shared feature, as is the transformation of the theatre into either a garbage dump (Cats) or a racetrack (Starlight Express).

‘Cats: Now and Forever’ – as the poster proclaims – proved to be more prophetic than might have been imagined by the Cameron Mackintosh team that coined it. Based on T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, this junkyard song and dance spectacle is a vaudeville/minstrel/burlesque populated by a company of colourful, dappled, tabby, be-whiskered and grizzly coiffed felines. As a show it defies categorisation. Cats is an experience. The theatre itself is transformed into a junkyard, not just the stage but the house as well. Just as audiences enter the world of the Paris Opera House when they attend Phantom, they venture into the world of feline subculture in Cats. The popularity of the longest-running musical in both London and New York was further endorsed when the US Postal Service honoured the show with a commemorative stamp in its ‘Celebrate the Century’ series. It was thus heralded as one of the fifteen most important events in 1980s American culture.

And if actors can be cats, why can’t they be trains?

Starlight Express capitalises on the formula experienced in Cats. The junkyard becomes a train yard and racing track. Actors on skates impersonate various types of trains – steam engines, diesels and electric engines and their coaches. Envisaged as a children’s story, the production was an expensive technological spectacle. The technology of the stagecraft and the skating prowess of its athletic actors overshadowed the recorded music and over-amplified lyrics in performance except in the few quiet moments when the mayhem slowed. It has more in common with a roller-skating disco than with the musical theatre. Yet it is indeed original – another ‘experience’ created by the mind and music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, a ‘theme park ride’ of a musical. A ninety-minute version of Starlight Express opened in 1993 at the Las Vegas Hilton, the first major legitimate stage production to play in the famed gambling city.

The third category of immortality musicals, personality shows, includes two of Lloyd Webber’s most popular shows, The Phantom of the Opera and Sunset Boulevard. Both musicals tell of an older, physically unattractive individual who searches for immortality through a younger, more beautiful one. A lush romantic operatic style with rock overtones pervades both shows. In many respects these are two versions of the same story – Norma is the Phantom in drag.

The Phantom of the Opera, Lloyd Webber’s most famous score, is romantic and sweeping, dark yet seductive, and must be considered his signature composition. The ‘Beauty and the Beast’ tale based on the Gaston Leroux novel, set deep in the bowels of the Paris Opera House, gave Lloyd Webber the freest rein with his imagination and musical gifts. Mark Steyn asserts:

In Phantom, Lloyd Webber fuses his pop/rock sensibility with the classical models of his youth. The half-masked, caped figure appearing and disappearing accentuates the duality, the mix of old and new, in the music, the rendition and the conception. Like Evita, the show opens with a prologue – an auction at the Paris Opera where items, including the chandelier, are visible. As the chandelier is lit (with modern electricity), the music begins and the chandelier rises above the stalls. The magic and mystery continue as the audience passes through the mirror with the virginal young heroine and is seduced by the Phantom’s ‘music of the night’. Phantom is a modern opera played on a classical stage. The theme of unrequited and inaccessible love is as elusive and poignant as any contemporary love ballad, as classical as any opera. The fantasy transports; the music invites; the theatre technology awes. As the audience enters the doors of Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, chosen specifically for Phantom because of its architectural features, to see the show, they pass through a portal to another world – a world of realised mystery and imagination. Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman triumphed in the original production, the show marking a milestone in the careers of both performers.

Phantom’s success is palpable. In addition to its record-breaking Broadway run, worldwide productions and tours, the 2004 film version brought renewed interest in the stage version. A new Las Vegas production opened in June 2006 – this version, running ninety-five minutes with no intermission, retains all of Lloyd Webber’s songs. The production is housed in a $40 million purpose-built theatre (meant to evoke the Paris Opera House) at The Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino and includes the largest cast of any US Phantom production, expanded sets and pyrotechnics and ‘an amazing chandelier experience unlike anything seen anywhere else in the world’.¹⁶ The sequel, Love Never Dies, while not as successful as the original, nonetheless owes its existence to Phantom’s popularity.

Sunset Boulevard commences with a musical prologue worthy of a late 1940s Hollywood movie that prepares for the story to be told in a large flashback, as with Evita and Phantom. The fast-paced motoristic fervour of ‘Sunset Boulevard’ is an apt overture to Lloyd Webber’s faithful musical treatment of the Billy Wilder film about the fading silent movie actress longing and determined to make a comeback. The House on Sunset, Paramount Studios, Schwab’s Drugstore, the Paramount back lot are the locales; Norma Desmond, Joe Gillis, Max von Mayerling, Betty Schaefer, Cecil B. DeMille and a cast of Hollywood hopeful extras are the characters. The London production starred Patti LuPone, while the Los Angeles and New York productions featured Glenn Close. Betty Buckley succeeded both LuPone and Close in their respective runs.

In a departure from his through-composed musicals, Sunset Boulevard adopts a more traditional Broadway musical structure with spoken scenes advancing the narrative. Joe is a screenwriter, Norma an actress. The presence of dialogue scenes anchors and supports the musical numbers. Norma invites Joe into her mansion and her bed proffering gifts and promises of work, success and contacts at Paramount. A phantom-like spectre, she haunts the Sunset House and fascinates the good-looking, down-on-his-luck young writer as she slowly weaves her web – she, a black widow and he, her prey. Her delusional hope for rejuvenation is based on the irrational belief that her conquest will ensure her return to the silver screen. This is music of a much darker night. The jazzy swing and hip sounds of the Paramount people seem a world away from Norma’s brooding, soulful, unresolved melodies and such telling lines as ‘We taught the world new ways to dream’ and her final ‘I am ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille’. Her stare, her stance, her face and her eyes are etched into the lens of consciousness as she lights the darkness one last time.

Plate 21 Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford in The Phantom of the Opera, Her Majesty’s Theatre, 1986.

© Donald Cooper, Photostage

The two shows, as mentioned, have strong parallels both dramatically and musically (see Table 15.2). Both the Phantom and Norma are searching for immortality and hope to achieve this through a younger character, an apprentice of sorts. The Phantom teaches Christine to sing and star in his opera, while Norma wants Joe to secure her return to the silver screen in her original version of Salomé. The chief protagonist is concerned about his or her physical appearance. The Phantom’s facial disfigurement is covered by the iconic mask until he reveals himself to Christine. It is his physical appearance that is the root of his societal estrangement. Norma’s faded physical appearance causes her great consternation, and her desire for corporeal beauty is the basis for the song ‘Eternal Youth Is Worth a Little Suffering’. Both the Phantom and Norma look for youth and beauty in their apprentices.

Each of these apprentices has his or her own romantic interest with a young and vital person, resulting in love triangles. The ultimate result of the triangles differs in the two shows, however. In Phantom, Christine and Raoul are together at the final curtain, while in Sunset Boulevard, Joe’s death forbids a union with Betty.

The musicals end in a similar fashion with a release from reality. The mysterious disappearance of the Phantom into unknown regions contrasts with Norma’s descent into madness at the end of Sunset Boulevard as she imagines herself on the set of Paramount Studios.

Lloyd Webber realises these dramatic parallels through musical means. The principal character in each show has two large-scale songs that define his or her demeanour and temperament. The first numbers, ‘Angel of Music’ and ‘With One Look’, are self-defining songs in which the characters assert their basic life views. A subsequent number illuminates their innermost desires. ‘Music of the Night’, a trunk song, reveals the deepest regions of the Phantom’s soul through its ballad style, while ‘As If We Never Said Goodbye’ is an expression of Norma’s sense of loss and her ardent desire to return to the world of Hollywood magic.

The younger character in each show has a solo number that defines his or her place in the drama. ‘Think of Me’ reveals Christine’s innocence through its directness of musical expression; ‘Sunset Boulevard’ with its constant rhythmic underpinning depicts the angst that Joe experiences throughout his ultimately fatal relationship with Norma.

Other commonalities link the two works. A staircase figures prominently in the scenic design of both. The second act of Phantom opens with the New Year’s Eve masquerade scene, set on a lavish staircase filled with live chorus members and mannequins. Norma Desmond’s staircase in Sunset Boulevard is a central feature of the show. A monkey appears significantly in both musicals. In Phantom a stuffed monkey is on the music box that is auctioned as the show opens. In Sunset Boulevard Norma’s recently deceased monkey is the subject of her mourning when Joe enters the mansion. Murders take place in both shows. The Phantom threatens or kills those who attempt to thwart his plans to make Christine a star, while Joe’s murder by Norma frames the plot of Sunset Boulevard.

Furthermore, both shows exhibit a notable conceptualisation of physical space. In Phantom, the lair lies beneath the Paris Opera House. In order to escape the Phantom’s influence, Christine and Raoul go to the roof of the building, a physically separate location. Most of the show takes place in the Opera House, between the roof and the lair. Likewise, in Sunset Boulevard, Norma makes her first appearance at the top of the immense staircase. Joe, by contrast, is seen first face down in Norma’s swimming pool – literally in the depths of her estate. Since the story is told in flashback, this is where Joe remains throughout the musical. The worlds of Joe and Norma are separate: the characters meet and interact on the ground floor of Norma’s lavish palace – an intermediate domain between their two regions. The relationship between the physical spaces allocated to the principal characters is gender based: female characters occupy the higher regions while male characters inhabit places physically beneath the setting of the central action.

This central mid-level dramatic location is the domain of the protagonist. Whether in the Paris Opera House or in Norma’s mansion on Sunset Boulevard, the protagonists find security in their respective physical surroundings. They determine and dominate the events that take place in these domains, controlling through fear, intimidation or sheer will power all who enter these realms that are every bit as private as the Countess’s boudoir in Le nozze di Figaro.

Finally, the performing arts backgrounds to both shows are central to their concept. The Paris Opera House and its activities provide the backdrop for Phantom, but Lloyd Webber also alludes to various styles of opera in the musical. Scenes from three imaginary operas appear in Phantom: Hannibal by Chalumeau, II muto by Albrizzio and Don Juan Triumphant by the Phantom himself. In these ‘operas within an opera’, Lloyd Webber pays tribute to various European operatic traditions. Hannibal is a French Grand Opera, complete with a scenic elephant, while Il muto is modelled on Italian opera buffa. Don Juan Triumphant is a decidedly modern work that includes musical devices such as the whole-tone scale, setting it off from the other two works. The setting for the scene from Don Juan Triumphant is a banquet akin to that in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Likewise, Sunset Boulevard is not only a transformation of a cinematic paragon but also homage to the lost world of silent cinema, as was the original Billy Wilder film.

The archetypal megamusical production includes lavish sets and a strong emphasis on choreography and other visual elements. In Lloyd Webber’s intimate musicals, however, the lush musical style is maintained while some of the overt theatricality is eschewed.

By Jeeves is in the retrospective style of 1930s musical comedy, and its basis in P. G. Wodehouse’s classic Jeeves and Wooster characters gives it a distinctively English character. Its overt Englishness was certainly a contributing factor to its lack of success in the US.

Song and Dance is an intimate two-part programme as literal as the title suggests – the first act is sung, the second is danced. Constructed from two earlier works – Tell Me on a Sunday, a 1979 song cycle, and Variations for cello and rock band – it received its premiere on the BBC as a television special and subsequently played at the Palace Theatre. The idea came from Cameron Mackintosh during a conversation in which he and Lloyd Webber were trying to find a way to keep the Palace Theatre, beloved by both of them, open. Initially called ‘a concert for the theatre’, its billing was changed to ‘a musical’ after the show received good reviews in the press.¹⁷ In ‘Song’ a woman sings about her relationships with several men, her experiences and her thoughts as an English girl living alone in Manhattan. ‘Song’ is sung through, without spoken dialogue. ‘Dance’, a set of variations on Paganini’s 24th Caprice written for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s cello-playing brother Julian, is a choreographic self-examination by one of the men mentioned in ‘Song’. It consists solely of instrumental music, without either lyrics or spoken dialogue. In 2003 a new production of Tell Me on a Sunday (on its own) starring Denise van Outen opened at the Gielgud Theatre.

Aspects of Love is an adaptation of David Garnett’s tale of intergenerational love. Here, as in The Phantom of the Opera and Sunset Boulevard, the central character uses the youth of another as a catalyst for personal transformation. Conceived as an intimate chamber piece in style and execution, it is a sung-through ballad of yearning and longing and the pains and penalties of love conquered and love lost. Aspects focuses on the human drama of a set of interrelated characters: Rose, an actress; Alex, a young Englishman; George, his uncle, an English painter; Giulietta, an Italian sculptress; Jenny, daughter of Rose and George; and Hugo, Rose’s lover. The action takes place in France and Italy between 1947 and 1961 and is a virtual Rubik’s Cube of love triangles. Michael Walsh says of the show that ‘it displays Lloyd Webber’s familiar melodic gifts, this time wedded to a solid technical foundation to produce moments of penetrating psychological insight and great emotional power … the score flows from one scene to the next, hardly stopping for breath … the penultimate scene … is the composer’s finest dramatic creation’.¹⁸ The show played for more than three years in London, but its 1990 Broadway run lasted only 377 performances.

In Whistle Down the Wind this idea of the transformative power of youth is combined with the religious messages of Lloyd Webber’s early shows. The show opens as an electric neon billboard with the words ‘Jesus Lives’ hovers over a flyover where a church congregation gathers and intones a hymn, ‘The Vaults of Heaven’, cast in traditional Baptist mode. The minister then tells of an afterlife where there will be no more pain, loss or sorrow.

It is 1959 in a small Louisiana town and the music is that of a British composer. Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of the novel and film of Whistle Down the Wind is a bucolic American gothic fable. The title song is a simple anthem of hope and acceptance, and Lloyd Webber is deep in the American South, far away from Egypt, Paris and Argentina. When three siblings return home after their chores, they are surprised to discover a long-haired, bleeding man hidden in the barn, sleeping in the hay. Swallow, the girl, startles the man, who, when she begins to ask who he is, responds with the expletive ‘Jesus Christ’. She takes him literally, and the drama begins.

A slim premise at best, but with this Whistle, Lloyd Webber’s imagination again takes flight. The Man is an escaped convict, an unlikely Jesus, yet the answer to months of unanswered prayers by the children. He is an object of hope and faith. The minister’s exhortation is a reality in a town where racial tension, graft and passions smoulder. His appearance is a miracle of sorts, for the children, in their innocence and naïvety, protect, worship and love him. The plot meanders and is fed by the hypocrisy of fundamentalism, the restlessness of youth appearing like an insidious Southern stream. A collaboration with Jim Steinman, the score includes romantic love ballads, blues, country, gospel and rock music. The eclecticism chronicled throughout this chapter is again apparent in Whistle Down the Wind.

The musical, while demonstrating the intimate, also includes some remarkable theatrical moments such as the hydraulically lifted flyover and the head-on approach of a train in a tunnel. These visual events are at least as powerful as they are in shows such as Phantom because of the intimacy of the overall setting and the tone of the musical. They are not part of an awe-inspiring aesthetic but rather accentuate moments in a show conceived in a much more private manner.

The Beautiful Game (revised as The Boys in the Photograph), a show about Belfast footballers in 1969, may appear at first glance to be a competition musical, but Ben Elton’s book and lyrics prove it to be a logical continuation of themes addressed in Whistle: a search for peace and the responsibility of youth to achieve a better future, this time on a societal level. The intertwined stories of two couples – the men are football players – address Northern Ireland issues: the Catholic-Protestant pair (Christine and Del) who leave for America and the Catholic pair (Mary and John) who are separated after John’s false imprisonment and subsequent IRA involvement. Mary’s solo soliloquy ‘If This Is What We’re Fighting For’ positions the political overtones of the show squarely in focus. Her unaccompanied singing for most of the song intensifies its heartfelt lyric, as does the critical line ‘No child was ever born to hate’. Ireland is celebrated in the lyrical ‘God’s Own Country’ and the energetic opening title number endorses football as a religion every bit as powerful as the faith of the Catholic priest who coaches the team.

The Woman in White, ‘freely adapted on the classic novel by Wilkie Collins’, is a nearly sung-through treatment of the famous Victorian mystery thriller (first published serially in 1860), a tale of love, mistrust and greed. Several aspects of the novel were changed for the musical, including the ending (which also differs between the initial London and subsequent New York productions), the dangerous secret of the mysterious ‘woman in white’ and the nature of the relationship between Marian and Walter, the musical’s principals. Lloyd Webber’s haunting score includes recurring themes that are associated with each character (similar to operatic leitmotifs). One of the most effective use of this technique concerns ‘Laura’s theme’. Laura, the suffering heroine, is forced to marry the treacherous Sir Percival Glyde; at her funeral, he dares to sing her theme to the disgust of not only the other stage characters but also the audience. Marian and Walter ultimately work together to seek justice on Laura’s behalf. Other notable uses of music include the seductive tango during which Marian and the manipulative Count Fosco attempt to outwit each other, and Fosco’s delightfully sociopathic ‘You Can Get Away with Anything’. William Dudley’s innovative stage design consisted of video projections that created something akin to an IMAX experience. Sets were minimal, placing the focus squarely on the characters and their music. The musical fared much better in London than in New York (where it played from November 2005 to February 2006), due in large part to the novel’s tremendous fame in Britain and near obscurity in the US.

In Aspects, Whistle, Game and Woman, carnal or spiritual forces challenge innocence, goodness and youth. The principals are all searching for catharsis or social justice. Like their earlier counterparts such as the Phantom or Norma, they yearn for some sort of transformation for either themselves, those they love or society as a whole. Lloyd Webber’s music, though still vaultingly romantic, is more tempered in these works, endorsing and enhancing the narrative and psychological dimensions of the librettos.

Capitalising on the high-tech staging associated with the British megamusicals are the Disney productions of the 1990s, appearing under the guise of Disney Theatricals. The live-theatre adaptations of Beauty and the Beast (1994) and The Lion King (1998) quickly became among the most popular shows in both New York and London. The transformation scene in Beauty and the Beast and the magical puppetry conceived by Julie Taymor for The Lion King took the remarkable staging and visual spectacle associated with the megamusical to new creative levels.

Like megamusicals, Disney productions have quickly become internationalised. In addition to English-language versions, Beauty and the Beast has been produced in translation in Stuttgart and Madrid; The Lion King has played in Tokyo and Osaka. Along these lines, the live theatrical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame was first produced in Berlin in 1999 under the German title Der Glöckner von Notre Dame, bypassing an initial English-language version.

Disney Theatricals runs Hyperion Theatricals, whose first show was Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida (2000), a score that, like so many rock musicals, tried to expand the stereotypical Broadway sounds. Postmodern staging, including a vertical swimming pool, accentuated the theatrical experience.

Cameron Mackintosh and Disney Theatricals joined forces to bring Mary Poppins to the London stage in December 2004, followed by a Broadway transfer in autumn 2006. Billed as ‘a musical based on the stories of P. L. Travers and the Walt Disney film’, the stage version includes the original music and lyrics from the classic Julie Andrews–Dick Van Dyke film by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman along with new songs by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe.

Disney itself returned to Broadway in May 2006 with another live-action version of an animated film, this time Tarzan, with music and lyrics by Phil Collins. Vine-swinging acrobats fill the stage with spectacular aerial feats and American Idol veteran Josh Strickland made his Broadway debut in the title role. Subsequent Disney productions on Broadway include The Little Mermaid (2008), Newsies The Musical (2012, with Jeremy Jordan creating a sensation with his star performance) and Aladdin (2014).

The megamusical is arguably among the most influential musical genres of the late twentieth century. The pioneering shows of the 1980s have a strong progeny – creating breathtaking effects for theatrical audiences has become part of the art of musical theatre thanks to the genre’s profound influence. Along with spectacular visual effects, megamusicals have given their fans unashamedly romantic, lush and expansive music: Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera and Beauty and the Beast, for example, contain some of the contemporary musical theatre’s most frequently heard songs. The inherent danger, however, is that these powerful blockbusters can easily overshadow other worthy efforts – impressive shows such as Miss Saigon and The Woman in White – and thus limit the reputations of their creators, individuals whose artistic visions continue to draw audiences into the theatre and whose efforts keep the great legacy of the musical theatre alive and flourishing.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, West End musicals exploded onto the world stage through a series of box office hits such as Cats (1981), Starlight Express (1984), Les Misérables (1985), The Phantom of the Opera (1986) and Miss Saigon (1989). Subsequently, the term ‘British musical’ has become somewhat synonymous with large-scale commercial shows that feature epic storylines and themes, striking designs and scores that draw on contemporary pop and rock influences. But while these commercial hits have undoubtedly had an enormous impact on perceptions of the British musical at home and abroad, they form only part of a wider story of the evolution of musicals in Britain from the 1970s to the present. This period has seen the gradual development – at first sporadic and later more strategic – of musical theatre as an integral part of the British theatre scene. This chapter explores the key elements in this evolution in terms of individual shows, artists and companies and the start of a national infrastructure for nurturing British musicals.

New Works for a New Millennium

As well as reinterpretations of Broadway classics, the new millennium has seen a tentative integration of new British musicals in theatres across the country. This includes commercial, subsidised, large-scale, mid-sized and chamber pieces and often reflects the particular aesthetics and artistic mission of the producing theatre. In 2016, new British musicals could be found in West End houses, pub theatres and medium-scale spaces such as the Menier Chocolate Factory, the Trafalgar Studios and the St James Theatre. A handful of regional theatres are also leading the way in bringing new musicals into the fabric of British theatre through commissions and joint productions.

While a wide range of work is evident, one distinctive feature has been that the writers have often developed their craft and aesthetic in other performance areas. Some have a close awareness of the traditions of the British and American musical, such as George Stiles and Anthony Drewe (Just So, Honk!, Mary Poppins, Betty Blue Eyes) who have worked extensively in both the US and the UK. However, other writers have a more ambivalent relationship to the conventions of the art form. Librettist Dennis Kelly has acknowledged that even after the success of Matilda, ‘I don’t know much about musicals. To be honest with you, I’m not part of that world.’²⁵ Composer Richard Taylor (whose credits include The Go-Between at the West Yorkshire Playhouse) has stated that he is ‘not a lover of musicals, I am afraid … I find the bar nearly always set far too low in terms of what an audience is happy to accept … it is from working in many plays (writing scores), and seeing many more, that I have identified what I enjoy theatrically’.²⁶ He continues:

I have a beef about the definition ‘musical’. I know we can’t un-invent it, but it’s got such a lot of baggage. It’s got to encompass everything from, I guess, what we have been trying to do with The Go-Between through Mamma Mia! and practically on to things like Cirque du Soleil. But audiences seem reluctant to come up-to-date with that development. They are seemingly happy to assume everything termed as a ‘musical’ is going to be somehow mass-market light entertainment (and impossible to dislike). They have never been so stubborn about the thing called ‘the play’.²⁷

This broad interpretation of what musical theatre can be continues to bring a certain freshness and unpredictability to British musical theatre. The commercial arena – traditionally the home of musical theatre – encompasses a variety of trends in the West End and on tour. In addition to ongoing imports from America (Avenue Q, Jersey Boys, The Book of Mormon), a variety of new types of commercial shows are being created in the UK. The huge popular success of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing (2004–) has unquestionably boosted interest in dance-based shows including the nostalgic jukebox musicals Dreamcoats and Petticoats (2009) and Top Hat (2011), the latter based on the 1935 film and starring the 2008 winner of Strictly Come Dancing Tom Chambers, previously best known as a TV actor. The spirit of musical and thematic experimentation is likewise reflected in shows such as Bombay Dreams (2002), which incorporates Bollywood music, dancing and dramaturgy.

Adaptations of classic British children’s literature have formed the basis of many national touring productions targeted at young audiences as well as internationally successful family shows such as Mary Poppins (2004), Matilda (2010) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013) which feature serious themes as well as upbeat show tunes and visceral excitement. It is indicative that the creative team behind Mary Poppins based its adaptation primarily on the P. L. Travers books rather than the more upbeat, sentimental Disney film. In its turn, Matilda displays an anarchic and often black sense of humour, repudiating a sentimentalisation of childhood while highlighting the importance of retaining key ‘childlike’ qualities such as imagination, sense of justice and individuality – a theme movingly brought to life through the sense of physical release when the adult actors take over the on-stage swings and in the final moment when Matilda and Miss Honey perform a joyous and defiant cartwheel together.

Another noticeable trend has seen adaptations of socially themed British films brought to the musical stage. Billy Elliot (2005) tells the story of a young boy’s perseverance against cultural and social barriers and is set against the 1984–85 coal miners’ strike. It includes depictions of police in riot gear and a scathing indictment of Thatcherism with a huge effigy of Margaret Thatcher herself in the style of the then-popular Spitting Image satirical television series. Made in Dagenham (2014) is based on the true story of how the tenacity of a group of female workers in a Dagenham car factory led to the establishment of the 1970 Equal Pay Act. And Bend It Like Beckham (2015) is bitter-sweet depiction of a teenage heroine torn between her passion for playing football and the cultural demands of her British Asian community, with the culture clash dramatised through a score and choreography that draws on both Western and Asian traditions.

Plate 22 Matilda the Musical at Cambridge Theatre, London, 2011.

Photo by Manuel Harlan © RSC

Key to the story is the generation gap between Jess, a teenager with a sense of personal ambition, and her Sikh father. In ‘People Like Us’, he relates his own thwarted dreams at the hands of racial prejudice. While acknowledging progress (‘In this England, in these times / Many acts which once were common / Now are crimes’), he warns that there are still racial barriers in place and that in reality ‘People like us are only free to do / What they allow us to’.²⁸

British subsidised and regional theatres play an increasingly important role in shaping the new British musical by developing original works as part of their artistic programming, echoing the growth of the non-profit musical in America. In the 1990s the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds positioned itself as a local and regional cultural hub and cultivated shows to reflect this. This led to musicals such as Spend Spend Spend (1998), the story of a Yorkshire housewife who won a fortune on the lottery and lost it, which featured dialogue and lyrics in Yorkshire dialect. In 2010 their musical adaptation of The Secret Garden was much more regionally specific than the 1991 Broadway version, again with local dialect and self-deprecating Yorkshire humour. The librettist Gary Lyons has noted his culturally specific choices:

I was conscious right through that I was a Yorkshire-based playwright writing a show for a regional English audience, inflecting a universal story with unique cultural qualities, not least through the injection of humour and warmth … The Secret Garden could be ‘reclaimed’ from the nostalgia bin and treated as a kind of ‘upstairs-downstairs’ folk story told by ‘people like us’ about ‘people like them’. The direct choric address in northern accents, both sung and spoken, was all about familiarity between actors and audience.²⁹

In 1999 the Theatre Royal Stratford East established an in-house musical theatre development programme that pairs up musicians from non-musical theatre backgrounds with librettists and lyricists to create shows that reflect the diverse cultural heritage of the local community, leading to shows such as The Big Life (2004), a ska musical about West Indian immigrants in the UK in the 1950s; The Harder They Come (2013), a reggae musical set in Jamaica; and The Infidel (2014) a comedy based on the film of the same name in which a Muslim East End man discovers he has Jewish roots.

Other significant new musicals to emerge from the subsidised sector include Jerry Springer: The Musical, which was first developed and performed in a series of stagings between 2000 and 2002 as a small-scale music theatre piece at the Battersea Arts Centre, a venue best known for avant-garde work. This was followed by a successful run at the 2002 Edinburgh Festival. The National Theatre gave it a full-scale production in 2003 that transferred commercially to the West End later that year. In 2011 the National Theatre itself developed the groundbreaking London Road, a musical that combines verbatim theatre with music to tell the conflicted stories of the local community directly affected by the 2006–8 serial murders of prostitutes and subsequent trial of the killer. Two years later the National brought together singer-songwriter Tori Amos, playwright Samuel Adamson and director Marianne Elliott to create a highly visceral musical theatre experience in The Light Princess. In 2014, one of the most talked about shows was a musical adaptation of American Psycho at the 325-seat Almeida Theatre in London’s Islington, best known for its productions of new plays and re-examinations of classical drama.

Tricked by Mrs Danvers to appear at a masquerade ball in the same historic costume as the title character, Rebecca’s heroine, known only as ‘Ich’, or ‘I’, sings ‘Heut’ nacht verzauber’ ich die Welt’ (Tonight I will bewitch the world). Her desire to transform and elevate herself in the new and exciting world she has married into is not unlike the experience of the European musical since the turn of the last century. Consciously trying to keep up with Broadway and the West End, the European musical has very often reached back to history for stories, characters and styles with which to fashion itself. Indeed for those who embrace the musical as an American form – or at least as a product primarily of the English-speaking world – the phrase ‘European musical’ can seem an oxymoron.¹

However, beyond international tours and productions of American musicals around the world, the creation of new musical theatre has steadily become more international. This is partly thanks to the popularity of the megamusical but also the result of local producers around the world who are no longer content with mounting imported musicals and instead want to generate their own new musicals, shows that might even have export potential. As the Music Theatre International website states: ‘The musical theatre is no longer the province of New York, London and the English speaking world – it is a truly multi-cultural phenomenon.’² This globalisation is certainly not unique to musical theatre; all forms of culture at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries are affected by the increasing interconnection of world societies and systems, an interdependency that has expanded exponentially during the past few decades through mediatised forms of communication, such as television, digital recordings, mobile phones and perhaps most of all the Internet. Critics of globalisation point to the breakdown of cultural specificity and nationhood; supporters applaud the levelling of world economic playing fields caused by technology. People on both sides discuss the spread of free market capitalism that seems to have become the inevitable result of globalisation. Entertainment forms bred out of capitalism, including the musical, are part of this phenomenon.³

Such developments as the Théâtre du Châtelet’s 2015 transfer of An American in Paris from Paris to Broadway, as well as the Dutch producer Stage Entertainment’s successful 2012 production of Rocky in Germany prior to its flopping on Broadway in 2014, are the result of globalisation and make it far less clear what labels ought to be applied to musicals that may tell American stories but only reach Broadway thanks to European capital and development periods in front of European audiences. While these examples may be best described as American musicals whose production was outsourced to Europe, it is precisely their European-ness that helps many European musicals succeed abroad. ‘Das Musical’ may not have firmly established itself yet on the Great White Way, but in East Asia, the European musical can easily outsell American imports and has even provoked imitations such as the original Korean musicals Werther and Woyzeck, based on classic German texts but conceived by Korean producers.

This chapter examines recent (in the past twenty-five years or so) developments in European musical theatre, focussing primarily on the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and France. Although the British Isles are geographically a part of Europe, this chapter only discusses British musicals in the context of their subsequent in non-English-speaking countries. All of these countries are now both importers and exporters of musical theatre, illustrating how despite the industry’s globalisation, audiences eagerly anticipate specifically European musicals, for the genre’s particular style, sound and stories. Beyond offering a definition of the genre, this chapter seeks to establish how and why it has been able to retain a European-ness while appealing to audiences at home and abroad.

Imports

Over the past thirty years, English-language musicals, either in English or in translation, have become extraordinarily popular in many European countries. The appearance of musicals from across the Atlantic or the Channel is not new, however. For example, the Broadway-style musical was introduced to Austria in 1956 by Marcel Prawy at the Vienna Volksoper, with Kiss Me, Kate. My Fair Lady was produced in both the Netherlands and Germany in 1961, five years after its Broadway premiere. West Side Story also toured Europe in 1961, featuring a young Michael Bennett as Baby John, in advance of the release of the Hollywood film adaptation, and it has since been a staple of both opera houses and amateur theatres. Fiddler on the Roof has enjoyed wide appeal in Europe; in fact, Gänzl calls it ‘one of the very few English-language musical plays of its period to make a significant and enduring mark in Europe’.⁷ Man of La Mancha, Hello, Dolly!, Blood Brothers, Cabaret, Chicago, A Chorus Line, Godspell, Grease, Hair, Sweeney Todd, Evita, La Cage aux Folles and other British or American shows have all enjoyed popularity in Europe. More recently, contemporary American musicals including Rent, Next to Normal, Dogfight, Avenue Q and The Last Five Years have been in regular circulation on European stages.

Plate 23 El Rey León at Teatro Lope de Vega, Madrid, winter 2017. Produced by Stage Entertainment, at the time the longest-running musical theatre piece in Madrid history.

Photograph by Paul R. Laird

While classic musicals are frequently programmed in European opera houses and contemporary musicals typically turn up in smaller venues or subsidised municipal theatres, large commercial venues tend to host the British and American megamusicals, from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s later shows to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Lion King and Tarzan. Les Misérables, often translated into the vernacular, is by no means the only megamusical that has taken the continent by storm.

During most of the 1960s, it was easy to view the musical as hopelessly out of touch with contemporary America. Even with three Broadway blockbusters opening in the same year (1964) – Fiddler on the Roof, Hello, Dolly! and Funny Girl – and the film version of My Fair Lady walking away with eight Academy Awards – it seemed apparent to some that the Golden Age of Musical Theatre had staged its own grand finale as these works neither reflected nor commented on the turmoil of the 1960s; they were escapist and nostalgic. With the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963), Martin Luther King (1968) and Senator Bobby Kennedy (1968), and the escalating war in Vietnam, the world was a different place from the comparative calm of the 1950s. In 1964, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, heralding with electronic chords that the British invasion was in full force, and rock ’n’ roll was here to stay. As urban centres across the county fell into disrepair, many downtown theatres were abandoned (often to the wrecking ball) and the road business of touring musicals began to decline. Financially and artistically, the fabulous invalid was not in very good shape.

When Hair arrived on Broadway in 1968, the Great White Way at last embraced a musical whose music and sentiment reflected some of the headlines of its day, and it was staged in a way that distanced itself aesthetically light years away from other musicals playing around Times Square. With the New York premieres of Stephen Sondheim’s Company (1970), Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line (1975) and John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse’s Chicago (1975), several new artists found audiences for their disparate visions of what a musical could be, sing and/or dance about. Experimentation continued as the concept musical, the jukebox musical, the revisal, the dansical, and the megamusical came to be. Despite rising ticket prices, theatre attendance began to climb both in New York and on the road. While movie musicals virtually disappeared from the silver screen after Cabaret (1972) and Grease (1978), the stage musical continued to attract audiences even as it experimented with new forms and structures. Truly, rumours of its demise were grossly exaggerated.

Changes that occurred in the American musical at the end of the twentieth century made it clear that while twenty-first century musical theatre owed much to the past, it was creating sub-genres which would have been unrecognisable to its original creators such as Cohan, Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, Hart and Fields. In order to explicate the musical at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we will first look at musical theatre genres that have their roots in the past, then move to new forms which emerged around and after 2000.¹ Finally, we will explore the changing roles of directors, choreographers, actors and producers as musical theatre explores new options in the twenty-first century.

The Pop/Rock Musical

For most of the twentieth century, musical theatre supplied many of the popular songs of the day. With the advent of rock ’n’ roll, however, musical theatre composers were slow to adopt this genre as rhythm had replaced melody as the unifying element of a song, and lyrics often took a back seat to percussion. For these reasons, most conventional Broadway composers veered away from rock. As a result, it is generally composers new to Broadway or the West End who write the majority of pop/rock musicals; unhappily, these writing team teams tend to create only one successful work. (See Chapter 14 for more on rock musicals.) Where are the follow-up hits by Galt McDermott (Hair, 1968), Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey (Grease, 1972), Carol King (Really Rosie, 1980), Roger Miller (Big River, 1985), Stew (Passing Strange, 2008), Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (Once, 2012) and others? While such musicals enjoyed long runs, they appear to be one-offs.

The exceptions to this one-hit trend are Stephen Schwartz, Elton John, David Yazbek, Frank Wildhorn, Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, who have brought numerous contemporary pop/rock musicals to the Broadway stage. Following Godspell (1971), Schwartz penned successful Broadway musicals – Pippin (1972), The Magic Show (1974) – and supplied the lyrics to three animated film musicals (Pocahontas, 1995; The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996; Enchanted, 2007) and music and lyrics to another (The Prince of Egypt, 1997) before he wrote the blockbuster Wicked (2003). (See Chapter 1 for more on the creation of Wicked.) Elton John was certainly no stranger to popular prestige, but even his most ardent fans were probably surprised by the vengeance with which he conquered the stage musical. Elton John and Tim Rice’s film The Lion King (1994) became a phenomenal stage sensation in 1997 and then John began writing directly for the stage, starting with Aida (lyrics by Tim Rice) in 2000, Billy Elliot: The Musical (lyrics by Lee Hall) in 2005 and Lestat (lyrics by Bernie Taupin) in 2006. Only Lestat failed to connect with critics and audiences.

Having been recorded by a number of popular groups and the composer of scores for television, David Yazbek came to musical theatre by adapting for the stage the 1997 British hit film The Fully Monty. Teaming up with veteran librettist Terrence McNally, the stage musical ran for 770 performances. Yazbek returned to Broadway with the stage musical adaptation of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005; 627 performances), this time collaborating with librettist Jeffrey Lane. On the other hand, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (2010), closed after 69 performances. Along with Elton John, Yazbek is a successful pop songwriter who made the transition to musical theatre, proving that he can write for character and keep his award-winning aesthetic of the engaging, contemporary pop song. Another pop song composer who has had success on Broadway is Frank Wildhorn, who had three musicals running simultaneously on Broadway in 1999: Jekyll & Hyde (1997), Scarlet Pimpernel (1997) and The Civil War (1999).⁴ These were followed by Dracula (2004), Carmen (Prague, 2008), Count of Monte Cristo (Switzerland, 2009), Wonderland (2011), Bonnie and Clyde (2011) and a 2013 revival of Jekyll & Hyde, all of which had short runs.

Fellow participants in the BMI Musical Theatre workshop, Brian Yorkey (librettist, lyricist) and Tom Kitt (composer, conductor, orchestrator) have collaborated on two hit Broadway musicals: Next to Normal (2009; 733 performances; Pulitzer Prize) and If/Then (2014; 401 performances). Currently playing the regional circuit (Signature Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Cleveland Playhouse, Alley Theatre), Disney’s Freaky Friday features music by Kitt, lyrics by Yorkey and a book by Bridget Carpenter. Yorkey penned the book for Sting’s The Last Ship (2014), while Kitt has been represented on Broadway by Bring It On (2012, with Amanda Green, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Jeff Whitty), and High Fidelity (2006, with Amanda Green, and David Lindsay-Abaire).

Related to the pop/rock musical is the ‘jukebox musical’. These revues and musicals take advantage of previously written music, as opposed to the previously mentioned productions, which feature original music. Similar to the revue, the jukebox musical is an assemblage of pre-existing songs where the emphasis is clearly on the songs, not on plot and/or character. Unlike earlier elaborate revues put on by the likes of Ziegfeld and George White, late-twentieth century revues tend to focus on the music of one composer and generally do not showcase stars. With the exception of Bubblin’ Brown Sugar (1976), Sophisticated Ladies (1981) and Black and Blue (1989) – which featured large casts, elaborate sets, and demanding choreography – most late-twentieth century jukebox musicals were small, intimate affairs: Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978, music of Fats Waller), Five Guys Named Moe (1992, songs by Louis Jordan), Smokey Joe’s Cafe (1995, songs by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller), Dream (1997, lyrics by Johnny Mercer) and Sondheim on Sondheim (Reference Sondheim2010, songs by Stephen Sondheim).

Plate 24 Imperial Theatre marquee featuring The Boy from Oz, summer 2004.

Photograph by William A. Everett

One variation of the jukebox musical/musical revue is the ‘disguised pop/rock concert’. In this format a series of pop or rock hits are staged as a concert; the evening invariably ends with an uninterrupted series of numbers performed by the cast. Some of these musicals are semi-biographical: Beatlemania (1977, Beatles), Eubie! (1978, Eubie Blake), Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story (1990), Leader of the Pack (1985, Ellie Greenwich) and Jersey Boys (2006, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons). Others are less concert and more biography, often using songs a singer and/or songwriter made famous and include The Boy from Oz (2003, Peter Allen), Good Vibrations (2005, Beach Boys), Fela! (2009, Fela Kuti), Beautiful, The Carole King Musical (2014) and On Your Feet! (2015, Gloria Estefan).

Another genre of the jukebox musical that utilises pre-existing songs, but creates a plot around them, is the ‘story album musical’ or the ‘anthology with a story’ musical. (These contain plots where the story is not a biography of the songwriter.) Some incorporate songs written originally for musical theatre, and others use pop songs. Two of the most popular of the former variety are the ‘new’ Gershwin musicals My One and Only (1983) and Crazy for You (1992). Crazy for You contains five songs from Girl Crazy, four from A Damsel in Distress, three from the film Shall We Dance and six other Gershwin tunes. Ken Ludwig wrote a new libretto; directed by Mike Ockrent and choreographed by Susan Stroman, the musical was very popular with audiences. Similarly, two plot musicals have created new characters and contexts for songs already written by Stephen Sondheim: Marry Me a Little (1980) and Putting It Together (1999).

Jukebox musicals featuring pop songs (and non-biographical plots) include the international sensation Mamma Mia! (1999); the Billy Joel/Twyla Tharp dansical, Movin’ Out (2002); Queen’s We Will Rock You (2002); and Green Day’s American Idiot (2010). Like the biographical or rock concert jukebox musical, musicals in this niche enjoy the fact that many potential theatre patrons already know the music very well. During their ten years of existence as a band (1972–82), the Swedish group ABBA had fourteen singles in the Top 40 (four in the Top 10), and record sales that exceeded 350 million units. British playwright Catherine Johnson took twenty-two of their greatest hits and fashioned a plot around them about a young woman who wants her father to give her away at her wedding; problem is, mom doesn’t know which one of three men she was seeing at the time might be Sophie’s dad. The NYC production closed in 2015, after fourteen years (5,773 performances), making it the eighth-longest running musical in Broadway history. Playing for six years (2003–9) in Las Vegas, it is the longest-running full-length Broadway musical ever to play the city of chance. Mamma Mia! has been performed in eighteen languages in more than forty countries to more than 54 million people; it has become an entertainment industry in its own right, with worldwide grosses exceeding $2 billion. A $52 million film version of Mamma Mia! was released in 2008, starring Meryl Streep, earning $609.8 million.