Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals by Scott Miller. Northeastern, 2011. 288 pp., $24.95 paper.
Off-Broadway Musicals Since 1919: From Greenwich Village Follies to The Toxic Avenger by Thomas S. Hischak. Scarecrow Press, 2011. 522 pp., $75 cloth.
Something’s Coming, Something Good: West Side Story and the American Imagination by Misha Berson. Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2011. 360 pp., $19.99 paper.
Forget the so-called golden age of the American musical that allegedly ran from Oklahoma! to Fiddler on the Roof, Scott Miller decrees in his provocative and entertaining new book, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals. “The real golden age of musical theatre began in the mid-1990s,” he writes, “and we’re still in the midst of it today.” Like all ardent iconoclasts, Miller, artistic director of St. Louis’s New Line Theatre, dramatically overstates his case. You don’t have to dismiss Rodgers and Hammerstein shows as “more historical artifacts than living theatre” in order to be excited by the ferment stirred up by such recent musicals as Spring Awakening, American Idiot and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.
Miller himself is too smart and too passionately engaged in musical theatre to be terribly consistent in his claim that “older shows and musical forms no longer have much relevance for most of us.” He tips his hat repeatedly to Stephen Sondheim, whose innovative 1970s musicals—containing, by the way, not a shred of rock-and-roll—paved the way for the contemporary works Miller admires. And his list of “the great scores of the American theatre” includes not just Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd but also such warhorses as Show Boat and even R&H’s Carousel, despite his dissing of the team’s “midcentury morality and that ubiquitous Broadway foxtrot.”
Moreover, as theatre historians Thomas S. Hischak and Misha Berson remind us—in the former’s pleasingly opinionated survey, Off-Broadway Musicals Since 1919, and the latter’s affectionate tribute, Something’s Coming, Something Good: West Side Story and the American Imagination— there have always been alternatives to the big, brassy commercial musical. And even Broadway itself has been intermittently receptive to artists with game-changing ambitions—folks like Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Sondheim, who believed they could make street gangs dance and make a mainstream audience like it. There’s more continuity and growth in the American musical theatre than Miller acknowledges. But that doesn’t lessen the value of his eloquent special pleading for the musicals he champions as authentic expressions of seismic social and sexual upheavals that—okay, let’s admit it—would have had Rodgers and Hammerstein reeling.
Off-Broadway has typically been the place for more difficult material, though the boundaries have blurred. Indeed, Hischak, who divides his book into decades, sardonically titles the chapter on the 2000s “Fodder for Broadway.” He detects this trend as early as the 1950s; his complimentary listing for the delightfully twisted fairy tale Once Upon a Mattress observes that it easily moved uptown from the Phoenix Theatre “because, frankly, it was put together like a Broadway show.” In Hischak’s view, “Off Broadway is about smart, sharp little shows that make a personal impact,” but do not always translate well to Broadway. In general, he thinks Off-Broadway musicals should stay Off Broadway even when they’re hits, as the Marc Blitzstein version of Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera did in the ’50s and The Fantasticks (“still the finest of all Off-Broadway musicals,” in his estimation) did from 1960 to 2002.
It’s not that Hischak dislikes the grander scale of Broadway musicals. “The American theatre is richer for the contrasts [between] these two very different approaches,” he writes. But he fears that the unique qualities of the Off-Broadway musical—intimacy, inventiveness, rough edges—will be lost if it becomes merely a low-cost venue for Broadway tryouts. Judiciously selecting the most representative Off-Broadway musicals from 1919 to 2009, Hischak spotlights some nowneglected figures, including producers Ben Bagley and Julius Monk, whose sophisticated revues crammed with young talent helped define Off Broadway as a significant cultural force in the ’50s, and composer-producer Al Carmines, who expressed the thornier zeitgeist of the ’60s in challenging, unconventional “plays with music” like Promenade. Recognition of theatrical life beyond New York is another nice feature of Off-Broadway Musicals, which frequently notes many shows’ later productions in regional theatres.
That wider focus is also evident in Miller’s book; of the 10 shows he profiles in depth, six originated outside New York—as far away as London, in the case of Jesus Christ Superstar and The Rocky Horror Show—and only two (I Love My Wife and High Fidelity) were developed in the conventional Broadway manner.
Something’s Coming, Something Good takes a comprehensive look at the musical that in many ways is the progenitor of the works that inspire Miller. “Storming the Rubicon between high-brow and middle-brow art,” as Seattle Times theatre critic Berson puts it, West Side Story asserted the musical’s right to depict social problems and offered early glimpses of a youth culture that came into its own in later rock musicals.
There’s not a lot new in Berson’s loving compendium, but West Side Story’s many fans will enjoy her thorough coverage of the show’s original production, the celebrated movie version, and its cultural impact, including the rise of Robbins-style director/choreographers like Graciela Daniele and Susan Stroman, and subsequent “youth musicals,” beginning with Hair in 1967.
That’s where Miller picks up the story, arguing that the ’60s and ’70s were “an explosive period for musical theatre” that prepared the ground for “the rebirth of the art form in the ’90s.” His featured shows are not all rock musicals, and only Hair pays much attention to drugs; America’s conflicted attitudes about sex form a stronger unifying chain, from Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party through The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. As mentioned before, consistency is not Miller’s forte; firm convictions backed up by ferocious theatrical intelligence are. His background as a director is evident in his probing discussions of scores, lyrics and librettos, which deal in specifics of musical styles and word choices as vehicles for the revelation of character and theme. “Like the legendary theatre composer Stephen Sondheim, [Larry] O’Keefe doesn’t use a reprise in Bat Boy unless it has a very different meaning and dramatic function from the first time we heard it,” Miller writes in a sentence typical of his deeply grounded knowledge.
Being a director, he also has an irritating tendency to inform you of the many instances in which, in his view, an insensitive production travestied the intentions of a great script and score. And sometimes his notions—Grease as a female-empowering assertion of sexual liberation, for example—are not entirely convincing.
All of which is simply to say that Miller has strong, idiosyncratic opinions that spark stimulating reflection even when they seem wide of the mark. This is also true of his title, which suggests a narrower range than the book actually has. What he’s really celebrating is the expanding horizons of the musical theatre (a development that didn’t begin in the 1960s, though Miller launches his personal investigation there), reflected (for now) in a new generation of artists who take rock-and-roll for granted as a valid mode of expression in the musical theatre. Rock isn’t their only palette, but it’s a natural one for younger people to employ as they depict sexual confusion, psychological crisis, political conflict and racial prejudice with a 21st-century edge. That classic musicals like Show Boat, Gypsy and South Pacific explored such issues in the idiom of their times, and have proven in recent revivals that they still speak to us today, only seems to prove the durability and flexibility of this homegrown American theatrical form.
Wendy Smith, a contributing editor of The American Scholar, is the author of Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940.
