Theatre on the Rocks

Ah, the clever double entendre. Last refuge of the person with very little of substance to say. That's me, baby!

I do think there's a problem with American theatre, well a host of problems really, which cannot be solved simply. But one of the things which can be done, simply-wise, is to stop making musicals. Seriously.

Now I'm not a musical theatre fan, so you might interpret this bias to mean that I have no business telling musical theatre fans what to think. But I'm not demanding a halt to musicals because I don't like them; I'm demanding a moratorium until we can stop doing three things. First, we need to stop producing revivals of the same old musicals. I know, I know, you go to New York and you want to see Cats, but really, maybe it's time to give them a rest. Second, we need to stop producing schlocky musicals in general. The quality has seriously gone downhill. I don't care much for Gilbert and Sullivan or Rodgers and Hammerstein, but they could write a musical. Not that they should be exempted from rule number one.

But those two are small potatoes and debatable, and frankly I wouldn't care if no one but me felt that way about them. So maybe we won't stop making schlocky musicals or rerunning the ones we already have. No biggie. What we absolutely must do, to rejuvenate American theatre, is to stop producing musicals based on movies or television. At the end of the day, when everyone is wondering why live theatre even exists any more, we do not need to give the doubters ammunition by turning into Hollywood Lite.

But it gets worse. Because putting movies on stage is bad, putting TV movies on stage is worse, but putting TV movies on ice is the lowest of the low. When Disney brings High School Musical (a cable television movie, that is to say, a movie with the same credibility as soft-core cable porn) to the world of the ice rink, then we need to call a halt. It's just not good enough, people.

Is American theatre creatively bankrupt? I don't think so at all. I just think that people are too worried that audiences don't want to see anything they haven't seen before. That's true of television and movies too; noticed the number of sequels recently? Sure, we can all sit back and wallow in low expectations, and we'll probably keep the arts alive for a while. Or we can break the mold completely and do like some artists have done in the past (i.e. starve). I'm not recommending either of these paths.

Like I said, it's not a simple problem, and it won't be a simple solution. There will probably be more schlock, more movie-musicals, and more reruns. But if we start slowly altering things now, maybe no one will notice we've done it until it's too late, and the idea of Young Frankenstein the Musical is as ridiculous to people as the idea of World Wrestling the Musical is today (well, maybe more ridiculous, since I can completely see the WWE putting out a musical; it's all spectacle, right Aristotle?).