Some Lessons of the Season

It can probably be traced back to 2001 and the arrival of The Producers. Ever since that time, the tongue-in-cheek, cartoon-style musical has dominated Broadway. And The Producers also established another popular form, the musical about musicals.

This season saw the arrival of Spamalot and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, both filled with such spoofing. Much of Spamalot sends up Broadway musicals. And both evince yet another current style, the self-referential musical that occasionally breaks the fourth wall to comment on itself.

It's hard to consider Dracula a serious musical. While Little Women qualifies as serious, it was too wan to make a case for the genre, and was disqualified here and there by songs with a generic pop sound. Brooklyn was serious, but also cloying and irritating.

As has often been the case, it was left to Lincoln Center Theater to mount the season's two musicals with the greatest claim to seriousness. Dessa Rose was somewhat unfairly dismissed. While it was seriously flawed, it contained two superb lead performances La Chanze, Rachel York and a narrative that was ultimately moving. Dessa Rose is playing out its limited engagement and will fold at the end of this week. Lincoln Center Theater's The Light in the Piazza has fared better, receiving its share of praise and award nominations.

Yet it would appear that even Piazza isn't headed for a long Broadway life. While it's now scheduled to last to Labor Day, that would still give the show only a five-month run. It would seem that Piazza is too rarefied a piece, its score too inaccessible, to reach a wide audience.

So in terms of popularity and critical acclaim, the serious musical remains on the critical list.

The Broadway play remains an endangered species.

A related issue. Articles recently appeared hailing the return of the Broadway play. These were reacting to the acclaim and apparent financial success of Doubt and The Pillowman. But it must be remembered that, while Broadway seasons of decades ago used to produce dozens of new plays and comedies, this season produced just five plays. Two of them Democracy, Gem of the Ocean were commercial flops, and one of them Brooklyn Boy was a not-for-profit attraction. The Broadway comedy is virtually extinct, long since subsumed by television.

So while it's good that the Broadway season produced a pair of well-received plays, they hardly qualify as a trend or indicate a resurgence on Broadway of non-musical shows.

Nothing closes quickly these days.

Look through an old copy of Theatre World and you'll find musicals that closed after one performance, four performances, six performances, eight performances. These shows received mostly negative reviews, and their wise producers chose to cut their losses and shut down immediately.

Nowadays it takes so much time and money to mount a Broadway musical that producers are extremely reluctant to close their shows quickly, even when it's pretty obvious that a show will never succeed. Even Good Vibrations, the worst reviewed musical of the season, hung on for a couple of months, as did another poorly reviewed musical, Dracula.

But that was nothing compared to Brooklyn, which has continued to play for seven months, in spite of the fact that it opened to almost unanimously unfavorable reviews and has never caught on at the box office. Last season, Bombay Dreams, a more expensive loser, hung on even longer before finally giving up. Clearly, the one-week musical is a thing of the past.

Not every musical needs to be revived.

Are we running out of musicals to revive, or rather shows that truly merit a revival? This Broadway season saw just two commercial musical revivals, La Cage aux Folles and Sweet Charity. La Cage hasn't thrived at the box office, and it's too soon to tell how Sweet Charity will fare, even if it doesn't appear to be a smash.

But more to the point, was it necessary to bring back these two shows just now? La Cage was eminently suitable for revival, but it surely could have waited another ten years. Sweet Charity already had one commercially unsuccessful Broadway revival. And in both cases, there was nothing in the casting or staging that made the revival deeply necessary. Was it worth reviving Charity when the best they could do for a star was the appealing but less-than-sensational Christina Applegate?

I don't mean to be hard on these two productions; indeed, we've seen worse revivals. But it does make one wonder how many titles remain that cry out to be revived. Next season will presumably give us commercial mountings of Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, and perhaps The Pajama Game and Mame. All but Night Music have already had a Broadway revival, and even Night Music has had a number of New York returns at New York City Opera.

The jukebox musical may not be going away so fast.

When All Shook Up, the season's second so-called "jukebox musical," failed to win a single Tony nomination, it was widely interpreted as sending a message that that genre of musical was no longer welcome on Broadway. And of course the season's first jukebox show, Good Vibrations, was panned and likewise received no nominations.

But All Shook Up is not expected to leave town soon, and neither, I suspect, is the jukebox musical. Part of the reason is the continued international success of Mamma Mia!, a bonanza likely to remain unique in the jukebox field.

The next two Broadway jukebox shows, Lennon and Jersey Boys, are taking a different approach, fitting a pre-existing song catalogue into a biography of the songwriters or performers associated with the songs. So those shows are more along the lines of Buddy or The Boy from Oz than All Shook Up.

There are bound to be producers who will wish to play it safe by putting together a show built around old songs. Mamma Mia! made it look easy, but that show is smarter than it may seem. Still, All Shook Up demonstrates a pretty successful use of the genre, and because it was fairly well-received, there are likely to be further attempts.

Solo shows aren't surefire.

Because of their relatively low costs, solo shows are supposed to be a comparatively easy way of turning a profit. This season, however, Mario Cantone, Whoopi Goldberg, Dame Edna, Eve Ensler, and Jackie Mason all came to Broadway with solo or mostly solo shows, and none set the box-office on fire. Of course, one solo show did manage to do just that, Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays. But that was the exception.

Already on the schedule for the new season are solos by Hal Holbrook in a return of his Mark Twain Tonight, Suzanne Somers, Antony Sher in Primo, Martin Short, and perhaps Chita Rivera and Sarah Jones. Of course, such productions usually present less of a financial risk than a full-scale play or musical. But this season demonstrated that they only occasionally thrive.

London is back as a source of hit musicals.

In recent seasons, London has sent us such dubious items as Taboo, Bombay Dreams, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. This coming season, Broadway is scheduled to get Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman in White, which received mixed reviews upon its London opening.

But during the past season, London produced two blockbusters that opened to ecstatic reviews and are certain to be imported to Broadway in future seasons: Mary Poppins a co-production of Disney and Cameron Mackintosh and Billy Elliot. Indeed, this pair received stronger reviews than any new musical Broadway produced this season, demonstrating that the days of the imported London musical are far from over.