Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals

The Bestest Musical Ever - Fall 2012

I love the fall. I've always been the type of nerd who couldn't wait to get back to school. And now that I teach full-time, that nerd-liness continues unabated.

Of course, one of the things that I look forward to the most is teaching my musical-theater history course, and this year I had something extra exciting to look forward to. For this academic year, my course is two-semesters long. Previously, it was only one semester for my freshmen sections, although last year I did get a chance to teach two semesters to the grad students for the first time.

And more students means more work, naturally, but for you, dear reader, it also means more robust lists. Every year, I start my course by asking students to write down the three best musicals of all time. We then make a list on the board of the shows that people have voted for, and then we start a discussion about what makes good shows good.

This year, I had 75 students in total voting, and here are their choices, as well as the number of students who chose that show as one of their top three:

West Side Story 25
Les Miserables 20
Ragtime 15
Into the Woods 14
Oklahoma 12
Hair 9
The Phantom of the Opera 8
Sweeney Todd 8
Rent 5
South Pacific 5
A Chorus Line 4
Carousel 4
In the Heights 4
My Fair Lady 4
Next to Normal 4
Singin' in the Rain 4
Spring Awakening 4
Sunday in the Park with George 4
Wicked 4
Anything Goes 3
The Light in the Piazza 3
The Music Man 3
Once 3
Parade 3
Porgy and Bess 3
Show Boat 3
The Sound of Music 3
Aida 2
Cabaret 2
Chicago 2
Gypsy 2
Hairspray 2
Kiss Me Kate 2
The Lion King 2
Miss Saigon 2

Here are the shows that received one vote each:

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Cinderella, Company, Crazy for You, Damn Yankees, Follies, Fosse, Good News, Grey Gardens, Guys and Dolls, Jersey Boys, Jesus Christ Superstar, Little Shop of Horrors, Mary Poppins, Memphis, Passion, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Songs for a New World, Spamalot, The Fantasticks, The Producers, The Rocky Horror Show, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Scottsboro Boys, The Wild Party (Lippa), The Wizard of Oz, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Urinetown

So, what do we see here? Well, as always, the students' choices are partly governed by which shows are currently, or were recently, playing on Broadway and/or touring the country. The presence of West Side Story at the top of the list was no doubt influenced by the national tour, which recently ended its trans-continental traverse. The similarly high ranking of Les Miserables and Into the Woods is likely related to the number of regional and high-school productions of those shows.

Rent is ranking much lower than it has in the past. Not sure what to make of that, other than the fact that more people are getting a chance to see it regionally, and it's possible that the show seems less impressive without professionals performing the vocally challenging score.

Spring Awakening also seems to have slipped in recent years. I'm thinking this is because the show needs a very strong directorial concept to work, and even though the show has been getting a lot of regional play, it's possible that in the absence of a strong director, people are noticing that the show itself isn't really that strong.

Wicked is ranking a lot lower than it has in the past. Perhaps the Future Show Queens of America (FSQA) have finally moved beyond the whole "Wicked is Like the Fiercest Show That Ever Was" (WILFSTEW) stage and started including other shows in their general barometer of fierce-osity. (Don't get me wrong. I love Wicked. But I also love when show queens broaden their horizons beyond Elphaba worship.)

It's wonderful to see Ragtime place so highly on this list. For years, I was concerned that Ragtime would sort of fade from the national consciousness, mostly under the presumption that not many local theaters would put the show on because of the controversial subject matter as well as because of the need for large numbers of African Americans, who traditionally haven't been as involved in community and regional theater. Thankfully, that seems to be changing, which gives more people a chance to see this powerful and challenging show.

So many classic shows placed relatively strongly on this year's list, including a big thumbs-up for Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, including Oklahoma, Carousel and South Pacific. Regular readers will recall my deep and abiding esteem for the first two of these shows, and my relative disdain for the last.

Among the new shows, Next to Normal has been holding fast over the past few semesters. This will likely continue as the show continues to catch on regionally. Regular readers will also recall my ambivalence about Next to Normal: I admire the craft of the show, but have significant problems with its apparent message regarding psychiatry. One lovely new addition to the list is Once, the big winner this year at the Tony Awards -- and rightly so -- and a significant financial success, having recently recouped its investment, and continuing to perform strongly at the box office, even in the traditional post-Labor Day drop-off.

There are always a few oddballs and aberrations on the list each year. Who'd a thunk Gypsy would rank so low? And after the wonderful revival of Follies last season, you'd think the show would get more than one vote, right? Also, why are Singin' in the Rain and The Wizard of Oz even on the list? I guess I should have specified that we would be focusing on stage musicals as opposed to movie musicals. (Sure, both shows have been done on the stage, but never very well, at least IMHO.)

How about you, dear reader? What do you notice in the list year's list? Any surprises, pleasant or otherwise? Any glaring omissions, from where you sit? Any shows included here that warm the cockles of your heart? Do the choices of these FSQAs give you hope for the future, or do they make you wish ever more strongly for a musical-theater time machine? Lemme know, m'kay?

 

Review - Chaplin on Broadway

Some bad musicals make you angry. Ghost was one, mostly due to the arrogance of the pop-music dilettantes who blithely thought that, just because they could write hit songs, they could automatically write an effective musical-theater score as well. Other bad musicals are tedious. The excruciating Lestat certainly fit that bill, although that show also had the dilettante factor going against it.

Still other bad musicals are just plain sad. The new Broadway musical Chaplin unfortunately falls into that category.

The main culprits here are an instantly forgettable score by Christopher Curtis, and an overly ambitious yet undernourished book by Curtis and Thomas Meehan. Not helping matters much are the utilitarian direction and choreography by Warren Carlyle. Add in a production design (costume design by Amy Clark and Martin Pakledinaz, scenic design by  Beowulf Boritt) that has admittedly gorgeous details but that adds up to a dull wash of monochrome, and you have a musical that's just about as colorless, both literally and figuratively, as the show's Playbill cover (see left). 

In fact, pretty much the only thing that Chaplin has going for it is a stellar cast of Broadway notables and newcomers, particularly the wonderfully animated and eminently appealing Rob McClure in the title role. McClure was likewise dazzling in the Ray Bolger role in the Encores production of Where's Charley? two seasons ago, and, make no mistake, he is a major talent, someone deserving of a far better show than the grim and lifeless Chaplin. 

For a show that purports to be about the man behind the legend, Chaplin tells us very little about Charlie Chaplin as a person. The show traffics in the rather hackneyed trope of the crying clown. The only dramatic motor the book supplies for Chaplin and his quest for fame is that his mother became mentally ill while he was very young and spent most of her life in a series of asylums. Somehow this is supposed to inform and justify everything that comes later. Well, that and Chaplin's notorious marital woes, although it's not really clear what Chaplin's mommy trouble has to do with his lady trouble, at least not as enumerated here.

In an effort to punch up the rather leaden book, director Warren Carlyle kind of overdoses on the borrowed metaphors. The show begins with a black-and-white film of Chaplin, which then transitions to actor McClure walking on a high-wire. The result is visually stunning, but the metaphor is anything but inspired, having been used in the musical Barnum and the movie "All That Jazz," among many others. We also have the boxing match representing Chaplin's lady troubles, used to much better effect in the original version of the musical Reefer Madness. We have gossip columnist Hedda Hopper manipulating Charlie like a marionette, which seems stolen from the movie of Chicago. And the show's design is almost entirely in black and white, with a sudden rush of color at the very end, a devise used more effectively in the stage version of Dracula. In other words, Carlyle's directorial concept seems to have been, "Just add metaphors and stir."

It could be that librettists Curtis and Meehan have simply tried to do too much with one show. The plot to Chaplin is pretty much cradle-to-grave, and as a result too much of the plot feels thin and rushed, which is funny because it also seems to move so painfully slowly. The plot to Chaplin doesn't thicken, it drips. What's more, the writers make a number of questionable choices as to what the show should focus on. At the end of act one, we're subjected to a rather pointless and joyless Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest, after which the act ends without any dramatic tension. Then, in act two, the show ultimately becomes about Hedda Hopper's vendetta against Chaplin. This fracas ends with Chaplin in European exile, mostly because of his communist sympathies. But the show would have you believe it was simply because Chaplin wouldn't grant Hopper an interview, which trivializes what for Chaplin was a deeply held conviction.

The songs in Chaplin make little lasting impression, whether it's bland ballads ("What Only Love Can See") or generic uptempo numbers ("Life Can Be Like the Movies," "Just Another Day in Hollywood"). The songs feature an unfortunate series of lazy rhymes, such as "journey/lonely," "amazing/changing," "sorrow/follow," and "heard/world." Charlie of course gets his "I want" song, but all he really reveals is a vague desire to become "somebody other than me." Chaplin also gets a sort of overly belt-y 11 o'clock number called "Where Are All the People?," which was just a bit too reminiscent of "Who Can I Turn To?" from The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. Coincidentally, Greasepaint was co-written by Anthony Newley, who toured the U.S. in another failed attempt at a Chaplin musical in 1983.

In addition to the sensationally talented McClure, the cast of Chaplin also includes some of the best female musical-theater talent that Broadway has to offer. Jenn Colella is marvelous as always as Hedda Hopper and manages to convey far more depth and variation than the authors have provided in the material. The lovely Christiane Noll is quite touching as Chaplin's mother, but again the part is painfully under-written. And Erin Mackey manages to bring nuance to the part of Oona O'Neill, Chaplin's fourth wife, idealized here to the point of sainthood. (Also eminently worthy of mention is the adorable little scene stealer Zachary Unger playing Chaplin as a young boy.) Talented performers all, although it's hard to imagine that Chaplin will provide them with a lasting employment opportunity.