Musical Theatre

I had heard very mixed reports about this show when I went to see it a little less than a year ago. A couple of the prominent critics had said some very nice things about it, but the word of mouth in the Broadway fan community was just short of poisonous. And while the combination of a classic movie, composer David Yazbek’s credentials, and what I had already seen of leading man Santino Fontana’s abilities seemed to provide the theoretical ingredients for a hit, the utterly underwhelming number from the show performed on the Tonys broadcast the year before wasn’t exactly an encouraging sign.

Still, plenty of shows have made a poor choice of their Tony showcase numbers (Curtains and Bandstand are two examples that immediately spring to mind), and as anyone who knows reads this site regularly knows, I find polarizing shows, songs or albums absolutely fascinating as material for my reviews. So I went to see for myself what had caused all these wildly different reactions.

The fact that it took me almost a year to actually finish the review is mostly the product of depression-induced writer’s block stemming from the current world situation, but I won’t pretend the show’s quality and level of overall importance didn’t contribute to it being somewhat low on my list of priorities. Make of that what you will.

Truth to tell, both the show’s adherents and its detractors were essentially right. The thing that everyone who liked it praised about it is certainly true…this was an extremely funny evening. The movie had been more of a character comedy, but the musical’s book was a raucous farce with hilarious dialogue, superb physical comedy and a marvelous comic star turn by Santino Fontana in the lead. Fontana hasn’t garnered the stardom he deserves (and this show’s failure probably isn’t going to help), but you’re most likely to recognize him as the voice of Prince Hans in Frozen, and he also had a major role on the cult musical sitcom Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Some people, including the authors of the book Musical Misfires (a disappointing would-be successor to Ken Mandelbaum’s iconic Not Since Carrie),  have insinuated that this show closed primarily because of the outrage of Transgender rights activists who misinterpreted its premise (presumably without actually having seen either it or the movie on which it’s based). Indeed, in the musical, it is specifically pointed out that Michael faking a gender purely to salvage his acting career is at least as offensive to actual Transwomen as it is to all other women (which is a hard point to dispute, actually).

But while it’s true that misguided politically-fueled outrage on social media platforms is capable of closing a  Broadway show under the right circumstances (Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet being the obvious example), I still think, the effective comedy elements notwithstanding, that there were enough holes in this particular craft that it probably would have sunk notwithstanding any bad press it may have gotten on Twitter.

What really did the show in was its relentlessly mediocre score. That Tony number had been no fluke, which is surprising given that composer David Yazbek’s most recent work for Broadway prior to this had been the best of his career. Not only does this score not remotely approach the level of Yazbek’s ravishing score to The Band’s Visit, it isn’t even comparable to his earlier scores for The Full Monty or Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Granted, this isn’t Yazbek’s first weak score, but even its predecessor in that field, the musical version of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, was if nothing else memorably terrible. By contrast, on the night I saw Tootsie, I could not remember a single individual song by the time I got home from the theater.

From listening to the cast album, that result is not really all that surprising. Michael’s two introspective solos, “Whaddaya Do” and “Talk to Me, Dorothy”, are effective enough as character material, but they both sound more like sung monologues than actual songs (there’s a reason most major numbers in musicals that deviate from the standard song form usually go for showstopper-level intensity, which these two definitely do not). The rest of the score vacillates between tolerable but bland ballads (the best of them, “There Was John”, sounds like a B-list imitation of Cathy’s numbers from The Last 5 Years), big, empty production numbers that fill the stage with noise and motion but ultimately accomplish nothing, and comedy songs that don’t remotely match the humor level of the dialogue and are generally either heavy-handed (“Jeff Sums It Up”, “This Thing”) or annoying (“What’s Gonna Happen”). I appreciate that they didn’t interpolate the hit Pop song written for the film, “It Might Be You” (that tactic tends to reek of desperation, as it did in the otherwise admirable Rocky musical), but frankly, in this case it might have been an improvement: at least then the show would have featured one memorable song.

There were, admittedly, some other minor flaws…the feminist message, regardless of its validity, was poorly handled and frequently came off as heavy-handed and preachy, and the ambiguous ending, while probably more honest than that of the film, was still not entirely satisfying.

Also, there was a sort of hole in the show’s central proposition. There are, without question, many, many fields where the best jobs go to men, and women are at a professional disadvantage: Broadway acting is not one of them. On some behind-the-scenes jobs like composing and directing, the narrative of a male-dominated field that women are prevented from breaking into holds sadly true, but in the acting pool, at least since Broadway switched most of its focus from straight plays to musicals, women are if anything at an advantage. Moving the story from Hollywood to Broadway certainly didn’t eliminate the core issues of sexism the show deals with, but it did make the primary stated reason that Michael’s impersonation was supposed to be reprehensible (that he was taking jobs away from real women in a supposedly male-dominated field) seem rather absurd.

Indeed, the heavy changes made to the setting and characters from the original movie, while probably the right choice in theory (Yazbek made much of this in the pre-Broadway promotion stages, pointing out—not without accuracy—how excessive fidelity and perceived redundancy had done a number of stage adaptations of iconic movies), may have alienated fans of the film, thus depriving the show of its most obvious built-in audience. Again, I admire their integrity, but in practice, they may have wound up choosing their principles over success or even actual quality.

But I suspect the show was funny enough to overcome those secondary problems if the music had been stronger. With a first-rate score, Tootsie might well have been a hit. But a musical with a truly weak score has to have an absolutely genius-level book to achieve any long-term success. Look at 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee…apart from two or three standout numbers, its score was only marginally better than Tootsie’s, but it was a one-of-a-kind stroke of inspiration and utterly hilarious (not one or the other, which might explain why Be More Chill, which had a similarly weak score, didn’t last long on Broadway despite its significant cult following). Hell, even momentary success with a weak score usually depends on a presold fanbase (Spamalot, The Addams Family) or a star so big that people will pay for a theater ticket purely for the privilege of seeing them in person (Applause).

This was definitely a missed opportunity, a disappointing treatment of an idea with not-insignificant potential, but it still doesn’t qualify as one of the sublime heartbreaker flops of recent years in the way that, say, Big Fish or Groundhog Day or Spongebob Squarepants: The Musical do. For all its laughs, its forgettable score ultimately renders it little more than a pleasant mediocrity, and I can’t really see it succeeding even at a more economically prosperous time for Broadway (or indeed, with or without any of the controversy it may or may not have stirred up being a factor).

Of all the shows to win the Tony Award for Best Musical in the current century so far, this is easily the weakest…even such unworthy recipients as Thoroughly Modern Millie, Spamalot, Jersey Boys and Kinky Boots were all more respectable than this. This is another second-rank show to rip off Hairspray, only this one rips off the serious elements of Hairspray and was probably inspired more by the mediocre film version than the Broadway show.

It’s the story of a white radio DJ, a black female singer, and their forbidden romance during the dawn of rock’n’roll. The book plays like a Lifetime movie-of-the-week, an appallingly melodramatic cliché with stock characters and shallow treatment of the issues it tries to address. Also, the leading man is the most annoying and unappealing main character we had seen in a Broadway show since The Drowsy Chaperone‘s ‘Man in Chair’. He’s portrayed as an ignorant, juvenile and hypocritical redneck stereotype, complete with some incredibly irritating verbal tics that are offered as a subsitute for actual personality, and we’re expected to forgive all of that just because he’s not racist. This show contributes yet more to the mounting pile of evidence that Joe DiPietro really shouldn’t be allowed to write Book Musicals.

The songs, including the emotional ballads “The Music of My Soul” and “Memphis Lives In Me” for the leading man, the proto-Motown pastiche “Someday”, the lively “Everybody Wants To Be Black on Saturday Night”, the bluesy power ballad “Love Will Stand When All Else Falls”, and the stirring finale “Steal Your Rock ‘N’ Roll”, are pleasant enough, but they’re also quite generic, not really showing us anything we haven’t seen before in a hundred other shows. The music was written by the keyboard player from Bon Jovi, and beneath its thin veneer of period pastiche, it pretty much sounds like a Bon Jovi album…lively, melodic, and emotional, but also conventional and kind of trite. The thing is, that formula actually works really well for middle-of-the-road Rock music, but it isn’t nearly as effective for expressing the emotions of an ostensibly serious story, and just makes the book seem even more shallow.

Also, apart from one genuinely dramatic number in “Colored Woman”, they’re essentially Pop tunes, often only loosely integrated into the story and offering little or no real dramatic resonance. If this inane potboiler melodrama was really to be told as a musical, it needed music powerful and honest enough to give the whole thing some actual depth, and this assemblage of vaguely pastiche-flavored Pop-Rock cliches just doesn’t cut it.

Also, as someone who actually knows something about the music of the time, I have to point out that the show misrepresents music history to reinforce the point it’s trying to make. It takes place in the mid-fifties, but it suggests that the music of the era consisted only of R&B by black singers and white Easy Listening acts in the vein of Perry Como. Seriously? This was the era of Frank Sinatra’s Capitol albums—trust me, there was plenty of great jazz, real jazz, being sung by white singers at the time. This arbitrary dichotemy of “old music” and “new music” comes across as false and annoying at the best of times, but in combination with the authors’ dishonest presentation of music history and complacent confidence that their audience would be ignorant enough to swallow it, the result becomes downright reprehensible.

I suppose I can understand how this show got to be a hit, even if it didn’t deserve to be. After all, the fact that those Lifetime TV movies are still being made indicates that there is an audience for this kind of melodramatic drivel. And I suppose the score is enjoyable enough for what it is…frankly, it had better and more consistent music than Rock of Ages the year before, and every song in that show had already been a popular hit. Also, I will admit that the dancing in this show is legitimately terrific—it really is the best thing about the show, and all the numbers play much better in performance than they sound on the cast album. What really enrages me is that this piece of pandering trash won the Best Musical Tony that year. Granted, there was less competition that year than there would have been in most of the surrounding seasons, but even so, Fela! and American Idiot were both twenty times the show Memphis was, and it was a slap to the face that they both lost to this exercise in stifling mediocrity.

When the ‘Musical Play’ was first introduced as a genre, in works like Show Boat and the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, while it proved musicals could be serious, deep and even profound, it still dealt with relatively straightforward themes and concepts compared to much of the so-called ‘legitimate’ theater it shared the stage with. But with the emergence of My Fair Lady, an unprecedented success and instant classic based on a play by the densest of all theater writers, George Bernard Shaw, musicals of the late Fifties and early Sixties gradually began to deal with more complicated philosophical themes, such as the passing of longstanding cultural traditions in the wake of social change (Fiddler on the Roof), the moral compromises necessary to effect historical change (1776), or the very nature and definition of sanity vs. insanity (Man of La Mancha). These progressions would later be picked up and carried even further by auteurs like Sondheim, proving that the Musical Play was capable of everything the ‘straight’ play was and more.

Camelot, the follow-up show by the authors of My Fair Lady, fell squarely into the middle of that progress. Like another hit show from around that time, Lionel Bart’s Oliver, it is based on a lengthy, complex English novel from the high literary canon, and as a result, is so stuffed full of plot, character and content that it seems to be bursting at the seams. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King is loaded with dozens of secondary characters and subplots relating to them, but the musical has so much to deal with just regarding the central story of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot and Mordred, and conveying the show’s high-minded ideals about civilization, that it was initially four hours long during its first tryouts.

To be able to tell T.H. White’s story in a reasonable time frame, more than just the subplots had to be sacrificed. In the musical, Arthur and Guenivere’s characters are more or less the same as they are in the novel…Guenivere even gets to keep her rather violent and sexual streak from the book, in songs like the twisted gloss on a standard Wanting Song “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood”, the merrily carnal “The Lusty Month of May”, and the scheming, playfully sadistic “Then You May Take Me to the Fair”. Unfortunately, Lancelot and Mordred are not so lucky, as both are significantly flattened out in the musical. For one thing, the Lancelot in the novel is extremely complex, a kind of self-loathing living saint (not the mention the ugliest man in the kingdom), and the character of the same name in the musical, a handsome braggart who happens to be unusually pious, would be almost unrecognizable to anyone who had actually read the book.

Meanwhile, Mordred, while still an entertaining villain, is little more than a stereotypical moustache-twirler in Camelot, complete with a villain song, “The Seven Deadly Virtues”, where he philosophizes on just how evil he is. The Mordred of the novel, on the other hand, is more of an avenging angel, at least at first. He’s the villain only because he’s willing to tear down a civilization to get revenge on one person: he has every justifiable reason to hate his father (who, in the novel, point-blank tried to murder him when he was a baby). It’s only when his half-brothers, whom he clearly loves in spite of his brusque behavior toward them, start getting killed as a result of his plans that he begins to go genuinely insane. By the end of the novel, he is something of a midieval Hitler analogue, but it’s also made clear by that point that he no longer comprehends the reality of his actions.

Even more irksome, in a way, is Arthur’s comment in the musical that “He is my son, and yet I feel nothing for him”. On the contrary, in the novel Arthur has a crippling Absolom Complex regarding Mordred, and that, combined with Arthur’s keenly developed sense of justice and his full knowledge that he does in fact deserve what he’s getting, leads him to essentially craft his own doom. In fact, the entire final tragedy could have been avoided if Lancelot had just killed Mordred when he was ambushed in Guenivere’s chambers, but Arthur had asked Lancelot not to hurt his son and Lancelot honored his request, even though it ultimately doomed them all.

I understand that these were necessary concessions…no musical, even if it was four hours long, could have contained even the four central characters of White’s novel and their story in a stage production. But it can be frustrating to fans of the book to see so much of Lancelot and Mordred’s very selves stripped away, especially when so many audience know these characters primarily through the musical alone. It also strips several layers of moral ambiguity from a show that is entirely about moral gray areas to begin with, which is especiall regrettable.

The show is an odd mix of genre elements that plays like something of an extremely intellectual Romantic Operetta (as opposed to the extremely intellectual Comic Operetta represented by something like Candide). While the book is certainly flawed, with some rather stodgy attempts at ceremony, some pacing issues, and some of the attempted humor falling flat (not to mention the tone radically shifting between the two acts), the show still plays wonderfully in performance, immensely charming and with a monumental emotional impact.

It certainly helps that the score is one of the all-time classic ones, and does a great deal to carry the show. There are a few duds among the minor numbers, particularly “The Persuasion”, an idiotic duet for Mordred and Morgan le Fay, a character from the novel brought on here purely as a plot device, where he bribes her with candy to build an invisible wall around Arthur so the plot-necessary ambush of Lancelot and Guenivere can happen without his interference (the movie, for all its problems, improved this part greatly by eliminating Morgan and the song altogether, and having Mordred instead trap the King with his own moral convictions as he does throughout the rest of the show).

But the major songs are all magnificent, especially the hilarious opening, “I  Wonder What the King is Doing Tonight”, the ravishing siren call “Follow Me”, Lancelot’s introductory showstopper “C’est Moi” and his soaring hit ballad “If Ever I Would Leave You”, Arthur’s deeply touching “How To Handle a Woman”, the quirkily brilliant villain song “Fie on Goodness”, and the title-song, which receives a memorable reprise at one of the most moving final curtains in Musical Theater history.

The score also has an oversized richness that almost rivals that of Candide, with even several of a minor numbers being extremely ambitious. For example, the aforementioned “Follow Me”, while generally featured very prominently on recordings, is little more than glorified underscoring as used in the actual show. And there is a brief but exquisite madrigal in the scene leading up to “If Ever I Would Leave You” that could easily have been expanded into a hit ballad itself, and probably would have been in any other show.

There is endless debate among the show’s fans about whether the stage draft of the material or the movie version represents the ultimate fufillment of the show’s concept. The stage version is musically richer (the film adaptation cuts almost half the score), and the Broadway production was certainly better performed than the movie (although that hardly seems relevant to the question today, as the original Broadway leads are all dead or retired and their performance was never formally filmed). But the movie screenplay is tighter and more consistent in tone, and it makes several improvements to the story like the one I mentioned earlier. For my part, I think the film, and especially Richard Harris’ interpretation of the leading role, are both rather underrated, but I also hate to lose all of that wonderful music (even if many stage productions, including the Broadway one by the time it closed, already cut two fairly key songs, “Then You May Take Me to the Fair” and “Fie on Goodness”, the latter of which is actually quite crucial to the show’s message).

As for the show’s historical associations, such as they are, with the John F. Kennedy administration, I’m not concerned with them (even if they’ve managed to dominate the show’s legacy to a rather ridiculous degree). For one thing, while I certainly have nothing against President Kennedy, comparing him with King Arthur just because of his status as a martyr frankly seems to be a considerable reach. In any case, Alan Jay Lerner certainly never intended this show to be an ode to the then-current President (even if they did know each other in College), and I find the way nostalgic baby boomers have hijacked this show’s entire perceived meaning by conflating the “Camelot” the title speaks of with their speculations on what Kennedy might have done as President if he had lived rather annoying, to be honest.

But as for the show itself, it walked an impressive balancing act. A show this flawed and unwieldy could easily have ended up as just another Heartbreaker Flop in spite of all its glorious qualities, but between the charming comedy of the first act, the emotional and inspirational impact of its second, and its enthralling score, it managed to outweigh all its problems and emerge as one of the foremost classic titles of its era. Given al the shows I’ve covered that simply collapsed under this level of ambition, that almost seems like a miracle. I suppose Arthur’s speech at the end of the show was right…some of the drops do sparkle.