AISLE SAY New York

A review-mination by David Spencer

December 2019
Rather than write a review here in the strict sense, I’d rather ruminate on a phenomenon. Which may be more important than my individual opinion about these shows, because I’m not so sure that opinion matters to your ticket-buying decision, or aftermath rumination. I think this may be more helpful; you’ll see (I hope) what I mean.

There was a time, in the history of the American musical, when it was often the source of songs that became part of the popular landscape. As the pop style began slowly to drift away from classic theatrical vocabulary, the first reaction of theatre writers was to affectionately (usually) parody it. With the advent of Stephen Schwartz in the 70s, something more sophisticated started to happen: for the first time, a writer with genuine pop chops was putting the pop vocabulary through a traditional musical theatre filter. This particular conflation very slowly became even more versatile as newer theatre writers with pop backgrounds brought newer pop sounds into the filtered arena, arguably achieving its apotheosis with the work of David Yazbek.

Right alongside this, another branch of expression, more random, more seat-of the-pants, more written-in-a-white-heat, less crafted than primal, started to reach out its tendrils; the musical that used pop music in an undiluted state. Only a few of these were successful—alchemical mixes of the right people in the right room serving the right material—and the failures were always conspicuous in their naivete, usually proving that none should enter the arena lightly, that the long game of musical theatre required knowing the literature and mastery of foundational principles.

But more and more, in this new millennium, that strict line of demarcation has been eroding. The international availability of content, legit and bootlegged; streamed, broadcast and owned; plus the passions of younger generations taking their inspirations from pop music; plus the socio-political landscape becoming drastically altered; has unexpectedly yet inevitably led to a seismic shift. Pop music no longer occupies a theatrical ghetto from which a few idiosyncratic and rare novelties rise to the surface. As a force, it and those who embrace it, stand tall in their own territory. What’s different is that the individual shows arise not from a tradition of lineage, but a cauldron of rebellious experimentation, building upon an increasingly savvy—sometimes just increasingly relentless—Zeitgeist of woke, awareness and retroactive multi-cultural rebalancing.

Thus, I think a better term for what I unofficially dubbed the Pop Writer Musical, earlier this season, when reviewing The Wrong Man, is probably Alternative Musical or perhaps, if you will, Alt. Musical. I find myself favoring it because as undiluted pop writing has increasingly informed the creation of new work for the stage, the characteristics that used to neatly contain the genre have begun to morph, grow, expand and multiply. The application is far less raw, far more sophisticated.

Jagged Little Pill, for example, is all kinds of hybrid. It’s said to be “based on” one of the bestselling albums of all time (of the same title), by vocalist-songwriter Alanis Morisette (lyricist and co-composer with Glen Ballard) but that’s really only its musical source material. It is in fact first-time librettist Diablo Cody who let the album title dictate the thematic pathway, crafting a story about a family in what sometimes seems like every kind of controversy crisis, whose matriarch is addicted to opioids; whose husband has become addicted to computer porn as compensation for their lack of intimacy; whose teenage son will witnesse the sexual abuse of a female classmate by a friend and not immediately come forward; and whose adopted, black teenage daughter will rebel against white normalization (meanwhile going out with a white lesbian girlfriend, on whom she will eventually cheat with a new-to-the-nabe sympathetic boyfriend).

Plenty, huh?

Librettist Cody has woven most of this around the single Morisette album, but where a little leeway was needed, a few more songs from her catalog have been added, and she’s even written two specifically for the show.

As might be expected with so much going on, and a hub character with an affliction but not a conscious objective, the show makes getting your bearings a challenge Three things keep audience concentration from sprawling: general familiarity with the album (there’s a palpable How-will-they-use-the-songs? anticipation); the thread common to all the main characters: on some level, each of them needs to heal by way of confronting his/her demons before s/he can move on; and director Diane Paulus’ relentless grip on the proceedings: She just keeps things moving until the audience acclimates to the multiple storylines. There are other collateral anomalies, like a secondary character who is mostly reactive (the lesbian girl friend) getting two songs, one of which is the showstopper of the season (literally: when it ends, it is greeted with at least a partial standing ovation), neither of which is actually crucial to the storytelling, but just go for a visceral punch to up the ante on the emotional intensity. It’s as if the tools of music video have claimed their own territory as a kind of musical theatre craft equivalence.

By contrast, there’s Sing Street, currently at the New York Theatre Workshop, and about to transfer to Broadway, by the creative team who developed Once. Likewise based on their own film, it likewise eschews the notion of “book songs,”which is to say songs that absorb character and plot development, standing in for, or taking over from, dialogue at key moments. In Sing Street, as in Once, the songs are diegetic—what are colloquially known as “source songs”—meaning they are consciously acknowledged as songs.

Here’s the boilerplate:

Dublin, 1982. Everyone is out of work. Thousands are seeking bluer skies across the Irish Sea. Sixteen-year-old Conor and his schoolmates turn to music to escape troubles at home and impress a mysterious girl. With a score that embraces the new wave sounds of the era, SING STREET celebrates the thrill of first love and the power of music.

The trick to this one is that librettist Enda Walsh and songwriters John Carney & Gary Clark have managed a story and structure in which the event of a scene to be musicalized falls into a sweet spot where the diegetic song merges with the function of what would be as standard book song. It’s really quite remarkable, and under the direction of Rebecca Taichman, impressively seamless.

It occurs to me, in conclusion, that the revelation I’ve been circling here is this. Whereas in a more traditionally structured musical, pop music is put through the filter of the musical theatre craft toolkit…in the Alt. Musical, the functions of musical theatre construction are being put through the pop music craft toolkit…and in a way that’s no longer dismissible as superficial, facile, glib or having its roots in the Brit or Euro musical language. Something else is going on here; something deeper and more versatile.

I don’t see—yet—where any single show provides replicatable technique that can be built upon by writers, of either school, to come. Each particular show, of those that work, anyway, seems to be sui generis. But maybe that’s at the heart of being an Alt. Musical in the first place. And we just have to wait and see what happens next.

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