The State of Broadway Rant

There is atleast one time every week that someone says something that makes me want to give the State of Broadway Speech, but I always refrain. I finally decided that it was time to write it down, in my blog, so I can always link to it or reference it. I know I have covered various small aspects of this in my other posts, but here is the centralized version. So here we go.

Broadway today is in a serious decline, no thanks to any of the people who claim to like it. Despite it's glorious history, the current shell of the past is circling the drain of irrelevance. In general, I blame three musicals. Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, and Rent. Now at this point, people just think that I'm 'hating' on the popular musicals. However, none of these musicals are exceptionally good and the reason that Broadway is in serious decline is BECAUSE these are popular. I mean, if they were popular, but didn't affect anything, that would be a completely different matter.

Phantom of the Opera doesn't necessarily belong on here as much as the other offenders, because it isn't Andrew Lloyd Webber's fault. When we went to New York on a choir trip, we saw POTA and I even tossed aside some of my former resentment of it. However, the problem with Phantom is it's extremely long run. It's developed a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. People who don't know what Broadway show to go to in New York hear the Phantom of the Opera, longest running show, and immediately assume that it means it is one of the best musicals ever written. Since people keep assuming this, the play keeps getting performed, therefore having an even longer running, etc. This leads to new shows on Broadway having larger financial troubles, since they don't draw in audiences due to no fault of their own besides being unknown. Imagine if people always watched the same movies. Would there be any reason for anyone to produce new movies? In today's society, it simply costs too much money to produce a new play with no history behind it, because all of the revivals and plays like Phantom. Sure, some revivals are good, but having half of the plays on Broadway be there for years just hurts new authors/composers.

Wicked is a continuation of this trend. While it is nowhere near the first musical to be based off non-original source material, it was certainly one of the first ones to make the transition that quickly. There was an eight year turn around, which isn't even counting the amount of transitional time it took to actually write it, which makes the turnaround even less. It featured the semi-mediocre styling of Steven Schwartz. I'll just put this in perspective. Schwartz has never won a Tony despite being eligible in multiple categories. This is in an industry where most plays are guaranteed to win one or two Tony's merely due to lack of competition. But people ate up Wicked, which pushed Broadway producers to embrace the new ability to take preexisting movies and books and mercilessly push them on the public, complete with subpar music and adaptation decay. It became more beneficial for up and coming authors to just right derivative works. But certainly it takes work to still orchestrate a hit musical, right?

I know that Rent came out before Wicked, but the constructive order works better this way. Rent proved to America that you don't need to worry about orchestration. Simply by combining a lot of poppy songs together with a limited pit, you could get financial success. I always held the unpopular belief that Jonathan Larson's body tried to get rid of him before it was too late. And this isnt' merely a matter of classical snobbery or sunk costs. The limited pit had limited musical range, but it didn't matter to producers. Now less musicians had to be hired. It also lacked any musical complexity. I've played piano for 10 years, and I could play the piano parts of Rent on BROADWAY without any trouble. I am not a concert pianist. I am not even a piano major. So now we have musical quality decay, bad enough on it's own, but the real floodgates had only just been opened. Jukebox musicals, disappeared for 70 or so years, now had the popularity to come back. A musical could be made out of the hits of Styx, Abba, an album by Green Day. And where does it end? These all have prior proved audiences, so no one needed to worry about filling seats. It didn't matter that these were loosely structured plots with the amount of arranging that I could do in an afternoon where I was actually physically forced to sit down.

All of the keys are in place to have a commercially profitable musical without taking any risks whatsoever. So as an audience who attends plays, are you going to help contribute to the problem and make musical writing an even less work stable job, or will you support original efforts, fully devoted to music and plot? Will you be the audience that helps bring fame to people like me or are you going to be the audience I have to fight against to get plays published.

Think about it.