Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Are mega-musicals bad for theatre?

The takings of Wicked! and co may delight West End producers but they also confirm the rise of McTheatre: shows that turn the ephemeral event into a soulless repetition

Musicals are booming. In the last week of the year, Wicked took over �1m at the box office, a West End record; The Lion King took �34m across the whole year. Broadway too had a record-breaking holiday season, grossing nearly $60m.

These are astonishing figures, but they're likely to be a cause for grumbling as much as celebration. Musicals generate polarised responses for two reasons. First, musicals are pleasure machines: vast theatrical mechanisms to generate rapture, exhilaration and joy. If you go see a musical with a sceptical attitude, these efforts are bound to seem teeth-clenchingly awful. Second, the scorn for musicals on one side tends to inspire equally passionate defences on the other, and vice versa, so that musical audiences wind up getting mocked as much as musicals themselves.

Those of us who work in theatre tend to think what is distinctive about the form is its unrepeatability, its liveness. Every night is unique; theatre happens in the same room as you, and only for you. It's part of "the thrill of it all", as Forced Entertainment might put it. Some musicals raise that to a high level. Seeing enormously skilful dancers and singers performing complicated dance steps and hitting high Cs is an exhilarating live experience.

But other musicals have taken the opposite route. These are the shows in which liveness takes second place to smooth reproducibility. When a new production of Cats or The Phantom of the Opera or The Lion King opens, it's not really a new production at all. The new opening will be a faithful reproduction of the original, all the way from the choreography to the lights, from the costumes to the merchandising. As Jonathan Burston has shown, these musicals are usually miked, so as to allow the singer's voice to be modulated and cleaned up, and therefore sound like the record, which often precedes the live show. (Stephen Sondheim once pointed out that if you can leave a show whistling the tunes, it's because you could have gone in whistling the tunes. He was talking about musical cliche, but there weren't ever going to be any surprises in Mamma Mia!, were there?)

There's a good side to this, of course. Second productions of musicals 40 years ago were notoriously under-cast, under-budgeted and weak shadows of the original success. McTheatre at least ensures that, wherever in the world you see Miss Saigon, its production values are the equal of the first production.

But have we lost anything? It seems a bit churlish to complain that musical theatre productions are less likely to be awful (like those naysayers in the 80s who complained that drum machines were soulless because they kept the rhythm steady). But underneath the debate about theatre's liveness is another set of values about its connectedness to time and place. Miking is a symbolic displacement ? the theatre's natural acoustic overwhelmed by amplification, with the voice coming from speakers rather from from the performer him or herself. Identical productions recall the global high street, where every city centre from New York to Mumbai has its standard-issue Starbucks, Niketown and, yes, McDonald's.

In theatre's connectedness to place and time is there, maybe, a vision of value that can't be reduced to market exchange? The good news about musicals' box-office takings might be forcing us to miss the point not only of musical theatre, but of theatre altogether.


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/jan/18/mega-musicals-theatre-west-end

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