Here’s a cheerful fact with which to kick off a blog about musical theater writing:
Most musicals fail.
A musical may fail when a writer thinks “I’ve got a great idea for a musical!” — and then never takes it any further than that. A musical may fail when it opens on Broadway to terrible reviews and closes after twelve performances. Or it may fail for almost any reason at almost any point in between. But ultimately, for one reason or another, the vast majority of musicals have always failed.
Now, this may seem like a depressing thing to consider, but the truth is that if you don’t consider it; if you don’t hold it up to the light and examine it with a critical eye, then there’s really nothing you can do about it. On the other hand, if you acknowledge that reality, you can approach it in a logical and pragmatic way, as a problem to be solved. And that is not only not depressing, but actually a really exciting and empowering task to undertake. So let’s undertake it.
Obviously the first step in solving any problem is to look at its root causes, and in this case there are two that stand out for me: a proximate cause and an historical one. I’ll get to the proximate in a later post, but first I’d to look at the history of the musical play in the context of modern dramatic history. I think this will be helpful not only in terms of understanding the immediate question (Why are so many musicals so deeply flawed?) but also later, when we ask the even more important question (How do we go about writing better ones?)
So let’s take a quick-and-dirty look at what I will somewhat arbitrarily define as “modern drama,” specifically the history of Western dramatic writing since the early 20th Century. Playwrights like Ibsen, Strinberg and Shaw are highly regarded for their innovative and influential works, which brought a new realism and psychological insight to the theater. But they did something else too — something for which, at least in non-academic circles, they rarely get the proper credit. What they did, whether by design or purely as a matter of intuition, was to help usher in the era of what we now recognize as modern dramatic theory, characterized by 3-act structure, a well-defined protagonist with a clear goal or desire, and an emphasis on seamless exposition, clear and compelling conflict, and the particular rhythms of rising and falling action we immediately recognize as the elements of strong dramatic writing.
That’s not to say that any of these individual elements were new, even a hundred years ago. Shakespeare used them. Aristophanes used them. But it wasn’t until the early 20th century that a clear system of rules for how to use them to their best effect began to be codified. As we moved further into the teens and twenties, these rules became more sophisticated, and around that same time, something else happened that was kind of important to the evolution of dramatic writing: Movies.
Once dialogue became a standard component of the Hollywood movie, the rules that had been developing in theater over previous few decades started to be applied to film. Some of the most important screenwriters of the 1930s and ‘40s were imported from the New York theater scene, in fact, and for a while, playwriting and screenwriting developed alongside one another. But very quickly, Hollywood began to outpace Broadway in terms of the sheer volume of work it could produce — dozens and later even hundreds of films for every stage play. And while screenwriters had previously taken their cues from their colleagues in the theater, that relationship began to reverse itself.
This was actually to everyone’s advantage. The film industry was able to turn out huge numbers of movies, in a comparatively short period of time, and unlike live theater, movies could be seen by almost everyone. The need to make ever more and better pictures, combined with a vast and demographically diverse audience turning thumbs-up or thumbs-down, sending almost instant messages of approval or disapproval, provided Hollywood writers with an intensely fertile, hothouse-like environment in which to cultivate their skills, and in the process to further refine and perfect the art of screenwriting.
Meanwhile, by the 1950s, a new player had entered the game: television. And TV had to do everything movies did, only in a much shorter space of time — while still leaving room for commercials. Suddenly, dramatic writing found a new economy and a faster pace.
All of these elements continued to advance and merge together until around the late 1960s and early ‘70s, by which time dramatic writing had evolved pretty much to where it is now. Very little has changed in the forty or so years since, and with good reason: if it ain’t broke, why fix it?
So where does the musical fit into all this? The short answer is: it doesn’t.
For any number of reasons, the musical simply never jumped on the same evolutionary bandwagon with film, television and “straight” theater. The musical as we know it happened fairly suddenly in the early ‘40s, and has kind of stumbled along its own separate trajectory ever since. Oklahoma became a huge hit, and suddenly every writer and producer in the world was looking at it as a commodity to be exploited. "We need to make one of those!" But how do you make a thing that’s never really existed before, when your only model is something whose success is hard to quantify or even understand? In this case, you made your thing as much like their thing as possible and kept your fingers crossed. But that meant you had to copy everything — the parts that made the show successful as well as the parts it succeeded in spite of — and hope to sort it all out later. And in fact, that actually worked pretty well, as long as musicals continued to be viewed as nothing more than light-hearted entertainments, with no other goal but to provide a few laughs and some hummable tunes.
But in the years after the Second World War, audiences became more sophisticated, and more demanding. By the 1960s, they'd started to grow bored and a little embarrassed by the traditional Broadway musical. By the ‘70s the “musical was dying” and by the ‘80s it was sad joke. And all during those years, there was always a small number of people — writers, mostly — who genuinely loved the musical theatre art form and longed to help lead it into the modern age. Unfortunately, there were many, many more — usually the ones with the money — whose primary concern was how to keep plugging the holes and keep the whole enterprise afloat just long enough to make a few more million dollars from it. And their ideas for how to accomplish this tended to boil down to variations on the same theme: make the musical different. Make it sound more like a rock (rap/hip hop) album; make it look more like a special effects-laden movie (or video game or high-wire act). Make it flashier, more spectacular. Give it lasers! Chandeliers!! TURNTABLES!! Just keep making it more like something else, and less like … well, a musical.
And again, up to a certain point, it worked. It was a band-aid on a mortal wound, but at least it bought some time until somebody came up with another solution, which, in the early ‘90s, they did (more about that later). But sadly, it was really no better or worse than any of the previous “fixes,” just a little smarter. And that, in a way, made matters even worse. Stupid bad decisions are easy to poke holes in, but smart bad decisions are harder to argue with, so they tend to take hold even more intractably.
Most frustrating of all was the fact that all of these ideas were in service to the same misguided goal: to find a way to “fix” the musical without having to do the one thing that actually needed to be done to fix it for good.
Because that one thing would prove to be really, really difficult.
