Almost exactly a year ago I asked the question "Has Hollywood finally run out of ideas?" Today I ask the same question about Broadway. Christy and I had the pleasure and torture (respectively) of seeing Legally Blonde: The Musical on Friday night. Back in December we bought tickets to a series of 4 plays and this one was the first. The other three are Fiddler on the Roof, The Addams Family, and a new play called Spring Awakening. So that's one out of 4 original theatre productions. Then last week I get a form in the mail soliciting a renewal for the next series. Those plays: Young Frankenstein, Dreamgirls, 101 Dalmations, and the token one new play In the Heights. So one out of 4 again. Then, as I was scanning through the playbill (which, by the way, was the highlight of the performance) I noticed an ad for Mary Poppins and a "coming soon" poster for Shrek: The Musical. Oh, and by the way, the theatre where we're seeing all these (The Oriental) just got done housing Wicked for the last 3 and a half years. Technically, Wicked is an original (but only in the strictest sense) but it's still a prequel (and doesn't everybody just love prequels!) and certainly only "works" if the audience is familiar with The Wizard of Oz.
Has Broadway now basically become the new action figures for movies? Something that just automatically accompanies a hit film/franchise? If we wait long enough are we going to see musical versions of The Dark Knight and Saw (actually, that I would like to see)? It's not so much that the plays aren't new. Apart from the plays that have been turned into movies (e.g. Chicago, Phantom of the Opera, Rent) there really is not a DVD equivalent for theatre, so I don't really have a problem with Cats or Fiddler on the Roof coming around every couple years. I just don't like the ultra-formulaic exercise of taking an existing movie, transplanting all scenes and plot points wholesale into a stage script, and slapping together super-cheesy, bubble-gum pop ballads and inserting them every 5 minutes and calling it something "All New!" It just shows a tremendous lack of creativity. It seems like Broadway is following the lead of Hollywood in that they are so terrified of making an expensive flop that unless Andrew Lloyd Weber is willing to attach his name to it you'd better already have a built-in audience or it's not getting made.
Look, I am not a complete artistic purist by any stretch of the imagination. Hollywood and Broadway only exist to make money. I always thought that the job of a producer and director was to look at something and see promise and/or to say, at various points in the process, "ok, it's good but we need to do X here, " or "it's dragging in this spot, we need to rewrite this so we don't lose the audience." To me, this seems like 1) producers have lost all cajones and are afraid to take any risk; or 2) they have absolutely no idea how to spot good ideas/scripts anymore and they know it.
It used to be that movies were seen as "for the masses" and theatre was viewed as being (for lack of a better term) more cultured. To use an analogy, if the average movie is a Miller Lite, than theatre was a Heineken. Not for everyone, but for those that like it there's no comparison on the quality. So now it seems like Broadway has decided that there isn't enough money in Heineken so they better start serving Miller Lite too. That's all well and good, but if I'm now gonna get the same product at 4-5 times the price, remind me why I'm going again?
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2 comments:
I dunno... I don't really have a response to this. All I can say is that art reflects experience, and the times they sure are a'changin' these days. I think in the next 10, 15 years humans are going to have to make some decisions on a lot of things--world economy, secularism, artificial intelligence (yeah I said it... or least superthinking computers), and new stories will come from that because they have a message that hasn't been said--and hasn't been needed--before. I will give you, though, that the American public won't be officially sick of the old recycled stories for a while yet, so I think that's what's going to continue to get produced for many years into the future.... it's just that those pictures are going to bring a lower and lower return on investment each year as the public tires of them.
In my opinion sooner or later Hollywood is going to have to come up with a new business model. Probably prompted by some new comer to the game that they can't compete with.
(Although I don't know... maybe if you've got about 70 years of stories, you can just recycle them once a generation and no one would know any different?)
I find it funny that your "cultured" beer reference is Heineken. I'd consider that "for-the-masses-plus." How about a nice Franziskaner hefeweisen? Or a Fat Tire (do they have that out there? It's yummy.)
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