Spring Awakening and the Economics of Broadway’s Culture of Derivation

Spring Awakening: A Review

Ever since I heard of it two years ago, when it was still in development, I’d been looking forward to seeing Spring Awakening, the new musical based on Franz Wedekind’s 1891 play about German teens coming to terms with their sexuality. It’s less that I’m a fan of turn-of-the-century European theater—though I am— than because the music was being written by Duncan Sheik, the sort-of-alternative singer-songwriter of the “Barely Breathing” and some other good, less poppy songs I’d seen him perform when opening for Ben Folds in 2003 at Williams.

Why was I excited about Duncan Sheik, you ask? After all, I’m not a big fan of his music, and don’t own a single album of his. But the Broadway musical has—I am certainly not the only one to have this opinion—grown quite stale over the last decade, and having a mainstream musical penned by someone who typically plays to a demographic uninterested in Broadway might provide some desperately-needed freshness and get a new crowd going to the theater. In the periodic Playbill interviews I’d read, Sheik and his colleague Stephen Sater were saying all of the right things about the show: they had no reverence for the Broadway warhorses while writing it; they wanted to do something new and contemporary; they were telling their singers to sound less like Brian Stokes Mitchell and more like Thom Yorke.

The question then became one of quality—their hearts were clearly in the right place, but would they execute it well? I had reason to believe, going to the show, that they had. All of the reviews have been glowing. Even a curmudgeon like Charles Isherwood in the The New York Times, who gleefully and righteously swats down glib and pretentious Fringe fare, had nothing but praise for the show. So I went to Spring Awakening on March 8th with anticipation just about as high as I've ever had for any show in my long theater-going life, perhaps even more than seeing Broderick and Lane during the opening weeks of The Producers.

In the face of such expectations, Spring Awakening was one of the most disappointing musical experiences I’ve ever had.

Saying that, I do not want to away from its genuine accomplishments. It takes a fair amount of courage to create a Broadway score that could comfortably live on a college student’s iPod, and a Broadway book that seriously treats issues surrounding teenage sexuality. The Sater-Sheik pair even manages to create the occasional effective couplet –e.g., a love song whose chorus goes “Oh, I’m gonna wound you/ Oh, I’m gonna be your wound” to a vulnerably alt.-rock melody—and set piece, such as the earliest school scenes. There are also some songs that really work—I’m fond of “Don’t Do Sadness,” sung by John Gallagher, who does an excellent mix of off-beat and lovable as Morritz.

But the show as a whole is just this side of a dramatic mess. Those of us musical theater geeks who were excited by the prospect of an alt.-rock Broadway score had tried to forget that most alternative music is, in fact, not terribly good; its self-absorbed, over-emotive, one-size-fits-all intensity can only be pulled off by individuals capable of exceptionally complex lyrics and composition, and Sheik doesn’t have enough of that for a two-hour show. When every song begins with either a one-chord chug on electric rhythm guitar or a minor piano arpeggio with a melodramatic hint of violin, it’s hard to keep taking it seriously. It doesn’t help that the show’s choreography never extends beyond free-form jumping by its red-faced, screaming vocalists.

The biggest problem, though, is tone. To avoiding giving too much away, I’ll simply say that you all know the plot: teens discover their sexual urges without being given any effective way to deal with them by their elders, and both those who resist and those with give in end up having to pay the usual worst-case-scenario prices for it. And there’s nothing wrong with that plot: it’s preachy but resonant, and there are enough variations such that it doesn’t get derivative that fast. But if you’re going to do that plot, then you have to maintain a tricky balance between genuine sympathy for the characters, sound ethical logic, and just enough levity to keep everything from getting too heavy. Losing the sympathy makes the show sadistic, but over-emphasizing makes it manipulative; losing the logic makes the show amoral, but over-emphasizing it makes it pedantic; losing the levity makes the show dour, but over-emphasizing it makes it trivial.

And Spring Awakening can’t keep it all straight. When several of the girls suddenly reveal they’ve been abused, physically and sexually, it seems an excuse to break up the post-rock monotony for some bluesier riffs and vocals rather than to seriously investigate the relationship of their problem to the show’s other themes, particularly considering that nothing develops from the scene. I couldn’t quite understand what Sater and Sheik wanted me to think when the somewhat-unexpected suicide of a major character very quickly devolves into a jokey number that explains what to do when you’re “Totally Fucked.” And I have no idea how to react to the dissonance of seeing one character being funneled through the dangerous world of 19th-century childbirth alternatives while watching, a scene later, a stereotypically Aryan homosexual (played as a cast member of Saturday Night Live would play that set of adjectives) none-too-subtly seducing a friend as part of another subplot that goes no where.

An even bigger problem may lie with Jonathan Groff, who plays the libertine Melchior as the Rebellious Smart Kid from a teen movie. I have no doubt that Groff could play the latter role quite well and inspire 15-year-old girls nationwide to Question Authority; he’s a very charismatic actor. But given several very bad things that Melchior does, Groff’s lack of moral complexity in the role is fatal. It seems that when he bears the consequences of the play’s central actions, he’s being martyred for the corrupt adult world rather than his own misdeeds, which he neither implicitly nor explicitly cops to. This is partially the script’s fault—as is the utter blandness of the female lead, Wendla, though Lea Michele does little to save her—but regardless, it makes the show’s logic very unconvincing. And this is without going into all of the everyday imperfections of the show, ranging from silly seasonal clichés in the final song to numbers that are meant to be cute but aren’t, such as the song “My Junk (Is You).”

And so I was upset leaving the theater, generally feeling let down and as if I’d made poor use of my evening. And yet, isn’t that unfair? After all, I’ve seen movies that have put my time to greater waste and not minded. If nothing else, I got to have the experience of seeing the show that will likely win this year’s Tony, and was treated to it by my mother, no less, so that my bank account was none the worse for it. In general, I subscribe to the theory that I’d rather see something that daringly fails rather than something utterly bland, and so I am willing to submit myself to several bad aesthetic experiences from time to time. And yet the fact that this show, which fails in several demonstrable ways, is being touted as a Major Cultural Event seems to me to be an equally bizarre phenomenon.

And this brings me to the economics of Broadway, and the reason that America’s premier theater district is in very, very unhealthy shape.

The Economics of Broadway: A History

There’s an obvious difference between going to a bad movie and going to a bad Broadway show. Going to a movie in Manhattan will set you back $10. Going to a musical will set you back at least 5-10 times that much for the cheap seats. Why are theaters so expensive? Simple supply-demand curves gives one pretty reasonable explanation (I will admit, I am no economist, but my mother is and has agreed with the principle behind this): there are increasing numbers of rich people who live in or travel through Manhattan who will pay that much to do the classy thing and see a Broadway show—Times Square is littered with limos for rich theater-goers at 10:45 every night. Typically when demand increases steadily, you ratchet up supply to meet it, but while it’s relatively easy to build a movie theater in most places, and easier still to add a screen or two to an existing one, building an entirely new theater anywhere is expensive, and expanding an old one in the middle of midtown Manhattan would, I imagine, be nigh-on-impossible for spatial reasons. So, supply is constant and demand has gone up, causing prices to dramatically rise.

Furthermore, costs of production—from everyday set materials to actor salaries, particularly for “name” actors—have also gone up, and while Hollywood can compensate by distributing its films to more theaters, Broadway, again, has no way to expand its theaters and must raise ticket prices. Indeed, from what I understand, most Broadway shows, other than the biggest hits, never recoup their initial investments, so it’s not even entirely a matter of theatergoers being fleeced by greedy owners. The largest adverse affect of this is not a loss in overall attendance but rather in the type of attendance: if you go to a Broadway show and look around, most of the crowd is either very rich, very old, or very touristy, and thus the musicals are written to cater to that demographic.

Another reason comes from the “blockbuster” phenomenon Broadway experienced in the mid-1980s, similar to what had happened in film ten years before. Broadway producers realized that, given the huge initial investments a musical requires and the high probability of failure, the only reliable way to really maintain profits was to find a way to guarantee a long run for shows; that is, consistently bring in broad swaths of people. Now, Broadway has a harder time generating that huge an audience than film does for a bunch of reasons. First, of course, film can be broadcasted nationwide and seen by millions of people in response to the initial advertising rush (a process which is repeated upon the DVD release), while Broadway show can only get a couple of thousand viewers a night. To put this into perspective, note that the film of Rent was a commercial flop, making less than $30 million in the US from a modest budget of $40 million, and yet was seen by more people in its opening weekend than had seen the play during its entire ten-year sold-out run on Broadway.

But just as importantly, film is a more reliable experience for viewers, because a given film is static: every time you see Star Wars, it’s going to be exactly the same (give or take special-extended-director’s-cut-effects). Not only does theater have night-by-night variability, but a show typically will not keep the same cast and production over the entirety of its run. Thus, to be reliably popular, a show needs to have some attractive attributes beyond its cast. Observe how The Producers, which had been predicted to give Phantom of the Opera a run for its money in longevity when it debuted to glowing reviews and box office in 2000, is now closing because no one was able to recapture the Broderick-Lane chemistry that had made the show such a hit at first.

One hopes that a high-quality score and book would be those reliable attributes. But while there are shows for which they are—Les Miserables is the most prominent of these among the 80s blockbusters —we come to the fact that “quality” has never been a reliable commercial attribute in any medium, even in cases where the quality is accessible to a large audience and can be painstakingly honed by skilled Broadway craftsmen (cf. any number of recent Sondheim shows). And so what producers found worked instead of quality was the extravagant set-piece: Miss Saigon’s helicopter, Phantom’s chandelier, Cats’s stairway, and even Les Mis’s barricade.

And so the economics of Broadway took a strange turn. As Frank Rich suggested at the time, since people were spending such a large sum on their tickets, they wanted to see some expensive flash and dazzle to justify it. The Broadway theatergoer’s mindset became, implicitly, that they were paying to see special effects, not music or drama—much like the shift in film that came with the Spielberg-Lucas films of the late 70s and early 80s that continues to this day, where the most profitable movies are those that would’ve been B-Movies in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Of course, having something that sounded like impressive music helped create the illusion that it was well-crafted, and so we get Andrew Lloyd Webber’s loud, soaring, and dramatically pointless (if not outright damaging—how many competent actors can actually sing his music?) arias.

After a while fatigue set in. Theatergoers gradually came to realize that the helicopter you can barely see and the chandelier that progresses down the theater at the pace of a ski lift are not actually terribly thrilling theatrical devices. In the mid-late 90s, the 80s warhorses began to close, and big-budget musicals like The Civil War failed to succeed on the basis of production values and bombastic scores alone. Broadway producers needed to find some other sure-fire way of hit-making, and found themselves unable to o seize on any theatrical aspect that would make theatergoers take the risks of high ticket prices. The only viable conclusion was leeching off entities that already were self-sustaining, adapting existing films and song catalogues into musicals. Disney had latched onto this idea early, with Beauty and the Beast debuting in 1994, followed by The Lion King in 1998. Its animated films are particularly suited to Broadway—they are already musicals and have a family appeal designed to lure in a middle-class tourist crowd that is particularly fearful of wasting $500 on a show that won’t keep their kids attention.

This results in frighteningly calculated musicals like the recent Mary Poppins, which features claptraps like a Dick van Dyke lookalike dancing upside-down, several gratuitous flying sequences, and an unexplained Jamaican woman who lives in a hidden room of the Banks house to provide token multicultural presence. The show, of course does not have any of the dramatic coherence of the film; this presumably would drag down the proceedings. The film turns on Mr. Banks’s realization of his failures as a father and his inability to feel joy; his final rejection of the bank and decision to fly a kite is an incredibly ecstatic moment and the thing that makes the movie work. In the musical, of course, he must realize all of these things during the first act so they can be gotten out of the way, and for some reason they are muddled together with his blooming and unmotivated social conscience regarding the machinations of high finance. Winifred, whose feminist pluckiness in the film makes her a strong character, spends the musical whining about being unable to deal with the pressures of being a housewife, rather than cheerfully demanding the right to vote. It almost seems like the producers try to rip all of the joy from the film to streamline the show. “Step in Time,” the carefree, energetic high point of the film, is orchestrated so as to be a portentous, pretentious bit of philosophizing that is demonstrating some family-friendly Moral.

Of course, Disney only has so many films to plunder, so the wealth must be spread to films, any films, that can support music. Thus we have Spamalot, Hairspray, The Color Purple, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Wicked, Tarzan, Edward Scissorhands, The Wedding Singer, High Fidelity, and the upcoming The Little Mermaid and Legally Blonde. These range from reasonably entertaining to mind-numbingly dull; none of them are terribly good or original. Spamalot was particularly painful for me, as it transforms the movie’s subversive wit into easy laughs about the pomposity of Andrew Lloyd Webber showstoppers, Lancelot’s latent homosexuality, and the fact that the Broadway community has a large Jewish population.

The other risk-reducing phenomenon is the jukebox musical. It isn’t a coincidence that Broadway began losing its larger cultural clout in the late 1960s. Before then, Broadway, like the pop charts, used to be an outlet for Tin Pan Alley. Particularly in the 1930s-1940s, the country’s top hit-making songwriters would produce catchy songs and then find some way to cobble them together into shows; even as larger dramatic coherence began to be a feature of Rogers and Hammerstein, Burrows and Loesser, and Lerner and Loewe in the 1950s and 1960s, the musical formulas of Tin Pan Alley persisted. When with the arrival of the British Invasion and the maturing of rock and roll, which is marked by a sonic preference for syncopated rhythm and limited melody that had been alien to Broadway music, as well as the growing confluence of “singer” and “songwriter” on the pop charts, Broadway music gradually became divorced from popular music. The national mentality, or at least its manifestation in music, changed, and the Broadway sound no longer expressed adequately.

I’ll mark the divide at 1968. Look the Tony-winners for Best Musical before and after that year: the divide between works that are part of the popular consciousness (Fiddler on the Roof, Guys and Dolls, Cabaret) and those that, irrespective of quality, simply are not (Hallelujah, Baby!, A Little Night Music, Applause), is palpable. Of course, there have been periodic attempts to create “rock operas,” but most of these simply take traditional Broadway song structures and transpose the riffs to electric guitar—note how Jesus Christ Superstar’s central riff is stolen, note for note, from the comic “Who’s the Thief?” number from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. There are two major exceptions to this: first, Hair, which in 1969 managed to be the last Broadway show to really make a dent on the pop charts, and Rent, which I’ll address more in a moment.

Broadway did very little about the fact that it was unable to write music in line with post-1964 popular music for a long time, hiding this deficiency through sporadic borrowings like Hair and The Whiz, the occasional lite-pop bombast from adult contemporary writers like Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line, They're Playing Our Song), the postmodern reworkings of Broadway past of Stephen Sondheim, and finally the Lloyd Webber blockbuster. Now that the latter era has run its course, Broadway finds that not only does it have no conception of contemporary music, it has no notion of anything remotely related to it; it regards rock and roll as revolutionary, despite the fact that rock and roll has been dead in pop culture for roughly a decade. Instead of cultivating a new musical tradition or adapting to contemporary ones, it has resorted to taking pop catalogues (only those from the 60s and 70s that would appeal to the sensibilities of the ingrained Broadway audience) and arranging them more or less at random into shows—to be fair, this genre is largely the fault of London’s West End, rather than Broadway, though Broadway has jumped onto the bandwagon as exuberantly.

Thus we have Mamma Mia!, Movin’ Out, Jersey Boys, All Shook Up, Lennon, The Times They Are a-Changing, We Will Rock You, Good Vibrations, Hot Feet, and Ring of Fire. The brilliance of the jukebox musical, of course, is that the audience already knows the music, so at worst they’re going to see a live concert that sticks to the Greatest Hits in a way that most baby boomers wish the actual artists who wrote the songs would do as reliably. And when any effort is put into honing an appropriate show, they succeed immensely; the first three above were major Tony winners and will likely run for years. Yet when that critical mass of effort is not met, and usually it isn’t, these have been unspeakably dreadful. Five of the above closed within three months, despite their sonic pedigrees. Hopefully this will mean the end of the genre, but Broadway may still be more willing to risk a show, even from a tradition of flops, that has some name recognition in its song catalogue over a totally new work.

If we leave out the movie adaptations and jukebox musicals, what does this leave on Broadway? Right now, many revivals: Company, Chicago (which now, from a commercial standpoint, is a film adaptation), Grease, A Chorus Line, and Les Miserables. This is not new nor particularly bad; furthermore, reviving something that once worked is an understandable financial move for a Broadway theater that has no thriving tradition to develop on. Of those remaining: Avenue Q and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee are light, postmodern comedies that are very well put-together and even have some smart things to say; I only wish they were sidelines to a healthy musical tradition that did not live on self-consciously cutesy rhymes and simple melodies rather than being at the forefront of quality Broadway. I have not yet seen Grey Gardens: I hear that it is an excellent dramatic work, but as we’ve established, I don’t trust critical acclaim from Broadway critics anymore.

Then we come to two more shows, very much alike in temperament: The Drowsy Chaperone and Curtains. I’ll call them retro-comedies. They come from a tradition that most recently has included Thoroughly Modern Millie and 42nd Street, even though those two also fit under the categories of film adaptation and revival. They’re unabashedly in a Broadway tradition that is not only pre-1968, but pre-WWII—big production numbers, swanky Manhattan settings, screwball humor. Their primary appeal is the hokeyness of their plot conventions, the funny clothes the actors wear, and the innocence which they’re able to get away with when discuss things like sex and love. Again, I suppose there is nothing inherently wrong with nostalgia for an older era, were there a healthy musical culture in place for it to play off. But there simply isn’t. Whether they want to or not, these shows are the face of Broadway today, and as a result Broadway today seems quite content to live in the past. My fear is that, as the jukebox musical runs its course, Broadway is going to need a new cash cow, and the retro-comedy is going to look like the best candidate. Retro-comedies are, by nature, formulaic and thus not difficult to construct dramatically. All they need are some skilled craftspeople in the fields of costuming, set design, one-liners, and melody, as well as a winning actor or two, and they work almost without effort. If Broadway does decide to move in this direction, it’d be a dreadful step backwards.

It has, after all, been a long time since Broadway has had a step forwards. I would put that step at 1996 with the debut of Rent, the last great musical. Now, people who know me will be surprised to hear me make that assertion. I have, ever since I first saw Rent seven years ago, felt that it wasn’t nearly as good as most people thought. I still feel that way—Act II is a ridiculous soap opera that creates melodrama for no apparent reason and giddily slams head-on into every cliché about the central characters’ types that the first Act had deftly avoided. (Also, I still have no response for my aunt’s question of why we should sympathize with Mark and Roger for refusing to pay their rent.) Furthermore, though I have found very few people who have agreed with me on this point, it seems very unfortunate that a show whose simple but not unpersuasive central point is that, in the face of a tragedy like AIDS, the only defense we have is not a method by which to prolong our lives but rather the fullness with which we live and love every individual day we have, the show would end with a character getting to have it both ways: magically having her life not just enriched but also extended by the force of her friends’ love (within a show using a realist ethic, no less). Ending that show with a song called “No Day But Today” when the characters’ have in fact been granted several more days after today for no discernible reason seems particularly odd.

But the fact was that Rent, even if it was piggy-backing off more articulate straight plays about AIDS like Angels in America, used a serious, contemporary problem to dramatize a larger aesthetic issue about human existence and said interesting things about both. Moreover, it was written with a pop ethic that was not just a simple attempt to appropriate pop-rock but was an organic, original hybrid sound based on hooks that could play both on alternative radio and in a theater. It showed that it was possible to create music whose melodies theatrically emoted while still living on anthemic hooks and blues-based rhythms from the post-1964 world, and thus expressed a serious contemporary mindset without abandoning its roots in musical theater.

Since then, there has been no musical that has successfully joined Rent’s efforts in doing that. Even the other good musicals of the past 10 years that made an effort to make original statements in some respects—and indeed, Ragtime, which is far better-crafted than Rent, is the only musical I can think of that I would confidently put in that category—have had to rely on retro stylings, one way or another, to work. Perhaps Jonathan Larson, even if he’d lived, would never again have pulled together a show that worked like Rent, but just having his musical vocabulary in the scene would have been a powerful force against the culture of derivation that currently exists. Perhaps the immense hunger on Broadway for something with the vision of Rent is what leads critics to overpraise Spring Awakening, which has all of the theatrical problems of Rent while lacking the consistent coherence of its music and the wit of its lyrics.

What Can Be Done

If there is to be a real renaissance of American musical theater on Broadway, then one of the few options I see requires an infusion of (relatively) young singer-songwriters who do not come from a musical theater background. There have been a few musicals by pop music titans on Broadway, most notably Elton John’s Aida and Paul Simon’s The Capeman, but both were by songwriters past their Billboard prime, and who, regardless, were writing in an idiom separate from that which gave them dozens of platinum records. Sir Elton allows himself to be Disneyfied for his theater projects, and while we might look at the Latino doo-wop of The Capeman as an extension of Simon’s multicultural experiments on Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints, its music was deliberately retro rather than forward-looking.

So not only would I like to see the Sater-Sheik partnership continue to make musicals, in the process addressing the problems with Spring Awakening, I want to see more works surface along these lines. I recall MTV producing Carmen: A Hip-Hopera about six years ago. I wonder what someone like Mos Def, who co-starred in it and who’s been active on Broadway sporadically, most notably in the innovative Top Dog/Underdog by Suzanne Lori-Parks, could do with hip-hop in longer dramatic forms. I don’t know if I’d care for it, but I suspect that if it’s well done it would bring solid audiences in the same theaters that hosted Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam. Most importantly, it’d bring some variety into musical theater, which has too often been the province of nerdy white homosexuals: that has had a limiting effect. For that matter, I wonder what any of a number of our most creative singer-songwriters—Ben Folds, Sufjan Stevens, and Wayne Coyne all have shown talent for expressing character through song as well as constructing longer-form musical pieces (indeed, since I began this essay, I have heard tell of Aaron Sorkin writing the book for a Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots musical)—could do in musical theater.

Of course, they’d have to cut their teeth off-Broadway, or off-off-Broadway, or off-off-off, etc., as Sater and Sheik did. Indeed, perhaps my assessment of Broadway has been a bit too bleak, as I have not been addressing off-Broadway, which is typically the province of most exciting theatrical experimentation. Yet I keep tabs, as best I can from a distance, on that scene, and have rarely been excited by anything I’ve read about. If something works in a small theater, Broadway is usually pretty eager to grab it.

There are other things that Broadway can do right now to help deal with its immense problems. One, if it is at all possible to expand existing Broadway theaters, I would think it could be a huge help. I imagine many owners would be reluctant to do this, particularly those that often see empty seats. By expanding the theaters, though, they could offer cheaper seats without losing much long-term profit. As the Met Opera has found with its $20 Family Circle seats (and from what I understand, American opera is in a situation as dire, if not more so, than American musical theater, though I don’t have the expertise to analyze it at the same length), offering tickets that do not cost the average family a week’s pay, or a college student more than he spends on food in a month, will help foster a younger and broader audience, so that when the current generation of theatergoers begins to die, there will still be theatergoers left. And if the theaters cannot be expanded—well, I would advise chopping those balcony seats in price for the good of the community. Unfortunately, while the Met can take a larger perspective, as it is one of only two major opera companies in the city, I doubt any individual Broadway theater would be willing to make that kind of change.

I have a slightly more ambitious plan: a New York State Musical Theater. It would not have to be state-run or subsidized, though I imagine the latter might be useful. It would be the size of, say, Madison Square Garden, and contain several theatrical spaces of varying sizes. It would have to have incredibly good acoustics, but that would be manageable. People might not be able to see the stage as well, but outdoor theater thrives despite that. The tickets would have a huge range of prices, from front-center tickets as cutthroat as any major theater to $10 nosebleeds. The theater would produce a range of shows that would run a limited time (with an audience 5-10 times that of the typical theater in the biggest space, they could turn profits more quickly while also exhausting the customer base fast), ranging from classy revivals to newer, low-budget, experimental works in the smallest. It could contract some of Hollywood’s bigger names (and medium names, for that matter) to commit to a show every few years, to keep the buzz high—and I would hope that these performers would be as willing to engage in the smaller projects as the bigger ones; while it’s nice to seen the Kevins Kline and Spacey to do another Shakespeare role every other year, I think it would help the theater world much more if they’d appear in new shows from time to time. I know there are enough stars who cut their teeth in the theater to have some stake in it, and most of them are rich enough that they don’t really need the kinds of salaries that weigh down a lot of shows.

That, at least, might be some sign that theater has to be taken seriously again. Right now it is not: I recall the TV Geek on Comedy Central’s Beat the Geeks asking why The Tonys are broadcast nationally, as no one outside New York cared, and basically thinking he was right. It’s a shame. Schopenhauer (and later Wagner) felt that music was the most profound and powerful expression of will; I, being less Teutonic in mindset, would limit to being the most universal way to express personal emotion, particularly when paired with lyrics for context. The musical is an important medium that can, I believe, still be relevant, and if done well might force people who have dismissed it as a genre to re-examine parts of their own personality that reject it that way. But it needs to be reinvented, both in terms of the content of what is on stage and the economic ways of getting the public to the seats.