02/15/2014
Editor’s Notes: What happened to the Broadway Musical?
By: Jeannie Lieberman

Beautiful - The Carole King Musical
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

I have just returned from seeing Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, the latest in a string of what are currently known as “Jukebox Musicals.” While I thoroughly enjoyed it, able to give myself over to the evocative music of the period, delivered by a great orchestra and talented cast, it was like Chinese food: quickly digested, with no lingering aftertaste of meaningful passages or insights, and a day later I barely remembered it.

What is a Jukebox musical?
No doubt derived from the originals found in luncheonettes and bars, a jukebox was a device into which you plugged a coin, made a musical selection, it played and then it was over. A moment’s pleasure quickly gone.
We can trace the term "jukebox musical" to the 1940s when it was coined to refer to motion pictures with original screenplays, whose musical scores consisted largely of hit recordings of previously released popular songs. Examples are Jam Session (1944), Rock Around the Clock (1956), Juke Box Rhythm (1959), and A Hard Day’s Night (1964) as recently reminisced in the stunning Grammy 50^th Anniversary Salute to the Beatles.


Jersey Boys
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

The Jukebox Parade
Beautiful… was but the latest in a season that started with the mostly forgotten Let It Be, a jukebox edition of the Beatles repertoire. This was followed by Lady Day, an Off Broadway biomusical that actually had a book, and What’s It All About? Bacharach Reimagined, that didn’t.



A Night with Janis Joplin
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

Broadway’s A Night with Janis Joplin, with its brilliant musical numbers and performances had a book painfully thin and puerile. The show, incidentally, will soon move to an Off Broadway house where it should enjoy a good run, and where it belongs. And I assume a jukebox musical about Marvin Hamlisch cannot be far away after a brilliant televised documentary about him.

These are riding on the tails of last year’s enduring Motown, and the biggest of them all Jersey Boys, which re-ignited the genre in 2005, the successor to the granddaddy of them all Smokey Joe's Cafe, a 1995 “revuesical” (a term coined about 20 years ago for a musical without a book) which ran for 2,036 performances, making it the longest-running musical revue in Broadway history. Until perhaps Jersey Boys which, according to its still undeniable popularity, might run “forever.”

Weak and weaker, Dumb and dumber
The books get weaker and weaker and if you meld just the numbers from Motown, Joplin and Beautiful and others dipping into the similar time pool – can you distinguish one from the other?


After Midnight
(Photo credit: Matthew Murphy)
The ultimate and logical regression of this trend is After Midnight which delightfully and bravely doesn’t even aspire to a book – just the pure music of its era.
And today’s audiences, with their ever diminishing sound-byte sized attention spans, find this form ever so more accessible as they run, usually from more and more early curtains, to catch their trains. Sometimes it no longer feels like the main event but just a convenient fit–in.


No guarantee of success
Million Dollar Quartet (2010) about a recording session of December 4, 1956, with Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, closed on June 12, 2011 after 489 performances and then re-opened Off Broadway. Said a critic, “The curtain calls were better than the show.”

Some jukebox productions spectacularly failed: Ring of Fire, (2006) based on the music of Johnny Cash, lasted only a month. Good Vibrations (2005) featuring the music of the Beach Boys ran for 94 performances.


Smart and Smarter?
There used be a debate concerning competition for the same awards between commercial successes for which producers had to scrounge for capital, usually for years, and not-for-profit musicals, which are funded.


Ashley Brown and Gavin Lee
in Mary Poppins
(Photo credit: George Holz)

And when Disney Theatricals burst upon the scene with their huge Hollywood pockets in 1994 with the record setting $12,000,000 budget Beauty and the Beast, soon to be followed by The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Tarzan and Mary Poppins, there was even more indignation by the traditional Broadway producers.

Is this form the new darling of producers who can skimp on paying for new music, even scriptwriters, needing only minimalist sets and choreography and directors who are more musical seamstresses, stitching together numbers on the thinnest of storylines? And, with a reduced budget, they can recoup even faster with a shorter run – and even win some Tonys!!

Is Dumb and dumber Smart and smarter?


From 14 karat to gold plate?
Does the Golden Age of the American Musical gleam even brighter in contrast as recent attempts to continue the tradition grow weaker and weaker?


First Date
(Photo credit: Chris Owyoung)

Consider this year’s original musical flops: First Date, Soul Doctor, Big Fish.


The cast of Pippin performs “Magic to Do”
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

And the onslaught of revivals: Annie (now closed), Pippin, Cabaret, the return of Les Miz (really?)

Where is the Musical headed?
With so many of these new entertainments serving up more of a cocaine high, (exhilarating but transient), in lieu of originality and creativity or significant contributions to our American art form one wonders where musical theater is headed.

Will producers, and composing artists with songbooks from other mediums, continue to be seduced by the easy marketing potential and financial payoff of a Jukebox show? Will audiences continue to vie for the quick fix of dropping a quarter in the juke machine to hear their favorite oldies, instead of risking that quarter (and now it’s actually more like $150 a pop) on something new and unknown?



A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder Cast
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

Or will the risk of fresh new, original book musicals like A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder still be attempted?

Cheer up! Broadway’s future will soon include The Bridges of Madison County, Rocky, Bullets over Broadway, Aladdin (thank you, Disney – the gift that keeps on giving) and nary a new Jukebox musical in sight.

But will they gleam like The Golden Age or easily tarnish?

And will it be brass or a new shot at the gold at award time?
Beautiful vs. Bridges?