Re: Musical Theatre uncool?
well.....yes of course
but.....
I agree that the article raises some really interesting points and I agree with much of what he says. The
point about sound design is particularly interesting to me. How do you stay true to the requirements of the music (rock, hip hop, whatever) and still answer the audience's desire to have sound in a live situation be as intelligible as when they sit in the living rooms watching TV?
I would not put it all on the artistic tension between b'way sound vs. concert sound. I think a lot of it comes from the
producer side of the equation not wanting to be standing at the
box office with bunch of angry patrons and reviewers complaining that they could not understand a word of the songs. I think this drives the results that Pie4weebl describes more than an artistic difference of writing and playing music in a rock style vs. mus.
theatre style.
But that is not to say that the artistic differences do not exist. One aspect the author did not touch on was that understanding lyrics in rock music is not the essential quality for reaching your audience. How many of us ever understood
Led Zepplin lyrics the first time around or any Black Sabbath song to this day? What matters is the hook, the feeling. It might be the
chord progression or just the chorus or a guitar solo. The rest of the appreciation and understanding comes once that something sucks you in and you listen to it multiple times. Broadway shows at $100+ a pop dont have that
dynamic.
Musical
Theatre has an obligation to a story so understanding the lyrics matters more than in other forms of pop music. The author's examples of original recordings of Hair (songs not that critical to
plot line, such as it is) and JC Superstar (story and characters pretty well established to audience before they enter
theatre) are to my mind still a lot closer to trad. mus.
theatre than any rock album of that era that I can think of. None the less I think his overall thesis is valid and that the pendulum could use a push back in the direction of getting more guts into the music and not calcify into a formulaic straight
jacket. I think he is spot on about Fela.
Paul