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| "Aida" poster, and Michael Cavanaugh in "Movin' Out." |
For the first time, several big-name pop composers contributed scores to Broadway. Elton John made his Broadway debut, working with lyricist Tim Rice on the transfer of his film score for the stage version of "The Lion King" in 1997. When Disney offered John and Rice a chance to write a new version of Verdi's opera "Aida" for Broadway, John applied his ebullient eclecticism to a score that he wrote at the amazingly fast rate of about one song per day: "It's truly a pop musical, with spoken dialogue. There are black songs, very urban-based, rhythm and blues, gospel-inspired songs, and kind of 'Crocodile Rock' songs, and ballads, of course."
The same season that John made his debut with "The Lion King," another major figure in the pop world, from the 1970s, brought his first score to Broadway: Paul Simon. Critics had always invoked Simon's name as a natural for Broadway, for his sense of narrative was extraordinary and his songs had already provided strong emotional backgrounds for several films. Simon's Broadway project could not have been less conventional; it was based on the true story of a 16-year-old Puerto Rican gang member, dubbed "The Capeman," who had stabbed two white kids in 1959. Simon's look at urban history was both uncompromising and sympathetic, and he provided a breathtakingly wide-ranging score of gospel, doo-wop, Afro-Cuban bop, and Latin salsa tunes. But "The Capeman" lasted only two months, costing $11 million, and when it folded, it took with it one of the most thrilling scores written for a Broadway show in the last 20 years.
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| Twyla Tharp and Billy Joel, and from "Movin' Out," Desmond Richardson and Nancy Lemenager. |
In 2000, choreographer Twyla Tharp wanted to create a large-scale theater piece, and she knew that the swinging narrative songs of Billy Joel held the answer. "He was clearly the best choice because he's such a good storyteller,'' Ms. Tharp said. ''There is rage in his music and guts in his songs. I've always known that his music dances.'' Tharp created "Movin' Out," which tells the story of three Long Island friends and the girls they leave behind during and after the Vietnam War. "Movin' Out" is performed unconventionally -- the show's large corps of dancers move through the narrative to the live accompaniment of 30 Billy Joel songs performed by a single singer and a back-up band. Although the show hit some shoals on its way in from Chicago, it opened in New York in the fall of 2002 to ecstatic reviews.
But, as became immediately apparent to musicians like Bacharach, John, and Simon, a Broadway collaboration is a very different prospect from a date in the recording studio. Not only do rock and pop composers have to stretch their narrative range to cover songs that work together over the course of an evening, they have to surrender to the grueling politics and unpredictability that go into creating a Broadway show. Broadway babies are born, not made.
Jonathan Larson, however, was a Broadway baby. He grew up in suburban Westchester and was taken by his parents to see "Fiddler on the Roof" and "1776," yet avidly followed the concerts and recordings of Billy Joel and Elton John. In the late 1980s, he began writing the book, music, and lyrics to a musical update of Puccini's "La Bohème," relocated to Alphabet City in the East Village, an area he knew well; it was, indeed, the cutting-edge epicenter of bohemianism. The ambitious score to "Rent," as the project was now called, required Larson to orchestrate gospel numbers, hymns, tangos, patter songs, and character songs, all to a rock beat.
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| The late composer and lyricist of "Rent," Jonathan Larson. |
All signs pointed to "Rent" as the logical successor to the ambitions of "Hair" in the days before it opened downtown at the New York Theatre Workshop Off Broadway. Larson died suddenly after the final dress rehearsal, at the age of 35, due to an untreated aortic aneurysm. His death created the biggest Off-Broadway sensation since "A Chorus Line" opened at the Public Theater more than 20 years earlier. But all the publicity would have meant nothing if audiences and critics hadn't liked "Rent." They loved it and, within months, the show transferred to Broadway and won the Tony for Best Musical and Best Score, and ultimately, the Pulitzer Prize.
Since its transfer in 1996, it has run more than 3,500 performances and, even better, attracted a new, younger audience to Broadway, just the way Larson wanted. It's surprising, absent Larson's consultation, that the Broadway producers of "Rent" decided to grab a youthful audience by promoting the show as something anarchic, hard-edged, and raw -- the very antithesis of "Pippin" (one of Larson's favorite shows). "Don't you hate the word 'Musical'?" read the ad campaign. Larson's death only complicated the debate about rock scores on Broadway -- someone else came along and brought the two together again. Composer Marvin Hamlisch puts the dilemma in the right context:
I have my own thoughts about Broadway and "the Broadway sound" -- there's been a lot of discussion about "Rent" and shows like that with the "rock sound." ... I think rock 'n' roll is wonderful and is here to stay, and we'll have those kinds of shows, but they're rock shows. Sometimes a good coat that's been there a long time is better than the brand new one that you have to break in, so I don't know how far Broadway can take it, how far we can move the envelope.
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photo credits: Photofest, Triton Gallery (© Disney), Joan Marcus, and the Larson family
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Critic Frank Rich talks about the Broadway musical falling out of step with popular culture during the 1960s; Jerry Herman on his song "Hello, Dolly!" topping the pop charts; Ben Vereen describes auditioning and working on "Hair."
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