As we come to the end of a Broadway season, I feel I need to revisit my December Substack on Jukebox musicals. I talked about my love/hate relationship with them and I snuck in at the end about the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. I was a member of that back in the 90s. An incredible workshop of musical writers learning the craft of musical theatre writing. How a song should be inserted when a character can no longer speak and must sing. How the lyrics continue the premise of the story (when often jukebox musicals use songs that only have one line to what’s happening in that moment). How you write perfect rhymes for the stage (when radio songs hardly EVER follow this rule). It was a wonderful organization to be involved with back when I had dreams of writing the next great American Musical…but in many ways, it also messed with my mind when attending theater and made me very critical for decades to follow.
Broadway’s original musical category this year is larger than some seasons we’ve seen in the past. If you break these down it’s interesting to see original music versus using a catalog of songs from other places.
The eligible musicals are:
Almost Famous, & Juliet, Kimberly Akimbo, KPOP, A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical, Some Like it Hot, Bad Cinderella, New York, New York, and Shucked. (I saw them all except for one.)
Wildly enough, 7 of these had original scores written for the show. That’s a huge number of original work that should “move the story along, be written for that specific moment to tell a specific story”.
Notice the words I used above because that’s not necessarily true for all of these. Of course you want a song that can be lifted, played on the radio, and be universal. Who doesn’t want to have a hit song pulled from their show? However, it should also be specific to the character/moment in the show.
This season there were a couple of head scratching moments for me. Writing an original score for Almost Famous, but using one of the songs from the film and then using that song on your commercial….totally negating the composers for your show. Or pulling in 4 other Kander & Ebb tunes to fill out the score for New York, New York. Composers steal from themselves all the time and songs cut from one show may end up in another with some reworked lyrics. (Yes…I’ve done this myself in musicals I’ve written.) However, the four songs I mention above are from produced/published shows. I couldn’t figure out why they simply didn’t use Lin Manuel Miranda more and write a few more original tunes specific for this show. Shucked has been around for almost a decade, had a completely different book and title at first, but they made great changes before Broadway and still managed to make the score work with the finish product. (The first time I thought it was ballad heavy, but my second viewing I figured we needed those to pull us in from all the laughing at the dialogue in this very funny musical.)
I had three favorite musicals rise to the top of my list this year and funny enough, one is a jukebox musical. I’m not even discussing off-broadway in this article because if I did, Titanique would be right up there and that is a major jukebox musical of all Celine Dion songs retelling the Titanic movie (and it’s hysterical).
My favorites list just goes to show you can teach an old dog new tricks and just maybe I’m not too old where I can’t change my mind now and then...especially about the score used for a Broadway musical.
Happy awards season, New York. Looking forward to seeing how it all plays out.