Don’t Cry for Them

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice come to New York, 1970. Photo: Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images

The megamusical, that old British invader, has crept back into the theater district. No panicked talk of Broadway’s colonization this time: This is just a reunion tour. Jesus Christ Superstar, the pioneering rock opera that helped usher in the Age of Amplification, has returned in a very earnest, vaguely ridiculous, vocally relentless production from the Stratford Shakespeare festival. Evita is back, as well, cloaked in fathomless imperial shadow by director Michael Grandage and featuring both the affable, translucent presence of pop star Ricky Martin (as Che) and the unique voice of Elena Roger, a de gustibus proposition if ever there was one. Both of these shows are proto-megas, predating the true Reagan-era behemoths Cats, Les ­Misérables, and, of course, The Phantom of the Opera, which still haunts the Majestic after a quarter century and claims the mantle of Most Profitable Entertainment of All Time, in Any Medium. This being the first time since the mid-nineties that Andrew Lloyd Webber, forefather and chief metonym of the megamusical, has had three shows running concurrently on Broadway, I visited all of them in the past two weeks, trying to determine what the mega is—or rather, what it was, why we loved it, and why we feared it. I came away with my ears ringing and my nostalgia abuzz: It all looks so innocent now.

It certainly didn’t 25 years ago. America was afraid of many things in the eighties: AIDS, crack, Soviet Russia, the Japanese, killer bees, Willie Horton, and splashy British theater, to name just a few. In New York, megamusicals easily ranked No. 3 on that list. The triumvirate of Cats, Phantom, and Les Miz—immense, plastic, through-sung stage spectacles all produced by one diabolical Anglo-Scotsman, the gold­fingered Cameron Mackintosh—was seen as a shot across the bow of the great American book-musical tradition (which had been tirelessly cultivating its self-­destruction by the time Mackintosh came along to stop Broadway’s bleeding). The problem with megamusicals, American critics complained, was not their bald commercialism, reliance on technical dazzle, or reductio ad Casio derivations of opera. It was that they were not really musicals at all, but Met-lite-lite spectacles, with gesture in lieu of character and image in lieu of storytelling. “You come out humming the scenery,” Clive Barnes famously carped. Stephen Sondheim, in his annotated-­lyrics compendium Look I Made a Hat, declares these shows modern “operettas,” characterized by “grandiosity, humorlessness, romantic sweep, melodramatic stories which take place in long-ago times and faraway places, brimming with spectacle and recitative.” This, he coolly claims, is “not a criticism, merely a description of a phenomenon, which in turn is now receding—it would seem. There will always be a public for the past.”

So what, exactly, was the “megamusical”? That eighties coinage, with its Sharper Image techno-sheen and unmistakable suggestion of excess, actually refers to a trend that began in 1969, when a pair of Brits named Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber synthesized the lessons of Hair and the Who’s Tommy to produce a concept album called Jesus Christ Superstar, then turned it into a stage show. The mega­musical and the rock opera are distinct (well, as distinct as these artificial categories get), but with the second Rice/Lloyd Webber production, Evita, the Who-vian DNA had begun to mutate into something newer, more ambitious, and, above all, more marketable. By the time Cats opened on Broadway in 1982, the transformation was complete—and the backlash began. Today, despite the return of a few adored curios and the ascent of Les Miz to the big screen (in an adaptation starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, and Anne Hathaway), the megamusical’s cell line is, for the most part, dead. (Though I await David Henry Hwang’s inevitable Sino-centric reimagining of Chess.) When Sondheim revivals suffuse Broadway, we talk about timelessness. When Lloyd Webber marches back to town, three shows abreast, we mostly just feel old … and I mean Grizabella-old. Why is that?

Despite a childhood spent pilfering my parents’ record collection for theater-cheese (out of the way, Graceland! Avant ye, Dan Fogelberg!), I didn’t actually see a megamusical in an actual theater until my junior year of high school. The show was Phantom, and I was fatally disappointed, despite a deep (and abiding!) attachment to the score. The problem was this: I’d been listening to the original cast album for years, and it had done its work too well. Megamusicals—which function more like film scores with words than classic musical-theater storytelling—­implicitly promise the cinematic, not the theatrical. Thus, I thought the chandelier should plummet! Instead, it glided, on sturdy guide wires, gently downward, Glinda in her soap bubble. The Phantom should sweep Christine down to his lair, à la Batman. No dice: The romantic leads scampered back and forth on what appeared to be a series of slowly descending jet bridges. The gondola was kinda nifty, but if you squinted (through the eyes of the young and literal-minded), you could peer through the dry ice and see where the black hull met a highly unromantic mechanical wheeled assembly.* I did find “Masquerade” to be suitably awesome. But that was the extent of my breathlessness. It had promised a world without limitations, a world as free of weight and mass as it was free of irony, complexity, and depth. Instead, Phantom proved to be just a bigger theater piece, not entirely unlike the ones I knew from my high-school stage.

*This article has been corrected to show that the gondola in Phantom was wheeled, not on a track.

Photographs: from left, Joan Marcus; Terry O’Neill/Getty Images; Joan Marcus (3); Richard Termine

This world of massless massiveness began to vanish in the early nineties, and the correction has been felt for years, in such also-rans and never-weres as Sunset Boulevard, Martin Guerre, Whistle Down the Wind, and The Woman in White. The Disney musical replaced the megamusical, substantially reembraced the “book” tradition of the American Golden Age, and implicitly declared children’s entertainment off-limits for adults: There would be no more bloated fairy tales for yuppie grown-ups (bankers weren’t taking their dates to Beauty and the Beast), and jukebox musicals would eventually prove safer bets for low-impact musical satisfaction—who’d risk $250 on dangerously untested new tunes? On top of that, the genre’s great melodists—Lloyd Webber and Claude-Michel Schoenberg, principally—were no longer cranking out great melodies at their peak rate. Say what you wish about Sir Andrew, call him a thief and an opportunist, but the man can shape a phrase. He is a pop compositor, yes, but that describes many talented composers. The allegations of his wholesale lifts from Puccini, Mendelssohn, et al., have always been somewhat overblown. As for the megamusical’s lyrics, well, they were always kind of beside the point, weren’t they? Personally I’ve never understood the appeal of Tim Rice, dubious wordsmith of Superstar and Evita. What ­Jessica Sternfeld calls his “efficient, pointed slang” in her excellent treatise / apologia The Megamusical, I’d characterize as casual sloppiness, Bernie Taupin–esque arbitrariness, and total metrical suicide. I present this unforgettable, unforgivable refrain from Evita: “I want to be / a part of B.A. / Buenos Aires / Big Apple!”

In a pileup like that, performance is every­thing—another reason why megamusicals, while they can be effectively and profitably cloned (a process perfected in country after country by Mackintosh), can’t be easily revivified from the ground up. These shows, as functional drama, are very shaky mirages, and attempts to alter them at the genetic level depend critically on the star-leads. (Phantom has been through many a Phantom, for example, but they’re all doing a Michael Crawford impression.) Consider Michael Grandage’s imposing new vision of Evita at the Marquis, an achievement of scale and dynamism, thanks in large part to Rob Ashford’s whirligig (and only occasionally muddled) choreography. Grandage has cast newcomer Elena Roger as Eva Perón, the sainted First Lady of mid-century Argentina (really, a distaff version of the fame-haunted Christ from Superstar). London went mad for Roger: her elfin apoplexies and unique vocal interpretation were met with bouquets. Personally, I found her performance almost too good a fit with Rice’s jagged, herky-jerky lyrics: She is memorable in part because she is irritating. Her upper register sometimes approximates a subway-gate alarm, and her quick-runs in tricky passages throw all normal concepts of pitch to the wayside. It’s as if her voice breaks a heel and just keeps hobbling at high speed. There’s pungency and pathos in this approach, but it all felt a tad shambolic to me. One place it works well: her plaintive yet needling “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” which she delivers with a hypodermic. Finally, there’s a version of this song that doesn’t allow you to luxuriate in its melodic velour. Roger, whatever else she’s doing up there, keeps us on our toes. (The same cannot be said for Ricky Martin’s narrator-gadfly Che, who, despite his grinning avidity and entirely competent singing, fades into the scenery almost instantly.)

There is no scenery to speak of in Des McAnuff’s brisk, dour, darkly dorky interpretation of Superstar. The show amounts to a mild apostasy: We’re presented with a stripped down Power Christ (the lank, note-perfect wailer Paul Nolan) who refuses to play to the arena at all. Maybe that’s because he’s tired of the spotlight (his constant theme); maybe it’s because he’s tired of being dance-mobbed by the cast of Waterworld. This Superstar’s constant brow-furrowing is so cosmically at odds with the intrinsic goofiness of its design and execution—fake Rasta-payess wiggery, silly leather dusters and plastic armor, and the kind of lazy postapocalypticism that blends Blade Runner with the bargain rack at Ricky’s—I often wondered whether someone was pulling my leg. But one glance at Griefer Jesus told me, definitively: “We are not amused (and by ‘we’ I mean the Trinity).” The new ­Superstar isn’t a dud, just a bit of a grind, as we wait for a wink that seems implied, but never arrives. (One place where the graveness works like gangbusters: Bruce Dow’s furious, self-loathing Herod.) No worries: The kids will love it.

Because kids do—and should—love megamusicals. They certainly still love Phantom, which I caught at a Wednesday matinee last week. The Majestic was packed with hormonal teens and preteens, and these txt-gen moppets—weaned on Avatar and Transformers and the Spider-Man killing, er, thrilling machine—weren’t there for the chandelier. They were there for the fat spatters of hummable romance, for the seat-shaking shock chords, for the great fondue pot of nonsensically swirling motifs. They were there for, and visibly rapt by, the music—yes, the mega­music. And also because someone put them on a charter bus, at a steep discount. Either way, it’ll be a memory, even if it’s a hand-me-down, for the future public of the past.

Jesus Christ Superstar
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber; Lyrics by Tim Rice.
Neil Simon Theatre.

Evita
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber; Lyrics by Tim Rice.
Marquis Theatre.

E-mail: theatercritic@newyorkmag.com.

Don’t Cry for Them