Learning to love musicals

A good friend and fellow lover of theater (I'm pretty sure we were in a play together all the way back in 7^th grade) posted an article on Facebook about Hamilton and noted that the author's negative slant made him, at last, interested to see the show, as he has long hated musicals.

The thing is: I know where he is coming from.

For the longest time, I felt the same way. Why is the action stopping every few minutes for them to sing? People don't do that in real life, do they?

As a theatergoer, this didn't really make much of a difference to me. You can have your well-scrubbed singers; I'll be over here in this grimy found space watching some “real” drama.

Once I started actually writing about theater as my job, I knew that attitude wasn't going to make it. I had to meet my prejudices head on.

For me – and likely a lot of others who didn't “get” musicals – the breaking into song that broke the flow of the show. I wanted realism, damn it!

How did I change, then? Well, a lot of it was just careful study over decades of experience watching musical theater. That isn't the a quick-and-easy solution demanded by modern society, so here's another way to try. Do you like movies and television? Have you enjoyed the various Star Wars, Marvel comics, heck, courtroom dramas, political thrillers, or John Wick?

Those aren't realistic either. No one has laser swords in our world. Being exposed to radiation gives you cancer, not give you big muscles and turn your skin green. And the courts, boardrooms, and the mean streets of any city (that inevitably looks like Toronto) aren't at all like you see on TV. Yet we buy into them because we agreed to a contract with the art: If they are able to immerse us in their “reality,” we'll stay with them until the end.

Musical theater, then, is just another kind of reality for us to enter. There are plenty of rules to be followed and and twisted and broken, but they are there. And honestly, if you just accept the baseline reality – a world where people break into song when it is demanded – half the battle is won.

Of course, it's not just a matter of turning a switch on in your brain. There are easier places to start than others. Three hours of A Little Night Music or Les Miz may not be the best way to start. Also, I can't point to any running productions at present as putting dozens of performers in front of a full house of often august theatergoers isn't wise.

Still, there are easier places to start. Apart from having a phenomenal cast, excellent direction, and Kander and Ebb's cracking great songs, the filmed version of Chicago presents all of the musical numbers as fantasies in the mind of the murderess Roxie. The “real” world and Roxie's world are clearly delineated so you can be content to know that “Cell Block Tango” isn't really taking place in the jail. (Also, “Cell Block Tango” is seven of the most brilliant musical minutes captured on film.)

Keeping with Kander and Ebb, there's Cabaret. Except for one harrowing number in a mid-'30s German beer garden, all of the musical numbers are confined to the Kit Kat Klub, where they comment on the action of the drama, or offer texture to life in pre-Hitler Germany. (Also, you get “Mein Herr,” another few absolutely brilliant musical minutes.)

There are other examples, though maybe not as tailor made as these. The Hedwig and the Angry Inch film has its moments, but the effort to expand the story's world robs it much of the stage version's power. There, the show is presented almost entirely as a concert by Hedwig (one song is from the view of collaborator-turned-rival Tommy Gnosis, though still presented as a performance on stage).

If you dig into this, there are plenty of ways into the genre. Even Hamilton – which is rapped and sung throughout – is an easier jump than you might think. The show never makes any pretense of being a “realistic” portrayal of Alexander Hamilton's life or the founding decades of the United States. Then again, that's what theater is – people playing at reality to uncover the truth, even if that's told through an 11 o'clcock number.