| THE LAST SHIP, KINKY BOOTS, CAPEMAN, TOMMY... and other Bway musicals by pop composers | |
| Posted by: | GrumpyMorningBoy 03:56 pm EST 11/24/14 |
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| Looking at Sting's attempts to save THE LAST SHIP naturally has me thinking about the examples we've got from the last few decades when successful pop composers have tried to break into Broadway. While songwriters like Sting, Paul Simon, Pete Townshend, Bjorn & Benny, etc. seemed to churn out pop songs with prolific ease, they took years and years and years -- decades even -- saving up for their ONE BIG SPLASH at trying to create a hit Broadway musical. (or, with the ABBA dudes, two.) The pressure's clearly high. But it seems to me like more often than not, our most successful pop songwriters don't usually succeed on the Great White Way. Am I right about that? It's a little heart-wrenching to see Sting -- an insanely talented guy -- struggle as much as he is. THE LAST SHIP is clearly something he worked on for a very, very long time, trying to churn out something original. Huge points for effort. But yes, I can scoff as much as the next guy... Silly Pop Composers! Don't you know how hard this genre is?!? Go take some Lehman Engel classes for a few years and try again! You're doomed to fail! And I'd love the ATC's chatters to round out the list of pop flops, beyond THE CAPEMAN, CARRIE, CHESS, DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES and others that immediately pop into my mind. I'm sure there are far more failed Broadway shows written by pop composers than I possibly than think of off the top of my head. (For the sake of this discussion, let's discuss musicals from the 70's going forward... we all know that Broadway composers essentially *were* pop composers in the Golden Era and beforehand...) But there are most definitely exceptions to those flops, right? Wasn't Rupert Holmes known exclusively as a pop composer before DROOD? I mean, my god, what a ridiculously talented person that man is. The sonic distance between "Moonfall" and "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" couldn't be further. I can only wonder why he hasn't written more musicals. CURTAINS wasn't my thing. You have to admire someone like Elton John, who seemed to really learn as he went along. BILLY ELLIOT is much more organic than THE LION KING (which relies heavily on a handful of other composers, truth be told). The way that Disney developed AIDA certainly must have taught him an awful lot about how a musical is constructed from the ground-up. Some pop composers really seem to have a gift at letting go of their particular pop sound when they're writing for the stage. I look at something like THE SECRET GARDEN, which really sounds NOTHING like Lucy Simon's pop songs. I look forward to hearing her DOCTOR ZHIVAGO some day soon. In the last few seasons, it's seemed like the pop composers who have tried their hand -- Dolly Parton, Cyndi Lauper, Trey Anastasio, Duncan Sheik for example -- have come at the process very organically. They worked with established theater people... book writers and lyricists who absolutely know what they're doing. The hubris of the previous decades seems to be gone. And so, if NINE TO FIVE, KINKY BOOTS HANDS ON A HARDBODY and SPRING AWAKENING are shows to be admired, is it because these pop composers knew how to adapt their songwriting to the quote-unquote 'rules' of the musical theatre genre, and collaborated along the way with smart book writers and lyricists to keep them on track? Was that their recipe for (qualified) success? What are we to make of shows like THE CAPEMAN, TABOO, CHESS, every awful thing Frank Wildhorn has subjected us to, Randy Newman's FAUST, the Scissor Sisters' disappointing TALES OF THE CITY... etc? Was the fact that these shows' composers came from the pop music world something that worked against them? And... for those of you who know more about the gestation process for THE LAST SHIP than I do, is there something that Sting should have done differently in the development of this show to make sure it landed on Broadway in better shape than it's in? - GMB | |
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