| A totally different thought on this subject | |
| Posted by: tmdonahue (tmdonahue@yahoo.com) 09:35 am EST 12/29/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Peter Marks: As tourist-friendly musicals take over, Broadway no longer belongs to playwrights - bowtie7 09:56 am EST 12/28/17 | |
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| The problem with writing comprehensively about Broadway trends is that the theater is part of greater changes happening in US culture. All media are changing. The reasons are as plentiful as blackberries. Thinking about this last night when I should have been asleep, I started to develop an argument that, historically, the era of important plays was aberrant. Theater in the US from the start was largely focused on British theater. Early Americans loved Shakespeare, altho what they saw as Shakespeare would stun us now, what with the bowdlerization and happy endings that were common until the actor-manager William Macready restored the plays in the late 19th century. (And some of us complain about overly inventive directors of Shakespeare today!) Much of the touring theater of the 19th c came from reworked European operettas. Remember that the most financially important title of the late 19th c was "Uncle Tom's Cabin," albeit played by white performers in blackface. There were companies still touring it up to the start of the WWI. Many early 20th c theater artists thought the theater should be reformed--Minnie Maddern Fiske and Eva le Gallienne, to mention two--but they focused on foreign plays. The artful American theater is generally said to begin with Eugene O'Neill. So maybe the efflorescence now of mostly mindless musicals on our stages is a "return to the mean," going back to what the theater in the US used to be mostly like. And maybe not just the US. There are few scripts of anywhere in the world that survive or if found could be staged successfully today. The best has always been rare. I guess that is why it is the best. |
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| Previous: | re: Peter Marks: As tourist-friendly musicals take over, Broadway no longer belongs to playwrights - bowtie7 09:56 am EST 12/28/17 |
| Next: | re: A totally different thought on this subject - ryhog 11:47 am EST 12/29/17 |
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