Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 249
Music (1973), adapted from an Ingmar Bergman film
about summer dalliances on a country estate in Sweden.
These works were widely heralded for their brilliantly
acerbic but always entertaining portrayal of the eternal
conflicts between social mores and romantic idealism
(or, more bluntly, between laws and lust). Furthermore,
particularly as all have been revived on Broadway twice
since their premiere productions, they established Sondheim’s
supremacy in the American musical form for the
entire generation that followed.
Even after this initial burst of success, Sondheim continued
to break new boundaries. His Pacific Overtures
(1976) employs kabuki-inspired music and stage techniques
to trace the history of relations between Japan and
the United States since Commodore Perry’s “opening”
of Japan in 1853. His Sweeney Todd (1979) integrates
Brechtian distancing techniques and elements from
Italian grand opera, the English music hall, and Victorian
melodrama in a wildly morbid story of a barber’s
revenge. Sweeney’s score is so powerful and its actions
and images so compelling that the work has been staged
by several European opera companies. Conversely, his
Sunday in the Park with George (1984) is an elegant
and minimal musical play about the pointillist painter
Georges Seurat; for this production, Sondheim invented
an abstract style of music to echo Seurat’s painting style.
In 1986, Sondheim’s Into the Woods offered a radical
version of the most traditional of forms, the fairy tale.
In this retelling, however, familiar characters like Jack,
Little Red Riding Hood, and Rapunzel suffer the same
psychological crises and moral ambiguities as real,
fleshed-out people, long after their lives supposedly end
“happily ever after.” A successful 2014 film adaptation
of Into the Woods shows its lasting popularity—indeed,
all of these shows have received successful Broadway
revivals in the twenty-first century.
Sondheim’s most controversial works are Assassins
(1991) and Passion (1994). The first is a musical
review of presidential assassinations (and assassination
attempts), which cascades through two centuries to
portray the quirks and oddities of John Wilkes Booth,
Lee Harvey Oswald, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, and
John Hinckley Jr., among other unlikely musical theatre
protagonists. Passion, a nineteenth-century gothic
tragedy (“one long love song,” Sondheim calls it) tells
the strange story of Giorgio, a handsome Italian army
officer who, though deeply in love with his beautiful
mistress Clara, is relentlessly pursued by his superior’s
cousin Fosca, a homely, ailing, and pathetically obsessive
woman. Giorgio yields to the intensity of Fosca’s
passionate fixation, much to Clara’s (and the audience’s)
despair. There being little for the Broadway audience to
“root for” in this romantic tangle, Passion closed less
than eight months after its Broadway premiere. Its innovations,
however, are exhilarating, and the musical won
the 1994 Tony Awards for Musical, Best Book of a Musical,
and Best Original Score, while subsequent productions,
including the nationally televised 2005 Lincoln
Center concert version and a 2010 Donmar Warehouse
London revival, have won great praise and new awards.
BLACK MUSICALS
More than a dozen major “black musicals” (musicals
largely by, about, and performed by African Americans)
have excited Broadway audiences since the 1970s to
attract large “crossover” (i.e., black and white) audiences
to help to pave the way for cultural integration at every
level of the country’s social structure. The last decades
of the twentieth century have featured Charlie Smalls’
The Wiz (an African American version of The Wizard of
Oz); Bubbling Brown Sugar and Eubie (both based on
the music of ragtime composer/pianist Eubie Blake, who
in 1921 wrote Broadway’s first black musical, Shuffle
Along); Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Sophisticated Ladies (featuring,
respectively, the music of Fats Waller and Duke
Ellington); Dreamgirls (celebrating a Supremes-like singing
group and their struggles to succeed in an environment
of racism and civil strife); Jelly’s Last Jam (about
jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, written and directed by
George C. Wolfe); and Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da
Funk (a capsule history of racial injustice in America,
conceived and directed by George C. Wolfe and choreographed
by Savion Glover, who also performed). Even
more recent black Broadway musicals like Memphis,
Fela!, and The Scottsboro Boys celebrate—and often
criticize—the interaction between black music and white
culture. Memphis (2009) deals with the transition from
African American rhythm & blues to white American
rock & roll in Tennessee during the 1950s. Fela! (2009)
showcases the legendary, and politically radical, Nigerian
singer/musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti and the mesmerizing
Afrobeat music he pioneered in his Lagos nightclub in
the 1970s. The Scottsboro Boys (2010) tells the true story
of young black southern men—some of them just boys—
who were falsely accused and convicted of raping two
white women on a train in 1931; the events are recalled in
the format of a minstrel show, with a white “Interlocutor”
and an otherwise all-black cast (some comically assuming
white roles). The great 1935 Gershwin opera Porgy
and Bess, set among the black inhabitants of Charleston’s
Catfish Row of the 1930s, revised by Suzan-Lori