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

Theatre 251
Quasimodo (Michael Arden) rings the gigantic cathedral bells in an extravagant new production of The Hunchback of Notre
Dame that opened at the La Jolla (CA) and Paper Mill (NJ) Playhouses in 2014–2015—hopefully en route to Broadway. Alan
Menken wrote the score, Peter Parnell the book, and Stephen Schwartz, who also directed, created the ingenious lyrics based
on Victor Hugo’s classic novel. © Kevin Berne
and New Jersey in 2015, from where it will almost certainly
be on Broadway when you read this. Clearly the
musical theatre, both American and international, has
become a global phenomenon in the twenty-first century.
FOREIGN INVASIONS: BRITISH, FRENCH,
AND DISNEY
American-born musicals dominated Broadway’s musical
theatre scene for the first six decades of the twentieth
century. Then, beginning in 1970, European
composers, lyricists, and directors came to the forefront.
Leading the invasion of America’s music theatre
capital was English composer Andrew Lloyd Webber,
first with his rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar in
1970, followed by his psychedelic Biblical adaptation
Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, and then by
Cats, a musical adaptation of famed poet T. S. Eliot’s
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. In 1988, Webber
outdid the success of all of these musicals with his
legendary Phantom of the Opera, which has become
the longest-running musical in Broadway history. All
these works—including the successful Evita, Starlight
Express, and Sunset Boulevard—are known for their
lush musical scores more than for their books or lyrics.
Most are sung through (with no spoken dialogue), so
they are easily accessible to global audiences who need
little in the way of translation. The staging tends to be
extravagant: Starlight Express featured a cast speeding
on roller skates around an elevated track encircling the
audience. In Phantom, a chandelier seems to fall right
in the midst of the audience, and the masked Phantom
and his beloved cruise in a gondola on a fiery subterranean
“lake” in the basement of the Paris Opera House.
Lloyd Webber’s most recent music theatre creation,
which opened in London in 2013, is Stephen Ward, a
satirical look at a notorious 1960s political scandal.
Following closely in Lloyd Webber’s trans-Atlantic
steps were French composer Claude-Michel Schönberg
and lyricist Alain Boublil. Their Les Misérables (1987,