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

254 Chapter 9 The American Musical Theatre
Alice Ripley won the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical for her leading
role as a mother with bipolar disorder in the 2009 Next to Normal.
Here Ripley is seated next to Robert Spencer, who plays her stage
husband, while Aaron Tveit, as the living image of their grown son—a
son who had actually died in infancy—hovers over them both, as a
nightmare that simply will not go away. Directed by Michael Greif; the
scenic design is by Mark Wendland. © Joan Marcus
This musical, ten years in development on its road to
receiving three 2009 Tony Awards, the 2010 Pulitzer
Prize, and a sixteen-city national tour, was greatly prized
for its alternately delicate and soaring portrayal of a
deeply troubled family battling with tragic psychic ailments
and the hope and anguish that come with them.
An even more lauded musical arrived the following
year: The Book of Mormon in 2011: a “raucously
funny . . . nonstop fusillade of obscenities,” the play “is
earnestly about the power of faith,” said Steven Suskin
in the trade magazine Variety, and “Some of the sweetest
poison ever poured,” said Peter Marks in the Washington
Post. Indeed, all the reviews were rapturous, and the Tony
Award voters overwhelmed, by this outlandish comedy
by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, teaming
with Robert Lopez of Avenue Q—a similarly wildly
successful and irreverent musical that employs puppets to
depict highly adult and scandalous situations—to create
their first Broadway production. The script, as mentioned,
treats white, male, Mormon missionaries transported to
black Uganda, Africa, and while the social, sexual, economic,
religious, and cultural differences between these
peoples are as extreme as could possibly be imagined,
human linkage somehow seeps into every miscommunication,
irritation, disappointment, and conflict that arises
among them until the audience erupts, time and again,
into joyous laughter and applause. Every group is riotously
satirized—not just Mormons and Africans but Jews,
Two Mormon missionaries, played by Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad,
meet the Ugandan sorcerer Mafala Hatimbi, played by Michael Potts, in
The Book of Mormon, 2011. © Joan Marcus
gentiles, gays, straights, thugs, wimps, believers, atheists,
intellectuals, and ignoramuses—and everyone somehow
comes out a hero. The Broadway production, still playing
to sold-out houses nightly in New York, has now opened
in London and toured to over thirty-seven cities in the
United States and Canada.
And two musicals from the off-Broadway New York
Public Theatre that have opened on Broadway as this
book goes to press are extraordinary. Fun Home treats
a woman at three different stages of her life (the role is
performed by three different actresses), and depicts her
difficult transition from pre-teen tomboy to college-age
lesbian to adult graphic artist as she discovers that her
father is a homosexual who eventually commits suicide.
The musical, based on the life of Alison Bechdel,
is replete with elegant but deeply ironic songs like “I’m
Changing My Major to Joan” and “Sometimes My Father
Appeared to Enjoy Having Children,” and emotioncharged
acting by a brilliant cast. Both composer and
author-lyricist, Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, respectively
won Tony Awards for Fun Home, which itself won
the 2015 Tony for Best Musical. And Hamilton, written
by and starring the multitalented Lin-Manuel Miranda,
offers a free-wheeling hip-hop take on America’s founding
fathers Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and of
course Alexander Hamilton, and received packed houses
and soaring reviews, as in Hollywood Reporter: “it all
flows together beautifully in a torrent of music and language
that is as exhilarating as it is educational.” Clearly,
the American musical theatre, in 2016, seems to be heading
for a truly new “Golden Age.”