… the old-fashioned school of Oklahoma! family musical appears to be all but gone for good, killed off by the disintegration of the common culture that made it possible in the first place. Now that Broadway-minded songwriters no longer have a universal musical language on which to draw, it isn’t possible to write a show with genuine broad-gauge audience appeal. It says everything about the desperate state of the American musical that the last theatrical song to become an enduringly popular hit, Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” was written in 1973.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Sad to say …
… The Song Is Ended | The Weekly Standard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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If audiences wanted old-fashioned musicals, producers would produce them. This says more about the audiences than the writers and producers.
ReplyDeleteAh, but maybe if they produced them, they would come.
ReplyDelete