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Too Many Musicals?Dateline: 19th September, 1999 Time and again in recent months I have read or heard the complaint that there are too many musicals playing in the West End and that the musical is killing the legit. theatre. Musicals, it appears, are driving "real" plays out of the West End. Musicals, so the complainers would have us believe, are killing British theatre. I thought I'd do a quick check on this, so I went along to Darren Daglish's excellent London Theatre Online to check it out. (This isn't the only site where you'll find all the London shows listed, of course, but I find it the easiest and quickest to use.) I went to his Drama, Comedy and Musicals listings, looked at the lists of shows currently running, and came up with the following statistics:
Looking to the future, lined up for production in the next six months are five new musicals, four new comedies and 25 new plays: 14% musicals, 12% comedies and 74% plays. (Actually, that's a bit misleading: there are five new (to the UK) musicals and 25 new productions of straight plays. There are less than ten new plays, some of which are just new in the sense of being new to the West End. Mike Cullen's Anna Weiss, for instance, received its premiere at the Traverse at the 1997 Edinburgh Fringe, but this will be its first West End outing.) However, before we start celebrating the renaissance of the straight play on the basis of the "coming soon" figures, we must bear in mind that plays do not have long runs of the kind that musicals have. We're not going to have a sudden 25% plus rise in the proportion of plays to musicals. One additional statistic of interest: of the 50 plays either on now or coming soon, half are in subsidised theatres, as are six of the comedies and one musical. That means that, in the commercial theatre, there will be 26 musicals, 9 comedies and 25 dramas. That hardly shows an unhealthy dominance of musicals! The dominance of the musical in the West End is not a matter of fact but of perception. Ask the man in the street to name a current West End musical and the majority will mention Les Mis, Phantom and Cats, and probably Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. After a little thought he'll probably come up with Miss Saigon and - just possibly - Saturday Night Fever. But ask him to name a straight West End play and you'll get "The Mousetrap and some Shakespeare". The general public is far, far more interested in musicals than in plays - at every level, except for the real theatrical devotees. That's true even in the shows I do at school: our profits on musicals range from around £400 to over £1,200, whereas the largest profit we've ever made on a straight play (and they are much cheaper to produce) has been £6.50. Yes, that's six pounds and fifty pence, not six hundred and fifty pounds! In every venue the audience for a play is well over 90% theatre-lovers, whereas the general public goes to musicals. And how many playwrights have become millionaires from their work? Andrew Lloyd Webber did. Snobbery? There is, I suggest, a lot of snobbery in theatrical circles about musicals. Many regard them as a lower art form - if they regard them as an art form at all. And the more popular the musical, the less it is regarded. Cats, which opened its doors on 11th May, 1981, is almost universally reviled by the anti-musicals brigade. Of course, it does have two strikes against it: it's a musical and it's popular. And there somehow seems to be a feeling that an enjoyment of musicals is somehow incompatible with an appreciation of straight drama. Musicals, it would seem, are light and fluffy (and, if they deal with serious themes, pretentious - unless they're by Sondheim, the acceptable face of musicals, who has the inestimable advantage of not being British), whereas straight plays are serious and terribly meaningful. Do I sound as though I'm slagging off the straight play? I'm not intending to. What I am slagging off (Isn't gutter-English so often much more forceful than the polite language?) is this straight play snobbery, which is a kind of defence mechanism: the deliberate cultivation of a mystique to make the proponent feel superior because (s)he has not been seduced by the superficial charm of the musical. No, the musical is not killing the West End. It's not even dominating the West End, except in the mind of the non-theatregoer. And it's certainly not killing theatre. As one who is trying, in his evertyday work, to bring theatre to young people, I recognise the power of the musical. It gets them interested and excited, and that leads them on to an appreciation and enjoyment of the totality of theatre. Thank God for the musical. It makes my job much easier! Articles Indices: |
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