stage matters / By William Kowinski

Musings on Musicals

What makes Humboldt County so good at song and dance?

(Dec. 20, 2007)  The musical is not my favorite form of theatre. Yet when I look back on the past calendar year or more on the North Coast, many of the shows I’ve most admired have been musicals. This personal paradox came into view especially in the last month or so, when I saw four of them and had different responses to each.

Two of these were imported shows — touring Broadway-based productions hosted by CenterArts. This is a unique species, and is a way of life for the actors and musicians involved. I’ve known a few and heard their stories. Someone here asked one of the participants in one of the touring shows where his home was. “On the bus,” he said. They tour 10 months a year.

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The touring Evita and The Producers were both polished, professional shows with great sets, very good performers and production values. I hated Evita. I loved The Producers. And thereby hangs a tale.

If you had to name crowd-pleasing forms, musicals would probably be at the top of the list, followed by physical theatre. But as it turns out, I am not a crowd. Nor am I a judge, making decisions on the basis of theatrical law and performance precedent.

I am forced to confront these facts every time I write about a show, and most every time I see one.

Tom Stoppard, who was a provincial theatre reviewer before he became an internationally acclaimed playwright, talks often in interviews about his own struggle with the reviewer’s perspective. He started out trying to review objectively, according to standards. But he learned, especially from reading the contemporaneous reviews of Kenneth Tynan, that as a reviewer, “the only thing that mattered was the effect the play had on me personally that night. That was what I was reporting on …”

I don’t think it’s the only thing that matters, but it is vital, and even more than that, it is unavoidable. We all bring different standards, experiences and tastes to each theatrical encounter. Even though I often include objective information about the audience as well as the play, I can’t escape the sometimes inconvenient truth of being me. The idiosyncratic element is seldom clearer than when I see a musical.

Take Evita. The production I saw at the Van Duzer was loud, flashy and, to me, empty. It was composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, also responsible for the enormously popular Starlight Phantom Jesus Cats Superstar Opera Express. I went in knowing that I basically detest Andrew Lloyd Webber and his ilk, who dominated musicals from the ‘70s until recently with gaudy, bombastic, pretentious, meretricious, vacuous productions, and lousy music. That’s the other thing — music is very important to me, and when I don’t like it it’s hard to even sit through a show.

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