As the Broadway season barrels to a frantic close (12 new shows have opened in the past nine days, leading up to last night’s deadline for Tony eligibility), I should give a shout-out to the best in a meager crop of new straight plays: Mary Jane, Amy Herzog’s delicate and affecting one-act drama about a single mother trying to manage the care of her severely impaired child. But it’s the musicals that continue to dominate the season, and my thoughts.
So many musicals, in fact, that they are all blending together. Indeed, the genre seems to have settled into a familiar groove: no brilliance, no real disasters, just a kind of consistent, polished mediocrity. So here, instead of a batch of reviews, is my one-size-fits-all checklist for getting your musical to Broadway circa 2024:
Go big on story. In contrast to the small-scale, character-driven musicals that have won acclaim in recent years (Dear Evan Hansen, The Band’s Visit, Kimberly Akimbo), big, sprawling stories are now the popular flavor. Several of the most recent shows are based on novels and/or movies (The Outsiders, The Great Gatsby) that seem cramped on the Broadway stage. Others tackle big issues and historical eras (Suffs, about the fight for women’s suffrage; Lempicka, the life of futurist painter Tamara de Lempicka, spanning the Russian Revolution and the rise of Nazism). Even in the jukebox shows, like Hell’s Kitchen and The Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll, the stories seem unduly cumbersome, so obviously concocted to provide a pretext for the recycled hits of Alicia Keyes and Huey Lewis and the News.
Stretch out the high notes. Most of the new musical scores, interestingly, come not from well-established Broadway composers, but from an assortment of newbies and outsiders, from cabaret performer-songwriter Shaina Taub (Suffs) to the Texas-based folk duo Jamestown Revival (The Outsiders). The scores are mostly unmemorable, but they’re a godsend for the belters — every show has at least two or three bombastic ballads that build to a climactic, over-emoted high note, held long enough to ensure a round of thunderous applause from the audience..
Dancers rule. While the singing-dancing Broadway star seems to be in eclipse this season (Sutton Foster being currently tied up playing Mrs. Lovett in the revival of Sweeney Todd), talented dancing ensembles are grabbing center stage. Intricate, well-drilled dance sequences — usually just embellishment, rather than integral to the story — are a highlight of nearly every show I’ve seen this spring, from the breakdancing street kids of Hell’s Kitchen, to the twenties-era hoofing of The Great Gatsby. Back flips optional, but strongly recommended.
Send them home cheering. No matter how serious or frivolous the show, how downbeat or uplifting the theme, the big musical finale has become as inescapable as the restroom lines at intermission. As the story wraps up and the closing curtain approaches, the whole cast reappears onstage (even dead people), face front to the audience, and join in one galvanizing final anthem: “Keep Marching” in Suffs, or “Roaring On” in Gatsby; Huey Lewis’s “The Power of Love,” or Alicia Keyes’s “Empire State of Mind.” It helps send the audience — after the obligatory standing ovation — out the door on a sugar high.
I’m not necessarily disparaging these shows. Indeed, the slick productions and strong vocals help redeem even the silliest ones, like The Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll. But it also makes you appreciate the moments that break through the formula — a clever, catchy number like “If We Were Married” from Suffs, or the surprisingly tough-minded portrayal of the mother daughter relationship in Hell’s Kitchen. I expect that both shows (along with Water for Elephants, which I reviewed earlier) will get some love when the Tony nominations are announced next week. The big question is whether the nominators will remember the best, most formula-defying musical of the season, David Byrne’s Here Lies Love, which closed way back in November.
We’ll find out on Tuesday.
Richard Zoglin 