Out of tune

Going to see the new smash hit show Matilda the other night, I was once again reminded that, as a creative musical force, the contemporary West End musical is dead. It contains the sort of music you only find in musicals; it has no relevance to contemporary music; it exists in a creative ghetto. The musical has become divorced from popular musical culture.

Theatre critics seem to have no value system for judging the music in musical theatre. They might declare that a new show has ‘a sparkling score’, which means that to their ears it was relatively unobjectionable, didn’t get in the way of the story and wasn’t too loud, but they’ll ignore the fact that the music and lyrics have one foot in the past and the other in parody, are utterly forgettable and unremarkable, and in the larger popular music culture are irrelevant. Even supposedly ‘cutting edge’ shows of recent years are musically insignificant. Rent, for instance, a show with an apparently modern, urban subject matter — drugs and HIV in downtown New York — has one pleasant song at the beginning of act two, the rest is sentimental, faux singer-songwriter stuff which couldn’t get arrested as pop music; it’s not good enough. Spring Awakening was a critically acclaimed show with a rock-influenced score greeted as an important step forward, but it contains nothing that anyone would listen to outside of its immediate theatre context. As rock music it’s doesn’t work; as musical theatre it’s soggy.

Many years ago, musical theatre was a huge source of contemporary popular songs — pop hits, jazz covers, new standards all came from shows like Oliver!, West Side Story, South Pacific etc. These shows played a vital role in contemporary popular music that is now more or less inconceivable.