"Oh, my God. That show is soooooo overrated."
One thing that musical-theater majors are never short on is attitude. And when I started teaching musical-theater history at the Boston Conservatory, I decided I wanted to tap into that attitude. So, I developed two introductory writing assignments to help me develop a sense of what my students were capable of, as well as to give students a chance to figure out what I was looking for on the midterm and the final.
As regular readers will recall, this led to The Most Overrated MusicalTM and The Most Underrated MusicalTM, in which students choose, develop and support their candidates, all while developing a stronger sense of what makes for a quality show, using themes, structures, techniques and innovations that we discuss during the course.
Of course, the students' actual choices are just a conceit to get them thinking. It really doesn't matter, ultimately, which show they choose, so long as they're developing their analytical writing skills. Nonetheless, I always like to share the lists of shows with my readers, because the lists serve as a sort of unscientific barometer of the MT zeitgeist.
A few caveats: this list is heavily influenced by the discussions that students have with me before they write their papers. There are certain shows that I steer students away from, and other shows that I point students toward. So, again, this list is anything but scientific. Also, students can only write about shows for which they have direct access to the libretto. Between my own collection and that of the Boston Conservatory library, the students have access to hundreds of scripts. But, for instance, neither I nor the library has a copy of the script to The Lion King, which comes up a lot as a candidate.
So, after much ado, here's this year's list, with my attendant comments, harangues, dogmas, digressions, and miscellany. These are the shows that received more than one "vote" (i.e. the number of students who chose to write about that show as being "overrated"):
Legally Blonde 9Phantom of the Opera 8
Annie 6
Anything Goes 5
Bye Bye Birdie 5
Les Miserables 5
Hair 4
Rent 4
Spring Awakening 4
Memphis 3
Pippin 2
The Wild Party (Lippa) 2
Sweet Charity 2
South Pacific 2
And here are the shows that received one "vote" each:
Evita, Annie Get Your Gun, The Music Man, Funny Girl, Children of Eden, Ragtime, Big River, Promises Promises, In the Heights, Miss Saigon, Beauty and the Beast, The Sound of Music, Damn Yankees, We Will Rock You
So, whaddya, think? Some pretty clear trends here. First, I tell students that there are essentially two classes of overrated shows: the "bloated blockbuster" versus the "shows that make MTs swoon." Clearly, The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables fit into the former category, while The Wild Party and Children of Eden fit into the latter. In terms of sub-categories, there are the high-school perennials like Bye Bye Birdie and Anything Goes, and the modern-day power weepies like Rent and Spring Awakening.
And then there's Legally Blonde, which appears to be well on its way to becoming a high-school perennial. The show ran about 600 performances on Broadway, and as far as I can tell didn't recoup its original investment. The show received a much better reception in London, however, and recently ended a three-year run followed by a UK tour. It even won the Olivier Award for best musical. And yet my students clearly reflect the American attitude toward the show: not so much.
I must confess that, although I found Legally Blonde unbearably shrill when I first saw it, the cast recording is really starting to grow on me, mostly because of the work of composer/lyricist married couple Laurence O'Keefe and Nell Benjamin. (It's really no surprise that O'Keefe's work would become richer to me over time, since he's responsible for the score to one of my favorite shows of the last 15 years, Bat Boy.)
As I mentioned earlier, there are certain shows I steer students away from and others that I encourage them to consider for their papers. Over the ten years I've been teaching this course, I have found that, with certain shows, it's easier for students (generally freshmen in college) to figure out what's wrong and to provide specific support. With other shows, it's a lot harder to capture what's wrong. In fact, based on my life-long love of skiing, I've organized the usual suspects for the overrated paper into categories based on the trail-marking system that ski resorts use to steer skiers to slopes that match their level of ability. To wit:
GREEN CIRCLE (Easiest)
- Legally Blonde
- Annie
- Bye Bye Birdie
- The Sound of Music
- Spring Awakening
- The Phantom of the Opera
- Oliver
- Billy Elliot
- Anything Goes
- Newsies
- In the Heights
- Big River
- Sweet Charity
- Funny Girl
BLUE SQUARE (Harder)
- South Pacific
- Man of La Mancha
- Hair
- Les Miserables
- Thoroughly Modern Millie
- Mary Poppins
- Promises Promises
- 42nd Street
- Wicked
- Beauty and the Beast
- Rent
- Memphis
- The Music Man
- Pippin
- Miss Saigon
- The Wild Party (Lippa)
- Children of Eden
- Ragtime
- Evita
BLACK DIAMOND
(Hardest)
- Cats
- Mamma Mia
- Passion
- Spamalot
- How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
- Grease
- The Drowsy Chaperone
- West Side Story
- Next to Normal
- Chicago
- Cabaret
- Gypsy
- Godspell
- Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
- Movin' Out
Bear in mind that these three lists have nothing to do with whether I personally find the shows in question good or bad. Some of these shows I love, others I despise. I'm just saying that, in terms of the criteria that we establish in my course (meaningful integration of song, demonstrable character arc, musical sophistication, etc.), it's a lot easier for my students to find something to criticize in Bye Bye Birdie or Spring Awakening than in Gypsy or Chicago.
Some of the more difficult shows are challenging because they represent some sort of satire or parody that the students have a more difficult time wrapping their minds around (e.g. How to Succeed or Grease). Others represent a sort of post-modern or meta show structure (e.g. Chicago, Cabaret, The Drowsy Chaperone) that we won't really get around to addressing until later in the course.
And then there's Cats. It might surprise some readers that I find Cats to be a black-diamond show, but consider this: What exactly is wrong with Cats? Is it bad because it has no plot? Well, it has about as much plot as Company. And it pretty much has the some plot as A Chorus Line. (A bunch of dancing performers get together to compete for a certain honor. They all get their moment in the sun, and at the end the sentimental favorite wins.)
I've only ever had one student who came close to capturing what is really wrong with Cats. She focused on the fact that Andrew Lloyd Webber stuck too close to the original T.S. Eliot poems, which are mostly written in the third person. As a result, we rarely hear any of the cats singing about themselves, rather we hear about them from a third party. So, we never develop a bond with anyone on-stage, with the exception of Grizabella, who sings one of the few songs in the show that wasn't based directly on one of Eliot's poems. Pretty savvy, huh?
So, what do you make of the list, dear reader? Any surprises here? Any glaring omissions? Gimme a holler.
