The Most Overrated Musical - Spring 2010

I'm getting the feeling that the "overrated musical" assignment that I charge my students with each semester is becoming less and less representative. In other words, the exercise is becoming less about what the students genuinely think is overrated and more about what they think *I* think is overrated.

First of all, the shows that students are choosing to write about seem to be coming almost exclusively from my own list of The Most Overrated Musicals. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I certainly don't want to develop into a benevolent dictator. (Well, more of a benevolent dictator...)

Here are the shows that students chose to lambaste this semester, along with the number of students who chose to write about each:

3 In the Heights
3 Spring Awakening
3 Bye Bye Birdie
2 Cats
2 Oliver!
2 Pippin

And here are the shows that received only one "vote" each:

The Producers, The Wiz, The Phantom of the Opera, Annie, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Sweet Charity, South Pacific, Man of La Mancha, Passion, Footloose, The Wild Party (Lippa), Big River, Mamma Mia, Les Miserables, Legally Blonde.

The only shows listed above that aren't on my own overrated list are Sweet Charity, Annie, and The Producers. (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is on my list of The Musicals That Suck. The movie is fun -- albeit lo-o-o-ong -- but the stage show sapped whatever life the movie may have contained.) I suppose it's perfectly natural for students to want to try to please me. But I think that they'll find that it's not really the show choice that determines their final grade, but rather how well they've supported their arguments. I've given out A's to people who've torn apart shows that I personally love, and low grades to some who've ripped a new one for shows I despise.

Another factor that makes this exercise less than representative is the fact that, in my discussions with my students, I usually try to steer them away from particular shows, ones that I've found previous students have had difficulty with. For instance, every year a number of students initially propose Grease, which I try to discourage. It's not that I think Grease is a good show, but I've never read a strong paper about Grease, one that really captures what's wrong with it. Students seem to focus mostly on the "message" at the end, when Sandy becomes a skank to attract Danny. Well, the show isn't necessarily condoning that choice. It's saying, "Isn't it interesting what kids of the time felt they needed to do in order to fit in?" Grease is a soft-pedal satire of the 1950s, and in order to criticize a satire, you first need to understand what it's satirizing. 

Other students propose writing about shows that aren't very well known, like Lone Star Love, Zanna Don't, or Little Mary Sunshine. Well, who's overrating these shows? For a show to be considered overrated, it needs to be relatively well known, either by the general public or by theater insiders. And none of those shows really fits that bill. Yes, the paper is more about how well the students defend their choices, but they need to start with a show that fits the general premise.

And then there's Cats. Every semester, Cats rears its fur-covered head, and it's another choice that I strongly discourage. Again, I'm not a great fan of Cats, but I've found that students have a difficult time specifying what's wrong with the show. They often focus on the fact that it has very little, if any, plot. Well, the same could be said of A Chorus Line. In fact, the shows have pretty much the same plot: a bunch of characters meet up and take turns talking about themselves in the hope of winning a particular honor. And then the sentimental favorite gets picked at the end. I did have one student this semester who had some solid ideas about the real problem with Cats, mostly stemming from the fact that the creators chose a literal translation of T.S. Elliot's poems, which results in a lot of third-person narration, and robs the characters of any dimension or relatability. I haven't read her final paper yet, but based on our discussions, it did seem like a promising tack to take.

So, what do you think, dear reader? Are my students onto something here? Or are there some other show choices that would make for more deserving targets for the "overrated" treatment?

Comments

[Linda]

I'm curious about the argument for "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." Is this show rated highly by anyone?

[ccaggiano]

Yeah, I hear ya. But the show ran for three and a half years in London, so I guess there's someone somewhere who thinks it's a decent show.

[Staylorellis.wordpress.com]

It would be interesting if a student tackled a *historically* overrated show, like that "first" great "integrated" musical that "forever changed" the genre: Oklahoma (1943). While it is a wonderful and important Rodgers and Hammerstein show, I think its impact is vastly overrated.

[Drew J]

I think part of the problem might be that since most of these shows have movie versions, that is where the students are getting their opinions from. You can read a libretto and listen to a cast recording all you want, but unless you see the show live, you cant really have an accurate opinion of it. Another factor is that a lot of the these shows are done by community theaters across the country. I know from personal experience that seeing a bad production of a show can ruin the show for the future, even if it is not a bad show. Last year, I say a horrible production of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", and I have not been able to listen to the cast recording since...such a shame.

[ccaggiano]

Ooh, gonna need to respectfully disagree with you there, my friend. Oklanhoma may not be everybody's idea of a fun and enjoyable musical, but there's certainly no questioning its impact. In act it would be hard to overstate the importance of Oklahoma. The show represented the culmination and convergence of a variety of innovations, from the dramatic cohesiveness of the Princess musicals, to the verisimilitude and complexity of Show Boat, to the adult subject matter and psychological realism of Pal Joey and Lady in the dark.

As I said, you don't have to like Oklahoma. But anyone ho cares about the history of musical theater needs to understand the place that it holds in the development of the form.

[Encore Entertainment]

Why Passion Chris. It's a sentimental favourite of mine, not my fave Sondheim but it makes me teary (though I prefer Mazzie's numbers to Murphy's)... The Wild Party is a (very) guilty pleasure. But Les Miserables? The book (of the musical) like the original book is episodic, and heavy handed but the musical is lovely I think. What are your problems with it?

MY LIST. Many of those that are listed above, especially Mamma Mia and The Producers. And though I like it Hairspray. And South Pacific, though I'm probably alone on the last one...I think it's VERY overrated.

[ccaggiano]

Drew, I see your point, and can definitely identify will the need to separate the inherent quality of a show from any one particular production of that piece. It's something I continually remind my students to do: don't review the production, talk about the work itself.

But your comment about having to see a particular show before having an accurate opinion of it got me thinking. There are a number of shows that I include in my musical-theater history course that I've never seen, mostly because there's no possible way I could have. Examples include The Black Crook (1866), Shuffle Along (1921), Lady in the Dark (1943), The Cradle Will Rock (1938), and As Thousands Cheer (1933). These shows are rarely done, but they represent significant milestones in the history of the form. If I held too hard and fast to the notion that I had to have seen something to be able to express and opinion about it, I'd have to cut a lot of very important yet underperformed shows from my syllabus. Historians in general have a longstanding tradition of interpreting and analyzing that which they themselves did not live through.

That's one of the reasons that I've added staged readings to my course, to give students exposure to shows they otherwise wouldn't be able to see, let alone perform in. Last semester we did Little Johnny Jones (1905), and this semester we're doing Very Good Eddie (1915). Next semester, I'm planning on doing As Thousands Cheer.

I agree with you that it's best to have seen a shows before forming an opinion. But I would submit to you that sometimes that's not possible, and that using a show's script and secondary sources are a useful, if unideal, substitute.

[ccaggiano]

EE: Passion leaves me cold. I've seen the show numerous times, and I've never felt that the central story works. I don't believe that Giorgio would fall in love with Fosca. She's not just physically unattractive, she's a dreadful human being. Selfish, pushy, screechy, maudlin. I don't see anything in her that Giorgio would be attracted to. And the show, IMHO, doesn't make the actions of the characters credible.

As for South Pacific, you're preaching to the choir:

http://ccaggiano.typepad.com/everything_i_know_i_learn/2008/03/south-pacific-m.html

[Robbie]

I am surprised that Thouroughly Sucky Millie wasn't chosen.

[Sarah]

I have not been schooled on the finer points of musical theatre, but I am an avid (albeit kind of midwestern, more pedestrian) fan. I can't stand Cats and I love a Chorus Line. I can see your argument that they are of the same basic form, but I connect much more with Chorus Line -- probably because I can relate to the characters and I get emotionally invested. The Cats thing is implausible and not even something I can connect with sentimentally -- if you can get past the basic notion that all these singing, dancing cats are getting together in a junkyard to go to some mythical thing that doesn't even exist. The lack of emotion makes makes the wire thin plot seem even more dumb.

[Staylorellis.wordpress.com]

Interesting. I enjoy Oklahoma immensely, but I think the mythology surrounding Oklahoma exceeds the reality. ;)

[ccaggiano]

Sarah: I really think you're onto something there, and it's very consonant with what my student was referring to. The ridiculous part of Cats isn't necessarily that we're talking about cats here. It's that we don't care about these cats. Personification isn't inherently good or bad. It's all in how you execute.

Grizabella is at least partially sympathetic, but the interesting thing about her character is that she's not in the T.S. Elliot book. She was taken from and unpublished poem that the authors found. So, rather than slavishly setting her material to music, they actually thought about her character. At least a bit. So the only character we even vaguely care about wasn't from the original book of poems. It makes you wonder what the show could have been had they actually thought more carefully about character development.

[Daniel]

Chris,

I love the blog and I love these lists, but I always want to ask the same question: overrated/underrated by whom? In your most overrated/underrated lists of the decade, you seemed to use the length of a show's run to determine the "rating" (and thus if it was overrated or underrated). In this post you mention "the general public" and "theatre insiders," but these two groups sometimes have wildly divergent tastes.

Take a show like Phantom of the Opera, for example. Would you say that it is overrated, because it's had an incredibly long run despite its many flaws? Or do you say that Phantom of the Opera is underrated, because it's a decent show but taken to be a punchline in the theatre world (one even [TOS] thought was too easy!)

I think that a lot of shows are like this, where the general public's opinion (at least judging by the length of the run) is much different from the theatre world's opinion. Phantom, Cats, Rent, In the Heights, Spring Awakening and scores of others would all be on different lists (in my opinion) depending on whether you were using popular opinion or the theatre world's opinion as a yardstick.

I'm sure that you would accept either as a measure in your classes if the paper was well argued, but which do you think is a better gauge?

Daniel

[ccaggiano]

Daniel,

You're absolutely right than "overrated" is a relative term. Which is why I encourage my students to start these papers by talking about who's overrating these shows. With a show like Phantom, it might be the general public. With The Wild Party, it might be theater insiders.

You're also correct is stating that one person's overrated is another person's underrated. Depending on the person, Wicked could fall into either category: overrated, because it's incredibly popular, of underrated because a lot of theater folks have a knee-jerk negative response to the popular, and they might not give it the credit that it deserves.

The point of these papers is not to be definitive but to get the students to start to think critically about the shows that they see and perform in. It's an admittedly artificial conceit, but I've found it to be very effective in getting the critical dialog started.

Regards,

--cc

[Nick]

Wow, Passion, i understand its not actually good story wise but the music is alright. My grandmother saw 1970 Company and Applause when she went to New york when she was young. She has loved sondheims music ever since then. But some shows she had never heard of when i asked her were Pacific Overtures, Passion and Merrily. I have never met someone who loved Passion, when i gave her the recording and she watched the dvd. She gave it back and said "I didn't like that at all". I don't know if its popularity but Passion is on this list correctly.

[David Armstrong]

I personally love Wicked, but I think it has some marks of overrated-ness. The book streamlines the nuanced novel really well and keeps the characters relatively dynamic while also tying together some divergent plotlines but some of the lines are not the strongest and some of the ties sometimes feel forced. Also, I think some people go (sometimes repeatedly) just to hear how the actress is going to handle Defying Gravity. There are a lot of moments that can get me emotional and Defying Gravity is actually pretty low on the list for me.

Hair, Rent, and Spring Awakening...I've seen all three and they all my friends (and some critics) have called them the "musical for this generation", whichever generation they represent and I'm hesitant to hand over such a momentous title so coolly. Hair tends to drag, Rent is at times way too melodramatic, and I'm sorry, but Spring Awakening is at times just so boring to me.

And Chicago. That's the one I can't figure why it's still going on. I don't like the staging of it at all, I don't think it's as cool as people who go see it seem to think it is. Also the celebrity casting for me just ends up being distracting from what is, for all intents and purposes, a pretty solid musical.

Just some thoughts!

- David

[Kerr Lockhart]

I hope that you insist that the student has ACTUALLY SEEN said overrated show in the theater, not judging by a recording and a reading of a script.

[ccaggiano]

You make an interesting point. Yes, for the purposes of this paper, I usually steer students toward shows that they've either performed in or seen professionally.

But I've received a number of comments over the years from readers who seem to insist that I need to hve seen a show before I can talk about it credibly. Obviously, that would be ideal. But as a musical-theater historian, I find myself teaching and writing about shows that I could never have seen, since they appeared long before I was born and are rarely if ever performed in revival. Opportunities to see such important but obscure shows as The Black Crook, Pins and Needles, The Cradle Will Rock, and Lost in the Stars are rare indeed, but they're still important to the progression of the form. According to some people, I have no right to talk about these shows, or at least express an opinion on them. But historians form opinions all the time about things they didn't personally witness. It's called research.

Sorry for the diatribe, but it's something that's been on my mind.

[Kerr Lockhart]

I have no problem with you as an academic and trained theater professional making a judgment from a script and recording--but it takes time and experience to make such an assessment.

I remember when I read STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE quickly the night before I was to see it at Lincoln Center, I completely missed that there were many good solid laughs in the play--I didn't have enough experience in theater or life to know that.