The Long View

The cultural moment of postmodernity typified by “the literature of exhaustion,” the notion that original literary forms and themes are now impossible, so all we have from our writers is a kind of smug knowingness and ironic cannibalizing of the products of high culture and pop culture.

It shows on Broadway.

Reading over last Sunday’s Times theater directory, one realizes that there are mostly three kinds of shows on the Great White Way: Revivals (or resuscitations in some cases) of older plays and musicals, musical versions of movies, and shows cobbled together from the oeuvres of pop singers.

Revivals (not that there’s anything wrong with that) can bring us timeless classics, like A Man for All Seasons, All My Sons, Blithe Spirit, Equus, Guys and Dolls, Gypsy, Hair, Hedda Gabler, Pal Joey, South Pacific, Speed-the-Plow, The Seagull, and West Side Story, all of which are currently open. Most of them are safely in the Western realist tradition, of course. None particularly challenges its audiences, making us see, know, or feel in new ways.

I guess I ought to be thankful that Broadway has not (yet) declined into musicals based on video games or theme park rides (as movies have), and, if they have, please don’t tell me, but there are plenty of shows (mostly musicals) based on movies: 9 to 5, Billy Elliot, Boeing-Boeing, Hairspray (charming as a John Waters cult film but as a musical more bloated than Edna Turnblad), Mary Poppins, Shrek the Musical (is “Shrek” used here as a verb?), Spamalot, The 39 Steps, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, White Christmas, and Young Frankenstein, all currently playing. Three of them started out as cartoons before morphing into the aliens that devoured Times Square.

Then there’s the bricolage of pop tunes connected into some Rube Goldbergian device they are calling a musical: Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia! (exclamation point is in the title, not my editorial addition), currently among them.

You want original theatre? Go shrek yourself!