"Hello, my name is Kim... and I like musicals": A Defence of Musical Theater from a Former Critic

When I was in high school, I was one of those kids driving around town with the latest Broadway musical soundtrack in their CD changer. My fondest memories of that time of my life consist of me gathered round the piano with my best friends, myself singing the soprano Cosette in Les Mis while one friend sang Eponine and the other Marius. I was a musical theater geek, who had musical theater geek friends, who all hung out community theater rehearsals and had musical theater geek parents who hosted the cast party. Note: the sun also shined brighter, gas was under 2 bucks, and the Stock Market arrow went up. Life was simpler then...

Then something happened. I graduated high school, and instead of becoming a musical theater major, I became something more specific... an "acting major." For my freshman year of college I attending the Catholic University of America. This is when I first noticed the rift between "musical theater people" and "actors" (pronounced with a heavy "ors"). You see, growing up, there only was one type of theater: the type that had an overature and the optional munchkin chorus. At CUA, the musical theater program was part of the music conservatory and the theater program was part of the liberal arts college. There wasn't much mingling. So while I took a break from voice lessons and Rogers and Hammerstein, I began to read more plays. I fell in love with Beckett, Shakespeare, Mamet, all those names you read in Theater I when they slap an anthology on the desk the first day. Mine eyes were opened! There were words out there without music, and they were beautiful!

I began to reject my "musical theater" past. I learned to raise my nose, dress in black, and read Oedipus Rex in the original Greek...actually, no I didn't, but there's always grad school. Anyway, since then I've been a play girl. I've become a playwright, concentrating on dramas and comedies of the non-singing nature. I saw musicals now and then, but usually with a constant awareness of irony. They were... "low art." Meanwhile, I set out to create art that would speak to the people, art that actually whittled its way into peoples brains and made them, of all things, think, while also being entertained! Aha, there's the rub!

Four years past. Dust collected on my musical theater itunes tracks. I moved to New York City. I spat at the marquees of Shrek: The Musical and The Little Mermaid, which, lets be honest, are pretty pathetic. I saw my Mamet and my Sarah Kane off-broadway. I saw Dutch Performance Art at BAM and Hip-hop theater at NYU. But when I sat next to a stock broker on Metro North, he talked about how his daughter went to Mary Poppins, and LOVED IT. A little girl like I once was... listening to my soundtracks... dreaming of the stage...

But this is not about that. This is about communicability. I am an "artist." Ok... I am an unemployed, part-time bartender, but still, ideally, I am a creator of art on the stage, both as a playwright and actor. I feel most alive when I connect with people. Those "Disney Musicals" as much as I deplore them on principle (I don't think you should reinvent the wheel, especially when the wheel was a beloved movie that can only be butchered by a staged version), as much as they do broadway a disservice, they are doing one thing... communicating.

I watched the revival of Company the other day. I had never seen it before. I have, even in my "actor period", worshipped the ground Stephen Sondheim composes on. I had always assumed that Company was a play within a play (you know, a "company" of performers) so I had put off watching it not wanting to see yet another back stage musical. I was so shocked to find it was a story about one of the hardest things to do in this damn city... connect with one other human being. The story of a young man and his passionate plea for someone to know him and love him connected with me, and I will never be the same, because it's now a part of me. It will be in every piece that I write. That is the power of art, because whether we are concience of it, what we read and see and listen to is like food for our soul. At the risk of sounding cheesy– we are what we eat.

So maybe rejecting musical theater for its campiness and its rose-colored glasses wasn't the answer. Not to mention, by pigeon-holing all musicals as fluff, I have done the genre a disservice by ignoring its power. It is the peoples theater, not because it is "low," but because it actually connects. How many times do you leave the Shubert Theater with a song stuck in your head, or pull up On My Own on your itunes whenever you're lonely.

I don't deny there's sucky stuff on broadway right now. I'm still that snob I was in college. I still go see Shakespeare over Hammerstein. But I take back all those years of unwarrented contempt. Afterall, what have I done to revolutionize musical theater lately. And there's a reason why South Pacific is still playing on a broadway stage after fifty years. They did something right. So if you hate what's on 42nd street these days, don't blame musicals... blame the artists who can't seem to connect.