The jukebox musical can be an embarrassing phenomenon: a living, breathing pop-music wax museum. It can be pandering and disingenuous, fostering a dynamic that the Times has called “ovation-by-coercion.” It can repackage your happiest memories as a Vegas revue, making great pop songs watery with orchestration and brassy with “American Idol”-style belting. And ever since “Mamma Mia” popularized the genre, in 2001, the jukebox musical has begun to take over. Its dominance seems especially painful in light of the worthy composers doing terrific original work now. In an ideal world, Broadway would have more musicals scored by Stephen Trask, the “Hedwig” punk genius. It would feature the music of Dave Malloy, the composer of “Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812,” “Beowulf,” and other delights; Mark Mulcahy, the pop wizard behind Ben Katchor’s wonderful oddball musicals, including “The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island”; Michael Friedman, of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” and Civilians fame; and Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt, the composer and lyricist who adapted the brilliant “Adding Machine”—which, while I’m at it, should have transferred to Broadway and stayed there, instead of closing after a few tantalizing months at the Minetta Lane in 2008.
While we strive for that world, we have our current state of affairs: for every great original work like “Book of Mormon” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” there are several jukebox musicals. Our instinct is to sigh about it, but we shouldn’t. The form is evolving. In a December, 2013, column about standout shows of the year, Charles Isherwood called the jukebox musical “surely the most justly derided of contemporary theatrical genres,” and then named two of them—“After Midnight,” featuring music by Duke Ellington, and “What’s It All About?,” about the music of Burt Bacharach and Hal David—in a list of the year’s best works. Done well, jukebox musicals, which are by nature about popular music, can have great music and dramatic insight, too. I propose that we stop being embarrassed by them, and I hope that producers and librettists continue to make the genre better. Great pop music can be celebrated well and enjoyably.
Good jukebox musicals come in two basic forms. The first is the straight-up celebration of a body of music, without significant plot. The best of this kind that I’ve seen was “After Midnight,” a feast of incredible singing, dancing, visuals, Ellington music, and Cotton Club wonders, which should have run forever but closed in June, after being overlooked at the Tonys. The post-punk “American Idiot,” which opened in 2009, was another, setting the enjoyable eff-the-Bush Administration Green Day album, itself a rock opera, in a TV-and-drugs-saturated no-man’s land, with a poetic wisp of mildly depressing plot about disaffected teens. It was a thrill to have that music come alive in a Broadway theatre, dramatized, among other people who loved it. (If only it had opened during the W. years.) There are also dance versions of this form—“Movin’ Out,” the Twyla Tharp–Billy Joel mashup, and “Come Fly with Me,” in which Frank Sinatra’s voice was featured over live orchestral music—which I haven’t seen. But I’m willing to be open-minded; “After Midnight” may have succeeded in part because it avoided the problem of plot altogether and just gave us a good floor show on a big stage.
The other worthy type of jukebox musical, and the much trickier kind to do well, is the biographical musical. In the early two-thousands, I saw some of these, among them “Love, Janis,” an affecting cabaret-size show about Janis Joplin, based on her letters; “Lost Highway,” about Hank Williams, which both satisfied and frustrated my impossible desire to see him in concert; and a small show about Edith Piaf, with similar results. If you’re too invested in a jukebox musical’s subject and it doesn’t give you what you’re hoping for—often because of an underwritten, unconvincing book—it produces an odd mix of agitation, guilt, and wistfulness. This is where the embarrassment comes into play: you know that it’s hubris to hope to resurrect a long-dead genius, but you’re drawn to the attempt anyway.
The first smash bio-musical, the one that most likely led to so many others being produced, was “Jersey Boys,” about the Four Seasons, which débuted on Broadway in 2005 and is still going strong. It doesn’t sanitize much, eagerly showing us the jailbirds and prostitutes and wiseguys who made the Four Seasons who they were. The overblown Joisey rambunctiousness—and, for me, the Frankie Valli sound—can be corny and tough to take. But “Jersey Boys” hit upon a key idea: of telling an underknown story about music that’s ubiquitous and adored. There’s great potential there. We all have a strong sense of Janis and Hank and Piaf, making them hard to dramatize convincingly, but perhaps less of one about Bob Gaudio, the secret to the Four Seasons’ songwriting success. His writing “Sherry” changed everything for the group, and it’s the moment when the show really comes alive. (We later learn more than we want to: I’ll never be able to hear the irresistibly groovable “December, 1963” without picturing Gaudio, in a silk bathrobe, singing about the virginity he’s about to lose to one of the “girls” the “label sent over” to the hotel.)
“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” succeeds in ways that “Jersey Boys” can’t—it may be the work that shows the genre’s potential and lifts jukebox musicals further away from scorn. It tells the story—and features the music—not just of King and her early songwriting partner and then husband, Gerry Goffin, but of their friends and composing rivals Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Like the Four Seasons, these songwriters, when they’re early in their careers, aren’t personalities we know well, so there’s plenty to discover. And “Beautiful” has a likable heroine in King; she’s talented, sympathetic, and funny. By the time she splits from Goffin and writes “Tapestry,” we’ve learned about the Brill Building system and watched its importance fade as the singer-songwriter era dawns, and then we see her embrace it, find her own voice, and become a star.
This week, the musical “Piece of My Heart,” about the Brill Building hit-maker Bert Berns, who wrote “Twist and Shout,” “Hang On, Sloopy,” “Brown-Eyed Girl,” and others, opens at the Signature Theatre Company. Berns’s name is known to few. The show tells his story in part through his songs; it’s a “Beautiful”-style character study whose dark hero is like one of the Jersey Boys. There’s a shady trip to Cuba; drama with Phil Spector and Jerry Wexler; and a lot of talk of 1650 Broadway, helping you fill in some gaps in your musical knowledge. You won’t fall in love with Bert Berns the way you fall in love with Carole King, but the moment in “Piece of My Heart” when Berns rejects Spector’s arrangement for “Twist and Shout” and insists on his own—“It’s ‘Guantanamera,’ not shama-lama-lama!”—made me realize that “Twist and Shout” is based on Cuban rhythms. And this is exciting and valuable—I heard the song anew.
Jukebox musicals often have such moments—the aha of musical creation, when a song comes alive. In “Beautiful,” King wakes up, finds the lyrics that Goffin stayed up all night writing to her tune, sits at the piano, and sings and plays, hesitatingly. “Tonight you’re mine, completely,” she sings. Suddenly, an idea, some lines of music, has become “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” In “A Night with Janis Joplin,” from 2013, Joplin, played by the knockout Joplin-alike Mary Bridget Davies, found a style and a song that suited her perfectly: “Piece of My Heart” (by Bert Berns!). The drummer and his kit, which had been lurking in the background, shot forward, Broadway-style, colored lights spun, the guitar knocked you over, and the vocals, so wonderfully, eerily like Joplin’s, made you cry. (Even if you were only a greatest-hits-level fan.) In the reunion-with-narrative show “The Rascals: Once Upon a Dream,” after a hamfisted filmed reënactment of how the Rascals came up with the three-man “one-two-three” count that begins “Good Lovin’,” the actual Rascals performed it, with the count, and it was thrilling, everyone leaping out of their seats. Ovation by coercion, and joy.
Midcentury pop—the dawn of rock and roll—is Chapter Two of the Great American Songbook. These songs, too, are our standards. A high-quality jukebox musical could be written about every great and underknown songwriter of the era; about the backup singers of “20 Feet from Stardom” and the session musicians of the Wrecking Crew. I’d like to see them all. And I’d want one of them to open next door to a Broadway version of “Adding Machine.”
