This is a subject matter that's been bothering me of late. Most of my friends and colleagues know that I'm not a fan of musical theatre. Therefore, they wouldn't invite me to a production of, say, Hairspray or Les Mis. However, what's perturbed me is the idea that perhaps performances are being put into this category for the wrong reasons, and are thus dismissed by many as 'musical theatre', when, in fact, they have been misled. Don't get me wrong - there are some exceptions to my 'No Musicals' rule; I do love Rocky Horror and very much enjoyed the stage version of The Producers when I saw it, but that's in much the same way as I hate raisins, but will happily scoff a well-baked fruitcake every now and then.
Anyway, as I was saying, a classic example of false musical accusation is Cabaret. Cabaret is a theatrical adaptation of the author Christopher Isherwood's real experiences in Nazi Germany and his relationship with the performer Sally Bowles. It is an intensely political and historical piece of work, originally directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse. Yes, like all of Fosse's work (e.g. Chicago), it does feature a lot of singing and dancing - but, as aforementioned, one of the main characters, Sally, is a performer by trade. The film depicts Sally and her colleagues performing their nightly routines at the KitKatClub in Berlin; the cabaret movement being prominent in the anti-Nazi community at the time. Sally does not randomly burst into song as a form of exposition or emphasising an emotion at a particular point in a scene. The songs are relevant to the themes of the film (Money, If you Could See Her, etc.), but they are performed naturalistically and characteristically in line with the theatrical style - you even see Brian (Michael York) watching Sally from the audience of the club. Characters do not perform numbers for one another in musical theatre; the number is the performance.
Why do I bring this up? Well, since this idea occurred to me, I've become increasingly more sceptical when I hear the words "Oh, you wouldn't like it - it's a musical". Is it? Or does it just have music in it? One production I've been interested in since I saw it advertised in the West End is Sunny Afternoon, the story of The Kinks. The Kinks are one of my favourite bands of all time, and the script is by one of my theatrical heroes, Joe Penhall (Blue/Orange), but I haven't yet booked tickets for this exact reason. The play is marketed as a musical, but seeing as it's supposedly a biographical account of the band's rise to fame, won't they be performing their songs in context? There's no reason for them to be used as a plot device - only chronological markers of iconic gigs and recordings. I just can't imagine Penhall penning(!) a 'musical' without irony, either.
I could be wrong - this could be Mamma Mia all over again, but the actors are portraying The Kinks themselves, not fabricated characters who can inexplicably only express themselves exclusively through the words and music of a long-disbanded group (a 'Jukebox' musical). Either way, it would be a shame if the industry continues to neglect this particular genre and pass it off as the cheesiest of theatre styles, in the hope that sporadic theatregoers will see that fateful word and instantly buy tickets because they won't have to sit through all that boring dialogue and careful direction without the promise of a recognisable sing-along every five minutes. Thoughts on a postcard.
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