the sexless musical genre known as "musical theater"

it was never supposed to be its own genre, really. american musical theater grew out of the vaudeville tradition, where wildly different sensibilities were thrown together on the same stage for the sole purpose of entertainment; imagine something between the Ed Sullivan show and "America's Got Talent," but bawdier and more brazen with ethnic and racial stereotypes (blackface was a staple), and you have a fair idea of what an evening at a vaudeville theater was like. one thing it was not was cohesive, especially musically. a harlem dance number (the word "jazz" came later) could be followed by an aria from a popular operetta or a cohan-style patriotic tune.

it took several decades of gershwins and berlins and kerns and rodgerses to shape the various musical strains into what we now think of as the "golden age of american songwriting". it's hard to imagine now, but in its time, this music was dangerous and sexy and not a little bit transgressive. in the 20s and 30s, anything with jazzy rhythms conjured the same association among small town whites that hip hop currently does -- it was urban, decadent, promiscuous, and very "black". at the same time, the lyrics of the golden age carried a whiff of effete sophistication that further emphasized the cosmopolitan outlook of the tunes. these songs were on the cutting edge of american pop culture, snatched up by recording artists as soon as they appeared on the broadway stage. and from Cole Porter's "Let's Do It" to Gershwin lyrics like "s'exceptional", the songs pumped with sexual energy. and it wasn't just the lyrics; the rhythms were earthy and physical and encouraged all kinds of inappropriate dancing and drinking and rulebreaking. "jungle rhythms," is what they were called.

what happened? the 60s, for one. sex and trasngression were culturally appropriated by rock n' roll (and later, plain old "rock"). the loud, electrified sound was hard to reconcile with dramatic storytelling, and musical theater (with a few exceptions) mostly ignored it, paving the way for its own cultural obsolescence. this can't be the whole story, though; there were other pop music trends that could have worked in a dramatic format (the motown soul sound, for example). it's still not clear to me why the major musical theater composers of the 60s and 70s -- i'm thinking of Sondheim and John Kander especially -- were so reluctant to experiment with these new sounds. instead, Sondheim and Kander, both gifted at the art of pastiche, mined past musical paradigms for their shows of the 60s and 70s which, while off-the-charts innovative from a theatrical standpoint, featured music that was explicitly retro. in the 60s and 70s! just when a new "golden age" of pop songwriting was happening all around them. it seems to me to be the most spectacular missed opportunity in musical theater history.

i suspect it has something to do with the audiences, also. in the late 60s and 70s, the audience for musical theater didn't look like the Bobby Kennedy or George McGovern set; it looked like the Nixon set. and i respect the idea that in order for innovators like Sondheim and Kander to tell the stories they wanted to tell to the audiences that were keeping broadway alive, more traditional music was probably the best vehicle.

however it happened, the consequence has been that several generations of musical theater composers have mostly reacted to pop culture in the same way that contemporary jazz and "classical" composers have; that is, by defining themselves in opposition to it. this is suicide. musical theater thrives when it synthesizes contemporary pop music sounds into something greater than the sum of the parts, but comtemporary musical theater composers, by and large, have been stuck for a while, recycling a a sound resembling sort of a watered-down sondheim or steven schwartz (whose music is like a watered-down version of the singer/songwriter pop balladeers of the 70s). rhythmic invention, forever a staple of american pop music, took a backseat to post-impressionistic harmonic noodling in theater music (that is, when songwriters didn't revert to a Amy Grant-style christan contemporary-ish uplift). almost every musical theater composer since then has been a piano composer, a "chord composer". the sound became more localized, kept alive by countless cabaret singers and shows (Songs for a New World, for example) written to be performed in such venues, abandoning the goal of communicating with a larger audience that continued to be interested in music that sounded modern and danceable and sexy. it's true that every so often, a show will come out that has "modern" music (which usually means music that would have sounded modern two decades prior) and everyone will herald it as The One, the savior which will finally bridge the gulf between theater music and pop music. Rent, say. or In The Heights. or Once, the savior-du-jour. but institutional pressures will revert everything back to form soon enough, and whether because of timid producers or songwriting talent that doesn't come to the new york musical theater scene if it has an ear for what's modern, new musicals will continue to be written by the current crop of very gifted keepers-of-the-flame who are good at using music to describe the vulnerable inner monologues of white twentysomethings (themselves!), but not much else.

sex is really the key concept, i think. of all the theater folk i have met, i don't know anyone who finds modern musical theater music sexy. as in, i would put this Wicked OCR on to get me and my baby in the mood. (or, if you're more highbrow, Light in the Piazza. nobody is getting busy to Adam Guettel.) modern musical theater songs can certainly describe sex (usually in a gee-whiz-my-first-time-was-so-awkward-but-tender sort of way), but that's a function of lyrics. the music sounds absolutely nothing like our popular cultural musical description of sex. (here's a test: picture a sex scene in literally any hollywood film, and then imagine the music that would be used: does it bear any resemblance to anything written for the modern broadway or off-broadway stage?) again, what is lacking is a rhythmic sense. this is amazing to me; rhythm is the heart and soul of 20th and 21st century pop music, including all the great musical theater music of the 20s and 30s. in a great pop song, every part of the song is driving and contributing to the rhythm. every single element. the melody, the lyrical rhyme scheme, the bass line, whatever harmonic instruments are being used (guitar, piano, strings, whatever), they're all contributing to the rhythm, and each in a different way. (even if they're not contributing to the harmony or the melody!) my friend sonny paladino, who conducts on broadway and gets this concept more than anyone else i know in the theater business (admittedly, not a huge universe of people), says that in a pop song, every single instrument is playing a hook, by which he means a rhythmic hook. pick apart the arrangement of any classic pop song, and you'll see what i mean -- every part is filling in the rhythmic space in a slightly different way, and every part is signable as its own little "hook", a good drum groove included. i blame a lot of this on the piano-bound songwriting technique most of my colleagues employ, but gershwin obviously had no problem writing intricate, swinging rhythms on the piano (then again, he was one of the most brilliant stride piano players of his day, so that's a pretty high bar, but i guess that proves my point; gershwin was thinking in terms of multiple competing rhythmic lines, trying to make his piano sound like an entire swing band).

among other things, sexless music does a huge disservice to the hard work that the bookwriter does. a character who sings songs set to music entirely drained of sex is no kind of character at all; it's a puritanical fantasy of a character. and the lyrics really can't compensate for this; an audience member will trust what the music is saying first, and sometimes only. (case in point: the least convincing moment in Wicked is the sex scene, even though there's no song being sung; based on the music we've heard, these characters have no sex drives, and the scene therefore feels totally false.)

there is some fantastic, thrilling, sexy pop music to be heard on broadway, though, and audiences flock to hear it. it lives in the confines of the dreaded "juke box" musicals. every theater professional i know disparages these shows, but audiences are not fools. they want to go to broadway to hear great singers sing and dance to great music that will wow them, turn them on, make them want to sing and dance themselves. if contemporary composers aren't giving it to them, they'll take The Four Seasons. this is depressing, but i can hardly blame them. is there any musical theater song written in the last 30 years that's as tuneful, singable, danceable, romantic as any song in Motown? we should all be ashamed of ourselves for this reality. once the place where pop songs were born, the broadway stage has lately become their graveyard. as for contemporary musical theater music, to paraphrase gershwin, it's got no rhythm, and audiences are asking for literally anything more.