What makes a great musical ?

Funnily enough, I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, prompted by Computer Says Show (well worth watching) and Beyond the Fence. In a three-stars quite entertaining way, I actually did like Beyond the Fence – it had some half decent songs, a solid plot and set of characters, a very decent setting (which deserves a better musical) and hit the right emotional beats (albeit with too accurate a precision) – but for all that, it absolutely was not a great musical. I think that’s because of the computer, and the central flaw is its unwillingness to risk imperfection. The plot’s too streamlined, it hits too many tried and tested right notes, it follows the formula too closely. It doesn’t have that key risk at its heart.

So with that in mind, I’ve come to the conclusion that, whatever a computer might say, I think Human Error is the secret to a great musical. I think that what makes a show isn’t hitting the formulaic marks or having big sexy moments, but having that giant opportunity for massive failure. It has to have risk. It has to have the potentiality for failure. Obviously the best musicals don’t fail in the end, but there has to be that risk of failure in the beginning. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. That’s probably true of plays, too – Hytner said that the four biggest hits in his tenure were History Boys, War Horse, Curious Incident and One Man Two Guv’nors, and all of those weren’t successes on paper – and probably true of all great art of any medium be it Duchamp or Disney or Dostoevsky.  That said, I think musicals stray into risky area less often, for tedious financial reasons. In this country we need a) better critical understanding and coverage of musicals (revivals and new, fringe, regions and West End, all need better understanding and coverage), and b) greater performance opportunities for musical writers to risk failure on a less public basis, and through that gain greater success through greater risk.

Also great tunes.

So what makes a great musical? Well, there’s that now-iconic quote by Leonard Cohen: There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in. Thinking about some major musical successes, I think that’s proven true:

The cracks in Les Mis, for example, for all that it has the key ‘success’ points the computer marked, are manifold. It has multiple dying sex workers, Hugo’s novelistic structure and complicated religious and societal politics, and is set during a major historical failure most people only know now due to the musical’s success. In treating Hugo’s novel seriously as Nicholas Nickleby was treated, it doesn’t make concessions to the mainstream, and in risking alienating the mainstream I think that’s why the mainstream like it.

The cracks in the other hit of Hytner’s tenure, London Road, are obvious – a verbatim script and musical style about a provocative, recent, sensitive subject? If it hadn’t worked, it wouldn’t just be a bad musical, but a hugely distasteful one (though I thought the film did have issues in taste the play didn’t, the structure there making it a Midsomer Murders witchhunt for a killer, and it patronised the prostitutes as on stage it never did). On stage it was a huge success which did change how I feel and think about that aspect of community and communal healing.

The cracks in Cabaret are also obvious – just setting it in the time when Nazism became the norm is risky enough. That it ends with our heroine getting an abortion whilst our Jewish heroine has her final moment of happiness before the Third Reich takes hold says it all. Though it’s not too risky a world – George Osborne kept banging on that his budget was a budget that put the next generation first, so as a member of the next generation I think his point was that tomorrow belongs to me.

The cracks in ALW’s best work, for all that he’s now mostly seen as conventional, are actually very daring.  The conflicted, heroic Judas of JCS, the complex Wilder plot of Sunset Blvd, the bonkersness of setting TS Eliot’s most childish animal poems to dance...  The reason ALW's been so successful is that, actually, he chooses his best material with great discernment; then he mainstream-ises them by ripping off Puccini over the top.

The cracks in Sweeney Todd are something Sondheim’s said about before – taking a relatively flippant and unknown myth very seriously. In treating the morality of mass murder in a very adult way, and with a plot about violence begetting violence that’s absolutely Shakespearean, it could be a pretentious, unfunny muddle – but it’s Sondheim, so of course it isn’t. And then the risks in Assassins make Sweeney Todd look like Mamma Mia.

The cracks in Mrs Henderson Presents are those of Emma Williams and the chorus.