Rendering 6

The article published on the website of the newspaper “The Thelegraph” on March, 21, 2013 is headlined “Book of Mormon: The new golden ageof the musical”. The article reports at length that as ‘The Book of Mormon’ reaches the West End and ‘Matilda’ hits Broadway, Matthew Sweet celebrates an unexpected renaissance .

It’s an open secret that the RSC’s musical version of Roald Dahl’s black little work Matilda is thriving in Covent Garden and gathering its skirts to do the same in New York. Once – an acclaimed Broadway hit adapted from a tiny Irish film that you probably never saw – makes the opposite journey next week. The Menier Chocolate Factory’s heartbreakingly brilliant revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along transfers next month from its modest home under a south London railway bridge to a grand venue in the West End. Tom Hooper’s film of Les Misérables, which has won more awards than Cosette has swept floors, remains resolutely on cinema screens, and the stage production is returning to Broadway next year.

It was revealed that there’s a clue to be found in Works and Days, a didactic poem written by Hesiod of Ascra in about 700 BC, a good few years before Barbara Dickson joined the cast of Blood Brothers. Hesiod asserted that the Greek world in which he lived was an Age of Iron: wretched, chaotic, debased. Long before this, however, there had been an Age of Gold, in which mortals lived like gods and everything was as upbeat as a first-act curtain number

The article carries a lot of comment on the fact that unlike the history of art, film or poetry, the history of musical theatre is essentially Hesiodic. Its Golden Age began on March 31 1943, when the curtain rose on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! to reveal not the customary line of chorines, but an old woman hunkering over a butter-churn as an unaccompanied voice sang Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’. From this moment, the old Broadway adage “no girls, no gags, no chance” was abandoned. Musicals were no longer adjustable frames upon which to hang a bunch of songs, they were the 20th-century answer to Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk – total works of art offering audiences coherent dramatic narrative, strong characterisation and music integrated with the action: a combination exemplified, in quick succession, by Kiss Me Kate (1948), South Pacific (1949), Guys and Dolls (1950), The King and I (1951) and West Side Story (1957).

Analyzing this situation it is necessary to emphasize that the Book of Mormon is acutely aware that the obituary of the musical has already been written. Its grinning paean to sexual and emotional repression – called Turn it Off – is an acknowledgement that its kind of theatre is often dismissed as glib and shallow. Its Ugandan village scenes exist to demonstrate the absurdity of using show tunes to make meaningful comment on African poverty, child soldiering or the Aids epidemic. Its sense of the musical as a worked-out, decadent, decomposing art is, perversely, the source of its monstrous vitality. On this evidence, I hope the musical stays dead. May it dance on its own grave forever.

As for me, I think that musical are very interesting and bright performances. We should visit them to relax and put aside all our problems. However, if you looks for knowledge and “food for thinking”, watch serious drama.