Word: broadway
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Poor Paul Simon. A few years ago he had the fool idea that a rock composer who wants to make it on Broadway has to go out and actually write new music. He spent years working on his musical The Capeman, only to see it bomb with the critics and at the box office...
Abba had it so much easier. The Swedish rock group (whose leaders, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, had been burned on Broadway once before, with their 1988 musical Chess) simply sat back and let a bunch of other folks take Abba's hit songs, graft them onto a flimsy story about a girl looking for her real dad on her wedding day and turn Mamma Mia! into a smash hit on Broadway--and just about everywhere else in the Western world...
...post-Mamma Mia! world, and the theater has fallen in love with rock--so long as it's retro. Opening next month on Broadway, accompanied by fervent buzz, is Hairspray, based on the campy John Waters movie and featuring ersatz '50s music by Marc Shaiman. Meanwhile, there's hardly a rock star or group from the '60s, '70s or '80s not about to be celebrated in a songbook musical reprising the greatest hits. We Will Rock You, a sell-out hit in London that boasts Robert De Niro among its backers, sets more than 30 songs of the '70s rock...
...minds of many Broadway traditionalists, the trend is unfortunate. They have a point. The peculiar magic of the musical form lies in convincing an audience that story and songs are an organic whole, that one can't live without the other. In most of the rock-songbook shows, the story is simply a clothesline on which to hang some presold hits the audience was humming on the way into the theater. Queen's We Are the Champions and Bohemian Rhapsody may or may not be your idea of great rock, but either way, in the college-revue tedium...
...Ghost World (that goofy disco clip, from the 1965 film Gumnaam) and the art-house hit Monsoon Wedding (the dance that brings a fractious family together). Bombay Dreams, the Bollywood-themed West End musical with an irresistible crossover score by top Indian composer A R Rahman, is headed to Broadway. But can the real thing make it here? Can Americans open up to the baroque beatitudes of Bollywood cinema...