[A series
AmericanStudying some important and impressive moments and works in the history
of American drama. I’d love to hear your responses to these posts and/or other
dramatic works, authors, and trends you’d highlight!]
On the popular
musical that helped change our national conversations.
When it comes to a controversial
or difficult social and cultural topic, one of the more interesting lenses
through which we can analyze the issue is to consider when and how overtly popular
representations of it developed. I’m not talking about explicitly or centrally political
or statement-making representations, but rather images of the issue in
entertainments intended first and foremost to be popular, to be successful, to
attract and affect a broad audience. So with an issue like interracial
relationships and marriages, one could point for example to Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner? (1967); certainly the film has a definite and even in the final scenes a pedantic
message, but on the whole it tries to be a successful drama, one that will
keep its audience interested and entertained throughout. Or if Spencer Tracy’s final speech makes the
film too political to fit this category, one could look just a few years down
the road, at the many
episodes of All in the Family (and then its spin-off The Jeffersons) that prominently
featured an interracial couple (the Willises) who unsettle both Archie Bunker
and George Jefferson; those episodes are, as the show always was, played first
and foremost for laughs, without losing any nuance in their representations of
the thorny issue itself.
If we turn to one of the most
difficult and controversial issues in American society in the 1980s (and beyond),
the
AIDS epidemic, I’d say it’s pretty tough to pin down when that kind of
popular representation really emerges. A case could definitely be made for Tony Kushner’s two-part
play Angels in America (1991),
which despite calling itself A Gay
Fantasia on National Themes and focusing almost entirely on gay characters is
in many ways a big-budget blockbuster award-winning (including the Pulitzer
Prize) kind of drama, featuring scenery-destroying descending angels,
hallucinations of long-dead American historical figures who exchange witty banter
with the play’s characters, and some of the foulest and funniest dialogue I’ve
ever read (mostly spoken by the
play’s fictionalized version of Roy Cohn). Or maybe the answer would be the
Academy Award-winning hit
film Philadelphia (1993), which
starred two of Hollywood’s most prominent actors (Tom Hanks and Denzel
Washington), featured musical contributions from legendary rock stars
(including a great tune
by some dude named Bruce), and relied on one of the oldest thriller plot
devices, the courtroom drama, for much of its very effective creation of
suspense and entertainment. And certainly both of these works, along with Magic Johnson’s
much-publicized 1991 announcement of his own HIV-positive status,
contributed to a sea-change in public consciousness about the illness in the
early 1990s.
But for my money (and it’s gotten
plenty of it over the years), I think the first truly popular entertainment to
grapple with AIDS is Jonathan Larsen’s rock musical Rent (1996). It’s hard to argue with
any measure of the musical’s popular successes: it was when it closed in 2008
the 9th longest-running Broadway show in history, at 12 years and
over 5000 performances; it spun off into dozens of national tours and foreign
productions, as well as a
2005 movie version featuring almost all of the original cast members; it
grossed almost $300 million and won a Tony for Best Musical; and the list goes
on. But in keeping with the show’s mantra, “No Day but Today,” I’d
say you don’t need any of those facts or statistics to assess the show’s
popular success: all you need to do is go see it somewhere if you get the
chance, or watch a video of the production, or even just listen to the soundtrack
(which features virtually the whole production, since there’s very little
non-sung dialogue). The play pretty much literally has it all—it’s funny and
angry, hugely emotionally affecting and cynical and smart-ass, big and
sentimental and intimate and realistic, has a perfectly constructed circular
structure (it starts and ends on Christmas Eves one year apart and uses New Year’s
to bridge the two Acts), includes almost every genre of popular music in one or
another of its songs, is based in great detail on a 100 year-old opera
(Puccini’s La Boheme) and yet
grounded in 1990s New York City and America in every way, and just plain sings,
all the way through and by any measure. And at the same time it is deeply
engaged at every moment—and politically engaged in many crucial ones—with the
issue of AIDS and its many different communities and identities, causes and
effects.
Larsen died,
unexpectedly and tragically, of a brain aneurysm on the day the play was to
make its Off-Broadway premiere, and an entirely different and equally rich
analysis could connect to great artists who died too young and the masterworks
they left behind. But if Rent is any
indication, Larsen would want his legacy to be precisely his achievement in
finding that perfect combination of popular and political, successful and
social, and thus contributing more (I believe) than any other single work to
bringing AIDS out of the shadows and into the mainstream of American culture
and consciousness. Last drama tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other works, authors, or moments you’d highlight?
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