Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals (review)

Scott Miller, founder and artistic director of New Line Theatre in St. Louis, Missouri, brings his directorial and artistic insights to ten post-Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, ably demonstrating their social references and resonances through the pop-culture triumvirate of “sex, drugs, and rock & roll.” Miller asserts that the infusion of rock music styles into the musical theatre vocabulary, along with their often sexually related subject matters, is ushering in a new “golden age” for the genre. (The classic mid-century musicals of Rodgers and Hammer stein and their contemporaries are generally thought of as the first “golden age” of the musical.) In Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals, Miller champions each of the shows he presents and provides insights into their backgrounds, musical-dramatic dimensions, and reception histories. Miller has directed many of these shows, and his familiarity with the works as performance pieces makes his vantage point stand out from those of other writers on musical theater. His commentaries will be of interest to performers, directors, students, and scholars who are interested in any of these shows as well as to readers who enjoy musicals, particularly more recent ones. While many of the musicals included here have played on Broadway, this is certainly not always the case. Indeed, it is the inclusion of a wider span of musical theater works, namely those with healthy lives in regional theaters and off-Broadway, that contributes to this book’s value.

The book has a twofold organization. At first the chapters seem to be arranged according to the musical style of the focal works. The book begins with a recent show, The Wild Party, one whose music is largely rooted in the 1920s. The next chapter concerns Grease and its evocations of late 1950s rock. The author’s approach then shifts to an essentially chronological one and becomes a survey of rock musicals from Hair through High Fidelity.

Andrew Lippa’s aforementioned The Wild Party opened off Broadway in 2000 and ran for just 54 performances. The story is set in the 1920s, and Lippa creatively employs period music for external action and more contemporary sounds for the characters’ interior moments. Miller asserts that Lippa’s fluid score “is as close to a jazz opera as it can be without actually crossing that line” (p. 12). A cast album was released, although, as Miller discloses, it includes only some of the score and listeners cannot therefore hear much of the show’s extraordinary music.

Grease, which began life in 1972 as “a rowdy, rebellious, oversexed, and insightful piece of alternative theatre” (p. 25), strove for authenticity in its depiction of teenage life in 1959. Miller posits the show as concerning itself fundamentally with the shift from sexual repression in the 1950s to sexual adventuring in the 1960s and furthermore, with how rock and roll itself changed concepts of sex in America. He effectively argues that Grease is a concept musical, a combination of a plot-driven show and a concept-based revue.

The epochal Hair opened off Broadway at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre in 1967 and moved to Broadway the following year. Miller places Hair within the social and spiritual influences of the 1960s, including the Vietnam War, as well as in New York’s experimental theatre movement. He addresses the show’s innately ritualistic elements, drawing parallels to Christian theology—Claude as Jesus, Berger as John the Baptist, and Jeanie as Mary Magdalene (p. 77)—and illuminating its subversive messages concerning race and sexuality. As in Grease, authenticity is paramount in Hair, according to Miller, who claims the show “is not a musical; it is a happening” (p. 82).

Miller’s passionate prose on Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) begins “Here’s the truth: Jesus Christ Superstar is about politics, not religion, about a political activist, not the son of God. And it’s about the 1960s, not the Roman Empire” (p. 84). He issues a call for a return...