Rewriting The Canon (and the Cannon)

Jukebox musicals and revivals generate a Greater but less White Way

I have been going to Broadway musicals for as long as I remember going into New York City. From my tween years when a trip into NYC involving dodging dodgy characters at the Lincoln Tunnel exit and Mama Leone’s was significantly more than an obscure Billy Joel reference, I’ve seen the equivalent of a five octave vocal range of shows. Some were well written but obscure (“Passing Strange,” which won “Best Book” in the 2008 Tony Awards but never got the attention of a headliner) to musically wonderful but short-lived (Trey Anastasio’s “Hands on A Hard Body” that ran shorter than a typical Phish fall tour) to classics that, well, I never quite got (“Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera” both of which ran — and run — long past their “use by” dates). My expertise in the theater is limited to playing in three pit bands, and to making sure I exposed my kids to musical theater ranging from summer stock at the Surflight on Long Beach Island to first-run shows with personalities they recognized on Broadway.

There is a most definite trend to widening Broadway’s creative alleys. It’s not just about inclusion; it’s about finding material that is both wonderfully musical and has high production value but also makes you think, to the point of mild discomfort. That is art in its highest form, and Broadway is on the rise again.

“1776” is a revival of the 1970s classic that featured all of two women (wives of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson), no people of color, and a passing in strange treatment of the discussion that left slavery implicit in the Declaration of Independence. The new 1776 features an all-female/non-binary cast, primarily people of color, and it dives right into the issues of slavery and women’s rights (or lack thereof in the original 13). The acting and staging will make you fidget; you will rethink the way history has been taught and therefore the the art does its job of firing a cannon through our viewpoint. See it soon; it’s only running through January 8.

“Six” tells the story of the six wives of British monarch Henry VIII. Shakespeare wrote a play about about Henry VIII that is literal palace intrigue, in which only two of his wives appear in passing roles (and without reference to Anne Boleyn’s beheading). When the play was performed at the Globe Theater in 1613, a cannon used for effect ignited the building’s roof and burned the original to the ground.

Rick Wakeman performing sections of “The Six Wives of Henry VIII”

My sole reference for the history is Rick Wakeman’s album “The Six Wives of Henry VIII",” where he tried to capture the spirit of each woman in his inimitable keyboard style. Wakeman’s portayal of these independent, unique women is much closer to “Six” than Shakespeare’s sloppy treatment of their (one third of their number’s) fate. “Six” rocks, it’s an all woman cast that does for this stretch of the monarchy what “West Wide Story” did for “Romeo & Juliet” - makes it accessible, fun, and completely focused on the real people whose lives were shaped and shaped the monarchy over decades. There’s a playful thread (especially with Anne Boleyn) that weaves messages of love, hope, and longing into a 400-year old story.

At the confluence of Shakespeare and rewriting the canon, though, is “& Juliet,” recently opened on Broadway. It is a modified story of Romeo and Juliet, after the final double-suicide scene in which Juliet takes her agency and decides to live her own life. William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway appear as characters, deliberately breaking the fourth wall and ostensibly rewriting as they go. It’s something of a jukebox musical, as the songs are all drawn from 1990s and 2000s powerful pop that tell stories of empowerment and taking charge. There are deep, deep Shakespeare references (the Bonvolio mic drop was superb); there are deep, well, cultural references (at one point I laughed so hard I nearly blacked out) and the story involves Anne Hathaway’s relationship to her artist husband as much as Juliet’s to her own, however short lived. While “Six” forces us to ask what the British queens might have been like as rock stars; “& Juliet” puts the entire female and non-binary cast (face it, Shakespeare used gender as performance long before Benjamin Rosenbaum predicted it as culture) front and center.

See it before the Tony nominations come out in February as my over/under is about ten nods for “& Juliet”.

Should you be making New Year’s resolutions, decide to see more live musical theater. It combines some of our longest running art forms with an ever-increasing healthy review of our current times; if exercising doesn’t make you a better person than an inclusive, canon-challenging musical certainly will.

Contributing to my mood while drafting and writing:

Words: Katy Tur’s “Rough Draft” that was simply wonderful and made me want to write this.

Notes: Multiple renditions of Back’s Brandenburg Concerto #3, especially with Ron Carter on bass, because it’s just fun to learn.