Has American theater outgrown the classics?
Many high schools seem to think so — because they’re abandoning classic scripts such as Bye Bye Birdie, Fiddler on the Roof, and Oklahoma! for newer, more modern sounds such as The Addams Family, Mamma Mia!, and Beauty and the Beast, according to a series of surveys compiled by National Public Radio. These last three titles were the most-performed musicals this past school year, the surveys found, and are in the running to be at the top of the list this next year too.
That can only mean one thing: We’ve entered the Disney era of theater. Sure, Broadway will still show the classics because that’s what sells to Broadway’s older generation of consumers. But the younger generations are moving on. As of 2018, Beauty and the Beast was the most-produced musical in high schools across the county, The Little Mermaid was the third most-produced musical, and Peter and the Starcatcher was the third most-produced play, according to Playbill.
“This is the new American songbook,” Thomas Schumacher, the producer and president of Disney Theatrical Productions, said. “We are this new era of Broadway.”
He’s right. The younger generations have basically grown up on Disney — the soundtracks, the movies, and now the musicals. This new genre isn’t just apart of our culture; it’s defining it — in part because Disney has made itself accessible.
One of the reasons that high schools and small-town productions opt for newer Disney works is because it is easy to do so. Disney offers choreography DVDs for crews without their own choreographer, set production tools for theaters with limited resources, and karaoke disks for casts that can’t hire an orchestra. Some critics would argue that this dumbs down the art, but Schumacher argued that the only thing Disney has changed is the rules.
“We can reduce shows down, make them singable, make them produceable, and make it possible,” he explained. “The rules are different in Pop Warner football than they are in the NFL. We have touch football. We have flag football. We have tackle football. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t do the same theatrically.”
Still, there’s something tragic about the move toward commercial theater — especially if it comes at the cost of the classics. West Side Story, The Music Man, Kiss Me, Kate: The next generation might not even recognize these shows’ names, let alone their worth.
