How Not To Like Musicals

Cultural guru Bryan Appleyard demonstrates how not to like musicals based on less-than-pleasing experiences of Starlight Express, Phantom of the Opera and a Sondheim show:

As intellectually challenging as a Moonpig card and as aesthetically satisfying as cat litter, these shows left me baffled. Why would anybody want to see such nonsense? In the case of Sondheim – the easily shocked should look away now – I concluded he wasn’t very good.

Can I look now?

In the end, I suppose, musicals are, to some, restful. They provide – sometimes – nice tunes and consoling sentiments as well as lots of expensive stage effects. Fair enough. I suppose.

Phew. He is, of course, wrong. But that's OK as he does tend to be right about everything else in life and he does find one exception in The Book of Mormon.

Although he fails to credit Robert Lopez as co-author along with the South Park fellas, Matt Stone and Trey Parker (by the way, how often is this going to happen in the forthcoming reviews?), his analysis is spot on:

Neither Mormonism nor religion is the prime target, parochialism is the heart of the matter...They [Trey and Parker] do not, however, resort to the helpless, postmodern shrug; rather, they draw consolation from the fact that, adrift we may be, but at least we are all in the same boat. And what do we do to pass the time? We tell stories.

However absurd Mormon parochialism appears to the outsider, it is a story to live by and we all need one of those.