Further to the post and podcast below on the question of why musical theatre songs gradually disappeared from the pop charts.
There is, of course, one obvious answer not explored by Messrs. Thos and Tim: musicals got less popular.
OK, let's tweak that a bit. From the mid-sixties onwards the popular musicals got fewer and farther between. In the West End the megamusicals could still throw up a big song or two (Phantom begat four top ten hits) but there were precious few shows to do the throwing up. And on Broadway the golden age had well and truly passed. By the eighties the biggest home-grown show was 42nd Street which, admittedly, included several hit songs in its score. Hit songs from the 1930s, that is.
So what about today? Could songs from original musicals compete with the techno-urban-hippity-hop stuff in the modern pop charts? I don't see why not. If a bunch of munchkins can get to number 2 with little more than a Facebook campaign, then surely a savvy theatre producer with a decent song could manage a top 10.
But given that there's generally more money in live performance than digital recordings these days, the real question is: why would they want to?
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