Things Can Only Get Meta

So says Mark Shenton over at The Stage:

"The Book of Mormon and Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell’s [title of show] couldn’t be further apart in terms of scale or budgets, but they’re both cut from the same ‘meta musical’ cloth."

And he doesn't just mean the good old fashioned boy-met-a-girl kind of musical cloth. Oh no.

"These are musicals partly or entirely about musicals themselves, whether as a hilarious pastiche of the form in the case of The Book of Mormon or a sweet but rather sad paean to the struggle of putting them on in the case of [title of show]."

Now I suspect this is a bit of a non-comparison. The Book of Mormon isn't a musical about musicals. It is, in fact, about Mormons. More broadly it's about the nature of religious belief, the function of storytelling within that belief and the cognitive bias in popular representations of a post-colonial African culture. There's also some rude songs about frogs. From what I can gather, [title of show] is a show about two people writing a show.

The point is that in The Book of Mormon musicals aren't really part of the story. It's only that certain musical forms and traditions are used in order to tell the story. So when Elder Price tries to convince the native Ugandans of the Mormon founder Joseph Smith's story, he pitches it to them in the manner of The Music Man's 'Professor' Harold Hill flogging non-existent band uniforms to gullible townsfolk. It works, not because the audience has to reference The Music Man, but because that style of song (the smooth patter-talk of a slick salesman) fits that dramatic moment.

Back to The Shentonian:

"But I also can’t help wondering if, in the midst of the onslaught of generic and formulaic musicals designed to appeal to a more general demographic, it is any wonder that original musicals have therefore reached a dead end? Just as Sleuth and then Deathtrap finally put paid to the stage thriller as a viable form, since both revealed the workings behind the thrills, so [title of show], by taking the lid off the painful process of writing new musicals, may have killed the thing it loves, too."

Could be wrong but I doubt that [title of show] will prove to be that significant. But there is a good point here. There is a tendency for musicals to be inward-looking. I think you can see it in the exclamation mark musicals (that is, shows with titles like "Unlikely Subject for a Musical! - the Musical"). They are part of a cul-de-sac culture. There may be some exceptions but, on the whole, shows about shows are really only for show people.

And musicals should be for everyone.