Seriously Funny

Vanessa Thorpe over at the Observer has been calling for death and steamy sex. In musicals.

"A sombre topic, such as suicide or the dreadful progress of a serial killer, is often just what a musical needs to get an audience humming the tunes. Highly successful shows such as Sweeney Todd, Spring Awakening and London Road all make this unlikely point, despite the common assumption that taking in a West End show should be a frothy, feelgood experience."

Musicals should be "darker" and not in the sense of cheap lighting design. Apparently this is what lyricist and founder of a new musical award, Warner Brown, is calling for. Although he's not actually quoted as doing so. The nearest we get is this:

"Fortunately, in the last 10 or 15 years good directors have noticed the influence of the serious theatre on the musical since Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, which has quite dark themes."

Serious musicals with quite dark themes, then, such as the latest award winner Forest Boy, of which the show's composer, Claire McKenzie, says:

"There is light and shade in it. I certainly don't think musicals have to be bright and breezy."

So this whole musicals-need-to-be-darker theme may be a bit of journalistic spin. Nevertheless it's a familiar one, usually put in more general terms: musicals need to get serious, grow up and ditch the froth.

Actually, in the case of original British musicals, the opposite is true. If the stereotypical pose of a Broadway show is a big grin with jazz hands, then the West End equivalent is a look of earnest intensity into the middle distance. Solemn drama comes naturally to us, it's the comedy we find difficult. Let's forget revivals and jukeboxes for a moment and take a look at some of the big British musical comedies of recent decades:

Matilda
Mary Poppins (sort of)
Joseph and His Amazing Dooda Whatsit
Er, that's it.

Now compare that with the musical dramas:

Billy Eliott
Miss Saigon
Les Miz
Phantom of the Opera
Chess
Blood Brothers
Evita
Jesus Christ Superstar

This, I suspect, is largely down to Lord Andy and Super Mac, both of whom got burned early on in their careers with flop comedies (Jeeves and Anything Goes, respectively) and have since stuck mainly to the solemn stuff. Put simply, we're better at musical dramas than we are at musical comedies.

Interestingly the successful comedies are all kids' stuff. Nothing wrong with kids' stuff, I'm just making the point. You have to go back to Salad Days and The Boyfriend before you find hit musical comedies for adults. And that's part of the problem. We don't have much of a tradition of musical comedy. And the ones that we do have are as frothy as a bus station cappuccino.

Now, at this juncture, it's worth distinguishing comedy from froth. Guys and Dolls is a comedy but it's not especially frothy. It's a character comedy and, in dramatic terms, it's as compact as a rock. Salad Days, on the other hand, relies on wit, wordplay and imagination. In dramatic terms, it's free as air. The point is that, in the British tradition, musical comedy tends towards the frothy-style musical comedy. It's G&S and Julian Slade and Sandy Wilson and, more recently, Stiles and Drewe. But what's the British equivalent of a non-frothy comedy like Guys and Dolls?

Musicals don't need to be any darker or more sombre or grown-up. But they could do with getting serious about comedy.