Curtains for musical comedy?

Move over, "Spamalot." The surreal, smart "Grey Gardens" and "Spring Awakening" are redefining Broadway.

Editor's note: This week, Salon is looking back over the year on Broadway, in anticipation of the Tony Awards this Sunday.

By Robert Simonson

Read more: Broadway, Arts & Entertainment, Tony Awards, Arts & Entertainment Features

Photo by Joan Marcus

"Spring Awakening"

June 4, 2007 | Six years ago, Mel Brooks hit New York with his smash hit phenomenon "The Producers" and inadvertently ushered in a new era of musical theater, one in which the old-style musical comedy -- the kind with a book, lotsa yuks, pretty girls and grandstanding performances -- was rushed back into fashion. For nearly three decades, that sort of feel-good enterprise had been locked in the deep freeze, first by the lumbering domination of the British mega-musicals, then by the heady, medicinal exercises of the atonal Sondheimarati. Brooks reminded theatergoers what they had been missing: fun.

But that era -- which resulted in the long runs of such self-mocking and satisfying shows as "Hairspray," "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" and "Spamalot" -- may now be over. When Brooks' new stage show, "Young Frankenstein," makes its expected bow on Broadway this fall, it might be too late to enjoy the era its author created, the atmosphere in which a show like "Frankenstein" would blossom. The reason? Two shows: "Grey Gardens" and "Spring Awakening."

These two daring, surreally unusual musicals -- both transfers from the 2005-06 Off-Broadway season -- have dominated Broadway during the past six months. Together, they will likely walk away with many of the Tony Awards in the major musical categories. Just as quickly as "The Producers" made "Les Misérables" and "Phantom of the Opera" look like musty warhorses, "Grey Gardens" and "Spring Awakening" -- and, to a (much) lesser extent, "LoveMusik" -- have recast "The Producers" and its stylistic brethren as so much low-brow cavorting. In Times Square, audacious visions are the new black, and "Young Frankenstein" may very well be faulted by critics for wanting in the smarts department.

Critical winds have already shifted a bit. Two cases in point: "Curtains," a hybrid backstage drama and murder mystery, and the first new John Kander and Fred Ebb musical to be staged on Broadway since Ebb's death; and "Legally Blonde," a once-promising stage adaptation of the popular Reese Witherspoon film comedy about a savvy SoCal ditz who takes on Harvard Law. Both shows couldn't have made it clearer that a good time at the theater was the lead item on their artistic agenda. No life lessons here. No furthering of the art form. And had these shows premiered in New York in, say, 2005, their success might have been assured. In the post-"Grey Gardens"-and-"Spring Awakening" world, however, "Curtains" was dismissed by many reviewers as old-fashioned and corny. "Legally Blonde," meanwhile, was deemed bubble-headed, a feast of empty calories.

That two shows as singularly odd as "Grey Gardens" and "Spring Awakening" should have climbed the Everest of critical and popular opinion amounts to one of the most unlikely success stories in the theater since a sassy puppet musical called "Avenue Q" whomped the witchy butt of tween magnet "Wicked" at the Tony Awards. Each is drawn from source material that any fool would see as ludicrously inappropriate for a musical. "Grey Gardens" takes its inspiration from the 1975 Maysles brothers film of the same name, which documented, with a hungry and cruelly unblinking eye, the squalid-cum-triumphant lives of Edith Bouvier Beale and her middle-aged daughter, "Little Edie." An aunt and a cousin of Jackie Kennedy and one-time society queens, they had mysteriously descended into tragicomic agoraphobia, living out their eccentric, deluded, codependent lives with a few dozen cats and raccoons in a dilapidated East Hampton manse. The film developed a cult status over the years, particularly among gay men, who see the Beales as staunch iconoclasts and different-drummer romantics.

"Grey Gardens" was written by the previously unknown composing duo of Scott Frankel and Michael Korie. Its book is by "I Am My Own Wife" and "Quills" scribe Doug Wright, America's playwright laureate of sacred monsters. The musical is divided into two distinct acts. The second act faithfully reproduces the film's various eccentric episodes -- the fights, Little Edie's nonstop monologuing and impromptu dance recitals. The first act, set three decades earlier when the family was in clover, tries to imagine how the once wealthy and well-positioned Beales got from A to B. It plays like a double feature of "The Philadelphia Story" and "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" Critics complained that it didn't all work, but few said it wasn't spellbinding.

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