Who?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't any of his fans have to be at the very least in their 40s by this point?

Didn't the both parts of the story miss rock 'n' roll's beginning by about a decade? Elvis certainly was kicking Broadway's ass in the mid/late 50s, along with Chuck Berry, J. L. Lewis, etc.

@2 is quite correct. In fact, even the people he mentions were relative late-comers.

But Elvis, for all his popularity, did not resonate at all with respectable adult society. That came later. Rock'n'roll was sanitized enough to get on the radio but the sanitized version was strictly for kids. None of the people involved in any aspect of Broadway show production would have paid more than the most passing notice of any rock performer until the Beatles came along -- until about a year or two after the Beatles arrived, in fact. And by that time, Elvis-style rock'n'roll was generally regarded as a fad whose time was long past, replaced by the more modern teenybopper pop like Fabian and Patti Page and so on, which was trying to bridge the gap between rock themes (teen love) and the older Sinatra/Bennett/Day style of pop singer.

It really was the Beatles that blew the doors off that world, that made adults sit up and take notice, even though they were mostly interested in the commercial aspects at first. It's the Beatles that made a generation of white kids take up guitars and start bands, and Mr. Rich is absolutely correct: it's the Beatles that destroyed Broadway music, or rather, it's mass resonance.

So the younger generation of audiences were no longer interested in theater, and the older generation was stuck in the past, as older generations always are.

In 2010, it's the rock performers who are the older generation, stuck in the past. Billy Joe Armstrong is pushing forty; Dee Snider is 55. When the Beatles first came to America, George Harrison was nineteen. Old people don't start musical revolutions, they finish them off.

That's not to say that the music Armstrong & Co. produce on Broadway is terrible, it's just never going to make an impact on our culture. Its audience is old, too. I guarantee that in fifty years people are far more likely to be singing pop dross like Justin Bieber than tunes from Green Day's musical. They're even more likely to be humming tunes from something else entirely.

Creepy - felt like I was reading about myself. In a universe where I'm terrible.

Interesting conversation, but... what Fnarf said. Also, did everyone forget Hair?

Musical theater, while pop music, kinda became a genre unto itself, not a medium for which popular music was channeled—the most enduring songs of the genre usually entered national consciousness through successful film adaptations, and not via Broadway success, the exception probably being Andew Lloyd Weber, who occasionally bent the genre toward rock music, but that of course was only after bands like the Who and the Pretty Things had already indulged themselves in his art form.

West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Celebration, Hello, Dolly!, etc. all occupied a space in pop culture between Rock and Roll's first hey-day and it's return with the British Invasion groups—when it was considered pretty much dead. There hadn't been a HUGE musical since 10 years before that to the best of knowledge. And considering musical theater has endured the advent of movie houses, television, and still thrives in its current incarnation with those Disney and ilk shows... fuck, what was the point I was trying to make? Goddamnit.

Sorry, some of those sentences are painfully punctuated and stream-of-consciousness... I'm at work here.

Well put, Fnarf.

It's Rodgers, not Rogers. Isn't Dan your editor?

It's also important to note that, not long after rock music became popular, Broadway shows started to become absurdly expensive to produce. So producers choose to back material that is the most likely to sell to the audiences that are already patronizing Broadway shows. And since those audiences tend to be older and more conservative than those at rock concerts, the shows that make it to Broadway tend to be a good 10 to 20 years behind popular music. Not to mention, the process of getting a show on Broadway usually takes nearly a decade from conception to first performance, so it's nearly impossible for a show to NOT be outdated by the time it hits a mainstream audience.

Also, there's a misconception that there are no people out there writing rock shows. Anyone who consistently sees NYMF or Fringe Festival shows in NYC (sorry, I live in NYC, so my examples are going to be east-coast-centric) knows that there are plenty of people out there writing rock and pop music for musical theatre. The problem is that it's very rare for those shows to get picked up for a commercial run because producers are too scared that they won't sell. There are exceptions, however, both historically and currently. Jesus Christ Superstar ran for nearly two years (a respectable run) starting in 1971 with a massively rock inspired score, and (if we're bringing pop music into this too) Promises, Promises ran over three years with a score by Burt Bacharach, popularizing mainstream pop songs like "What Do You Get When You Fall In Love." And right now, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Broadway's first emo rock musical, as they're calling it) is in previews on Broadway. Who knows if it will be popular, but it shows that rock and pop music are still being used in shows.

Done. Sorry for the length.

First off, great post, Fnarf. I don't agree with everything you surmise from your observations, but the observations themselves are unimpeachable.

I don't know how concerned I am that the rock being mined for these productions is 20-50 years old. To me, it's much more problematic that it seems to be the work of either theater people who have no real love of rock (or any of its tributaries or distributaries) or of rock stars--aging or otherwise--who simply see theater as another income stream (or, at best, channel for propaganda).

Mr. Savage's stated disdain for rock or hip-hop represents what seems to be a common view among theater-makers and theater-goers. When theater stopped being the suspect art of thieves and whores and started being the province of the effete and well-heeled, the age of the attendees and, more importantly, the level of mistrust of the popular (at least as expressed through any facet of youth culture) rose; concurrently, the tendency to dismiss the avant-garde as adolescent, as a phase through which one passes before embracing quasi-academic, "adult" populist impulses (a sort of neo-classicism), became the norm for the medium.

I don't think that the age of the genre of music is any more the problem than the age of the audience; nor is the apparent longevity of its popularity. No one really walks around singing songs by the Birthday Party, Einsturzende Neubauten, or even the Velvet Underground anymore, but I can . . . not guarantee, exactly, but predict with some level of certainty that any one of those artists still sounds more jarringly alien on first listen than anything by Twisted Sister or Green Day (which isn't to disparage the latter camp so much as to note that what "lasts" may not be as important as what still seems fresh on re-opening). By that same token, theater artists like Beckett or Brecht still pack something that I just don't find in even the most well-regarded musicals (Sweeney Todd being the exception that proves the rule).

These parallels aren't so coincidental, by the way; I discovered, say, Waiting for Godot and, say, Joy Division at so close to the same time, and found them each to occupy so similar a psychic space, that the fog of memory no longer allows me to see which turned me on to the other.

Sorry for the ramble; I guess what I'm saying is that the attempts to marry rock and theater always seem to arise from a commercial interest (not a problem in itself) that is fundamentally ungrounded in some kind of unified aesthetic, political, metaphysical, or even observational worldview (there's the rub). As long as theater artists approach the forms like minstrels, as long as rock musicians approach theater as another revenue stream or delivery system, rock musicals are gonna feel like a pointless clash of disparate languages undertaken for the sake of "reaching the kids."