It is a topic as elemental as existence itself. It is one of the main subjects in the American consciousness. It’s religious faith, and many long to see honest depictions of faith and religion on the musical stage. Here are ten musicals that vary in their attitudes toward faith, but present an honest witness.
Avant-garde theater artist Lee Breuer came about as close to a mainstream Broadway musical as he ever will with this 1988 Broadway effort with music by Bob Telson. Breuer’s idea was a setting of Sophocles’s
Oedipus at Colonus
as told by a Pentecostal Sunday service, a melding of the Christian faith and the Greek
catharsis. The Gospel at Colonus
premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in 1983.
As presided over by the magisterial Morgan Freeman, the evening was praised in concept but left most reviewers scratching their heads to comprehend the
meaning. The main pleasures, besides Freeman, were Telson’s music, the predictably fine Gospel singers (massed choirs and soloists), and Alison Yerxa’s impressive church altar set.
Adapted from Alan Paton’s novel
Cry, the Beloved Country,
Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s 1949 musical
Lost in the Stars
was Weill’s last musical and a searing examination of faith in crisis and hope for change fueled by racial injustice. Reverend Stephen Kumalo, whose son, Absalom, is missing, journeys from his home in the South African hills to the shanty-towns and city streets of Johannesburg to find him, fearing that Absalom has lost his way, both spiritually and physically. The show as a whole was appreciated but not raved over, but the score served Paton’s minimalist prose well, particularly in the haunting “Train to Johannesburg” and the title song, in which Reverend Kumalo questions his faith in an absentee God.
The most profitable kids’ pageant ever conceived, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
was indeed written to be performed by and for the kids at Colet Court, the prep school for London’s St. Paul’s. (It was a commission from the school’s choirmaster, who was a Webber family friend.) Their tale was the tale of Joseph, the dreamer and coat-wearer, from the book of Genesis.
The anything-goes pop ethos of the late sixties, coupled with the audience for whom they were writing, gave Rice and Lloyd Webber freedom to mix styles and
genres freely in the piece, and after its premiere in May 1968, it kept growing. Jacob’s favorite son finally made it to Broadway in 1981 and has proven a huge cash cow both occasionally on the Main Stem, and especially on the road.
Vernon Duke and John Latouche wrote the remarkable score to this adaptation (by Lynn Root) of the folk play
The Green Pastures
by Marc Connelly. Its premiere in 1940 was an important event, not just because of its intelligent and human black characters, but because of its attitude towards faith and spirituality.
Cabin in the Sky
takes the form of a parable in Negro dialect: The Lawd’s General and Lucifer, Jr. are fighting for the soul of Little Joe, a decent Everyman given to earthly temptations (here, notably gambling and Miss Georgia Brown, Junior’s emissary of hotcha). Joe’s wife, Petunia (Ethel Waters, in her only Broadway musical), fights the good fight to keep him on the straight and narrow, and her outlook and her unwavering goodness is what gives
Cabin in the Sky
its appeal. Indeed, the “Cabin” she sings of is not only Heaven, but also the perfect life in faith and love on Earth.
Much has been written about the mega-smash musical
Les MisÉrables
and its tribute to the power of the human spirit. But Victor Hugo’s classic novel, on which the musical is faithfully based, offers a stirring look at the faith that carried France through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The hero of
Les Miz,
Jean Valjean, looks to God at
almost every turn and is saved from returning to prison and ruining his life again by the Bishop of Digne, who not only spares Valjean from prison, but also gifts him candlesticks with which Valjean starts his life anew. He is, of course, pursued at every turn by the show’s principled villain, Inspector Javert. Both Javert and Valjean are given fervent anthems of faith and guidance, Javert’s “Stars” his declaration of determination, and Valjean’s “Bring Him Home” a prayer for delivery on the eve of battle.
Leonard Bernstein wore many, many hats in his rich life, and two of them were Professional Jew and Friend of President John F. Kennedy. His friendship with the Catholic First Family fueled his fascination with Roman Catholicism, and when he was asked to commemorate the opening of Washington’s Kennedy Center in 1970, he decided to honor the late President with a unique modern Mass.
A synthesis of the Latin texts of the Catholic Mass, presided over by a celebrant, and modern commentary on the state of belief and faith as they provided by singing and dancing characters,
Mass
was a mammoth spectacle, employing two orchestras, a marching band, a choir, a children’s choir, dancers, soloists, and the head of Alfredo Garcia. Packed inside the spectacle were the usual Bernstein musical and textual indulgences (many with subpar lyrics by Stephen Schwartz), such as a Gospel sermon in 7/8 time, and the “touch of peace” concluding the ceremony. But also present was some perfectly sublime music, including the plaintive “Thank You,” and one of the finest American songs ever written, “A Simple Song.”
Sholom Aleichem’s stories, particularly “Tevye and his Daughters,” are rich in folk wisdom and humor and especially strong faith and belief. This pure belief is what keeps simple dairyman Tevye going and is also what attracted Zero Mostel to the character and to
Fiddler on the Roof
in the first place.
Tevye’s man-to-Man conversations with God are a gently humorous device to illustrate Tevye’s beliefs, but the show’s musical moments are even richer in spirituality. Tevye’s “want” song, “If I Were a Rich Man,” starts as one of those conversations, and the musical high point of the evening is the unimpeachable, so-simple-it-hurts “Sabbath Prayer.”
Lerner and Loewe’s magical musical sets up two very different schools of belief. Brigadoon, the village which appears only one day every hundred years, was saved from pagan witches by the sacrifice of Mr. Forsythe, a “minister of the kirk,” who was basically a benevolent totalitarian. Invading this world is the outsider, Tommy Albright, an Amerian with postwar malaise, who desperately needs something to believe in.
Not much is spoken of theocratic religion in
Brigadoon,
but the basic theme of redemption through faith is powerfully present, especially in the “From This Day On,” the heartbreaking duet between Tommy and Fiona, the village lass with whom he’s fallen unconditionally in love, and he must give up in order to get back.
William Finn and James Lapine’s nervy trilogy, the “Marvin Songs,” followed Marvin, an immature, conflicted
husband and father who left his family for another man. Episode three,
Falsettoland,
set in 1981, examines the extended family dynamics set up by the consequences of these actions: Marvin’s lover, Whizzer, is diagnosed with what turns out to be AIDS, and Marvin’s son, Jason, is approaching his bar mitzvah.
The analogy is fairly routine: Jason’s passage into manhood through the Jewish bar mitzvah ritual plaes in comparison to the life lesson the death of his father’s lover will teach him. But so deep is Jason’s belief in the power of love that his ideas of “the miracle of Judaism” change over the course of the show, from picking which girls he’ll invite to the ceremony to holding the ritual in Whizzer’s hospital room, in the hopes that he won’t die.
Joe Darion and Mitch Leigh’s 1965 musical
Man of La Mancha
is adapted from Cervantes’s classic novel
Don Quixote,
the story of a knight-errant and his doomed quest for truth and beauty. As dramatized, Cervantes himself is on trial and must defend his manuscript in the kangaroo court of convicts judging him.
The youth-quake mid-sixties attitude was less about chastity, purity, and devotion than it was about success against odds and rebellion against authority. But
Man of La Mancha
had belief in both sets of values, the religious hypocrisy of the show’s venal Padre and Quixote’s hollow-pious family offset by Quixote’s unwavering faith in the abilities God has given him and his redemptive power over his Dulcinea, the kitchen wench Aldonza.
Foolhardy to adapt the works of the immortal Bard of Avon to the musical stage? Tosh and forsooth! These ten shows stepped bravely into the breach.
This classic musical from 1957 updated
Romeo and Juliet
Street gangs, native white and Puerto Rican immigrant—stand in for the Capulets and Montagues, and native boy and immigrant girl fell in love with tragic consequences. Arthur Laurents’ book trimly handled the transition, inventing a kind of contempo slang for his gang kids, rife with “cracko jacko’s” and “kiddando’s.”
The parallels to Shakespeare matter less than the structure of the show, which moved in a way that no musical ever had. Jerome Robbins directed and choreographed the show to dance almost constantly, to the brilliant rhythms of Leonard Bernstein’s eternal dance score. The movement of the gangs was Robbins’ own
heightened, stylized realism, which both underscored the tragedy and drove the action.
A radical change in attitude from (and towards) youth in 1968 was key in the creation of this musical version of
Twelfth Night
The gender politics and examination of unconditional love that mark Shakespeare’s play are spun cleverly in
Your Own Thing,
which makes no bones about Illyria-on-the-Hudson and the desires of the longhaired cast to do “their own thing” with longhaired man (or woman).
John Driver’s very funny book used slides, cartoon thought balloons, and other then-new multimedia to comment on the Shakespeare (Viola: “Who governs here?” Mayor John V. Lindsay: “New York is a fun city.” Cough, cough.), while jettisoning the clowns, letting a rock band, The Apocalypse, make the funny instead. A big hit off-Broadway,
Your Own Thing
is one of the most satisfying uses of Shakespeare in a musical context.
George Abbott authored and directed this breezy 1938 farce based
on The Comedy of Errors.
The twins plot was maintained, and the part of the courtesan, who shows up to throw a wrench in the plans of her “Master Antipholus,” was expanded for good, sexy comedy. But best of all was the score, one of the Rodgers and Hart classics. “The Shortest Day of the Year,” “This Can’t Be Love,” and the riotous “Oh! Diogenes!” all point up the farce. A seriously rewritten version was presented, to little acclaim, on Broadway in 2002.
Talented composer Lance Mulcahy conceived this intriguing evening, setting many of the Bard’s words to music. Developed off-Broadway at the Colonnades Lab, Mulcahy’s pen embraced Shakespearean verse both familiar (“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?,” “If Music Be the Food of Love”) and less so (“Crabbed Age and Youth,” from
The Passionate Pilgrim).
Despite the show’s lasting only fifty-four performances on Broadway in 1981, Mulcahy’s music received a Tony nomination.
Director Mel Shapiro asked Galt MacDermot to set “Who is Silvia?” to music for his 1971 New York Shakespeare Festival production of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Shortly afterward, their “grand new musical” version was the hit of the summer and moved on to win the Best Musical Tony on Broadway later that season.
This musical version (which dropped “The” from the Shakespeare) was a quite agreeable mix of musical styles, with rock, soul, Latin, and even country jostling for position. Shapiro’s typically anachronistic direction gave us a bustling Milan (and, thanks to wordsmith John Guare, a pregnant Julia) which bore a striking resemblance to a scaffold-clad Manhattan. The youthful tone of the show was served by a superb cast, including Raul Julia and Clifton Davis as the two gents, with Diana Davila and the luminous Jonelle Allen as their ladies fair.
This musical version of
The Tempest
was, pun intended, a monster hit in London but less so on American
shores. The show’s creator, Bob Carlton, had wanted to fashion a campy Shakespeare musical as a late-night offering on the London fringe, and word-of-mouth spread on
Return to the Forbidden Planet
like wildfire.
Planet was
a major award winner after it opened in London in 1989 and remains a favorite on tour in the CJK. The show’s tacky approach to the rock tunes it incorporates may have doomed it in America. Weaving the
Tempest
plot points in with its ’50s and ’60s tunes and framing it all inside a
Forbidden Planet-like
cheeseball space flick (the film is based on
The Tempest),
this one practically screams “cult musical.”
The great Cole Porter’s greatest score brilliantly supports Sam and Bella Spewack’s 1948 treatment of
The Taming of the Shrew,
which turns out to be a thorny rose to the theater biz (and, oh yes, a masterpiece of musical comedy). Smart, funny, tuneful– let’s eat!
The Spewacks wrapped a musicalized
Shrew
around the onstage and offstage foibles of the troupe performing the show, trying it out on the road, in the “land of Mencken and Nod.” Here’s the egomaniacal director/star, his estranged wife, the star-crossed secondary couple, funny gangsters, and some of the very best songs ever written for the theater. Porter’s beguine, “Were Thine That Special Face,” is here, as is the minor-key scorcher, “Too Darn Hot,” the torch song, “Why Can’t You Behave?,” and the funniest song ever written, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” Check, please.