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I think I’m beginning to understand why it is that most American musical theatre written after about 1960 completely turns me off. Pop music in the 1950s ruined it for everybody.

Let me backtrack a bit. Last summer, when I did Brigadoon, I remembered how much I enjoyed performing in musicals. I hadn’t done it in many years, mainly because (as I revealed to everyone) the last one I had done was Grease, which is, in case you weren’t aware of it, the worst piece of dreck ever to hit a Broadway mainstage. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I hate the original production, I hate the movie, I hate the soundtrack, there’s honestly not one thing about it I can stand. Most of all, I hate the fact that the rest of the world seems to adore it, such that every year or so some local theater performs it, and invariably a friend of mine is cast in it, so I have to go see it again. And I sit there, and stare at the stage (which is invariably pink walls in every scene, with black checkerboard floors, as if every business and home in the continental United States closed down and became a friggin’ sock hop on the weekend), and hate.

There are two basic reasons why my anger on this subject is so strong:

• The “plot”. Here’s a basic outline, leaving out some of the more pointless stuff (of which there’s a lot): New girl moves to town, sees the boy she met over the summer. He turns out to be a jerk when he’s around his friends and spurns her. His friend buys a car. She makes friends with the local bad girls, who invite her over. One of them reveals she’s quitting school to go to beauty school.

  The friend with the car starts nailing the baddest of the girls. The girl in beauty school discovers she has as much beauty-creating skill as a gerbil. Jesus comes down from heaven and sings a song to her about going back to high school. She crucifies him.

  Wait a second, I’m getting off track here.

  The bad girl tells the guy with the car that she might be pregnant, and it’s probably not his. He is sad. The main boy and the main girl are still having issues ’cause she won’t give up the punani and he’s dirty.

  All this turmoil builds until the final scene, in which:

  • The main girl turns into a slut, and presumably gives up her virginity to the main guy.
  • The baddest girl turns out to not be pregnant.
  • The beauty school dropout starts a cult in Oklahoma and is killed when she sets off a nuclear device near Tulsa.

  It just makes me insane that they spend over 2 hours building up all this pressure on the characters, and then BOOM everything’s fixed and they sing. Hate. It.

• The “music”. Why do we revere the music of the 50s? So much of it is painfully bad. My ears start to drip blood when I hear a lot of it. In the 40s we had swing music, much of which was brilliant and jazzy and fun, and inspired dance moves that required the athleticism of a starting point guard for the Pistons; in the 60s we had Motown and Rock and Roll and the Beatles and Joni Mitchell and lyrics from Bob Dylan that won’t be topped in 500 years unless John Mayer gets particularly insightful. In between, we had horn-rimmed white dorks from Minnesota playing songs with 3 chords, screeching horrific falsetto death rattles, and crashing airplanes left and right. Worse, some idiot wrote an entire musical just to relive that decade. And if I meet that man, I will stab him in the neck.

I think most of what I don’t like about musicals today is a direct result of Grease’s immense popularity. The shoddy music ripped off from top 40 radio, the lame plot ideas, the bad writing; everything’s gotten sloppy because playwrights and composers realized that all you have to do is throw some hack dialogue together with a big dance number with some poor idiot screaming notes that make her vocal chords spray blood into the first three rows, and the audience will eat it up.

Another problem is that the quality of the singing seems to have gone WAY down. Right now I’m listening to the original “Off-Off-Broadway” cast recording of “Godspell,” and I’m not enjoying it terribly, although it’s not the fault of the composer, whoever he or she might be. The recording I have features singers that are simply God-awful. Seriously, it’s like they hired homeless people to record this album. And it doesn’t make sense because I personally know a half-dozen or more singers with incredibly strong voices.

Here’s the thing. When you’re hiring performers, you want to get the best actors and singers and dancers that money can buy. Unfortunately, I think that casting directors tend to focus on acting, to the detriment of singing. And this is not a smart idea, because while I can tell the difference between a grade-A actor and a grade-B actor, once I get into the story I won’t notice. (Example: “Napoleon Dynamite” did not feature actors of the caliber of Steve Buscemi and Al Pacino, but it didn’t detract from the overall hilariousness of the film.) I can tell the difference between a grade-A singer and a grade-B singer before they finish their first measure, and I think most people can as well. The people on this recording of Godspell are approximately Grade-D singers. And I have no idea if they’re quality actors, because you never see or hear that part. I wouldn’t have even issued an “original cast” recording, I’d’ve just hired professionals to lay down the tracks.

Still, there’s hope for Broadway, I think. Back in February HearnWife and I and some family folks went to see “Wicked,” which I believe I described at the time as “OH MY GOD THAT WAS SO AWESOME I THINK I JUST POOP’D MY PANTS,” which still holds true. The score is a delicious mix of classical and popular styles (the pit orchestra was a true ORCHESTRA, and yet it still had guitars and drums and all the fun stuff that audiences today dig), the melodies were fantabulous, the lyrics and book just right, the acting was righteous, and best of all they found two leading ladies with some SERIOUS pipes. Elphaba in particular could absotively WAIL. I haven’t bought the soundtrack yet, but it’s on my list.

So clearly it’s possible to find writers who can really come up with quality shows, and the performers exist to make them memorable. Let’s keep it up, Broadway, and prevent the musical theatre scene from becoming like Hollywood: the occasional gem lost in a sea of horrific pap.