‘Fortress of Solitude’ and the Un-Suckification of Broadway Musicals
In my New York City high school in the late Seventies, the black kids listened to funk and disco, the white kids to Sixties rock and new wave — music that reflected back who we imagined ourselves to be. Then there were the musical theater kids, another race entirely, devoted to songs built on a different science, to develop characters and advance stage narrative. They were adorable, but song for song, generally insufferable.
This triangulation figures in The Fortress of Solitude, the endearing adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s music-geeky novel about 1970s Brooklyn that’s currently running at New York’s Public Theater. It also figures in a notable aesthetic shift where musical theater is finally — thank God — engaging more deeply with modern pop, both mainstream and indie.
The trend is obviously demographic-driven – boomers and Gen X-ers are aging into theater-goers/-makers, combined with the collapse of the record business. Following in the footsteps of rock-minded forebears like Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and Rent, this more-or-less began in 2006 with alt-lite singer/songwriter Duncan Sheik dialing back the usual Broadway cheese on the hit Spring Awakening, and it’s given way to some remarkably cool musicals. Literary indie-rocker Stew (of The Negro Problem) took his Passing Strange to Broadway in 2008, an autobiographical song cycle that had him onstage both narrating and killing it with his band; it was so good, Spike Lee filmed it. A year later, with Brooklyn afrobeat acolytes Antibalas in tow, the brilliant Fela! also hit Broadway, thanks to boosting from Questlove and investment from Jay-Z. The unlikely pop-punk American history lesson Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson was inspired, even if its Broadway run tanked; American Idiot was better than it had any right to be, and has toured for years; the U2-enhanced Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark, if nothing else, was a fascinating pop train wreck (see Glen Berger’s wild-ride insider tale Song of Spiderman). New-wave hitmaker Cyndi Lauper wrote music and lyrics for Kinky Boots, which is still kicking, as is the authentically glam-rocking Hedwig and the Angry Inch revival. Worthy jukebox musicals like A Night With Janis Joplin, Motown, the modest and surprisingly compelling off-Broadway Lennon, and Tammy Faye Starlite’s spot-on, way-off Broadway Nico: Underground skew towards boomers but keep coming.
Weaned on the heydays of college radio and early internet free-for-all, the sizable target audience for these shows are clearly willing to pony up for good music. No wonder even non-musicals want a piece: The note-perfect all-star revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s early-Eighties sorta-coming-of-age slacker drama This Is Our Youth – a next-gen Broadway salvo if ever there was one, complete with Pitchfork ad campaign — gives Vampire Weekend‘s Rostam Batmanglij star-font billing, even though his original music, which enlivened bar traffic during intermission, is otherwise underemployed.