Our niece, Belén, from Argentina, visited us for a month as a celebration for her 21st birthday, and as part of her de rigueur experience of New York City, she wanted to see musicals. Now, the Marvelous Maria Beatriz and I are not musicals-goers, but we are excellent hosts, so off I trundled to TKTS to see what was on the board.  Eventually we saw Mary Poppins (Belén had performed in a version of this and knew all the songs), Rent (at its new digs at New World Stages), Phantom of the Opera, and Bette Midler's fever-dream juke-box production of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert — nine hours or so of the art form.

Man, it was not easy for me.  Luckily, Howard Barker came to visit.

In his seminal Arguments For A Theatre, in a chapter titled "Fortynine asides for a tragic theatre," he notes two things about musical theatre: "The authoritarian art form is the musical" and "[When] you emerge from...the musical, you are anyone's fool."  He doesn't elaborate much more on this theme in the book, but one can understand what he means as he describes how he hopes his Theatre of Catastrophe will demolish the transparency, lesson-making, sentimental naturalism, and suffocating ordinariness of both the commercial and non-profit theatre world in order to score in the theatre-goer a "wound" that liberates spirit and mind.

Was there ever an art form that promoted the very things Barker wanted to dissolve than musical theatre?  Was there ever an art form that short-circuited logic and made conformist morals and politics palatable than musical theatre?

A case in point.  Much of the advertising for Mary Poppins centers on the "magic" of the story: imagination and childhood will refresh the spirits of a reality-weary world.  But what does this "magic" really mean? It means what the Wizard of Oz meant: "Don't look behind the curtain; just let what we offer wash over you; there is no need to think."

Well, I confess, I sat there and thought about what I was seeing — couldn't help myself.  And once one starts thinking about what is actually going on behind the Oz curtain, Mary Poppins is a profoundly weird piece: a capitalist fairy tale.

Her name may be in the title, but the center of the story is not the witchy nanny but the banker father (fittingly named Mr. Banks) who comes close to losing his position for making a decision based on his heart rather than the numbers.  (Aside: there is fascinating traffic in the question of whether Ms. Poppins is a good or bad witch, or even a guardian angel.  But for another time.)  He has put his family in jeopardy by his actions, and if he loses his job, his family will suffer not only financial ruin but class come-down: they will be no different than the chimney sweeps populating the roofs of London.  (Do they never take a pee-break?  But for another time.)

This thrum of anxiety runs throughout a good portion of the play, which Mary tries to will away through her shenanigans with the children, but to no avail: if the father loses his job, they will lose the "magic" of their bourgeois lives, and what had once been flying (like the kites, like Mary herself) will be earth-bound and rubbed raw by reality.

However, this is Disney.  The father's heart-made decision pays off royally, while the one that looked good in the numbers ends up bankrupting those other banks who took the gamble with what turns out to be a charlatan scheme.  Not only does he keep his job, he gets a promotion and a raise as well as apologies from the bank president.  His response to his good fortune: he wants to spend more time with his family, with which his employers readily agree.

So, the father gets the girl, so to speak, and the proper order of things is maintained: the bankers will continue to bank, the sweeps will continue to sweep (with all the lung-ailment perks attached), the bourgeois children have avoided deep pain, and Mary's work (that is, saving the middle class from itself) is done as she literally flies off into the sunset (i.e., to the second balcony out over the audience).

Undisneyfied, it's quite an interesting story, but the copyright-grip is so tight on the work (the Mary Poppins books started publication in 1934, and the movie was released in 1964, so good luck on this coming into the public domain anytime soon) that one would be legalistically suicidal to render a new rendition of it.

The crowds streaming out afterwards were, to use Barker's phrase, "anybody's fool," softened up for the hard-sell of the Poppins tchockeiana along the walkway out of the building and invited to have one's picture taken next to the iconic figure of Poppins up-up-upping away with her umbrella (as if one could, with just the right kind of wish, lift away from the sordid streets....)  While they believed they had been offered a "magic" story, where the whimsicality of childish imagination refreshed the adult spirit, they in fact had been inoculated against the Occupy-Wall-Street mentality, reaffirmed that the right people got the right things and the world as they know it is the world they should know.

Phantom — what has kept this beast going?  I think even Barker would be stymied in trying to extract any conformist content from this lumbering bucket of bolts.  The story is about a serial murderer that the audience is expected to pity and love, in emulation of the doltish young singer, his protégé.  If there is any lesson here, it might be that art would be better if not invested in by greedy businessmen, since it's the avarice of the new owners to put people in the seats that leads to morally damp and aesthetically rachitic choices — but that's really a pretty undercooked surmise.

Priscilla has all the aesthetic nutrition of cotton candy, but it does have the moral and political virtue of making gay people, especially transvestites, and transgenders undangerous to the goodly crowd as long as they remain on stage and are visible for only two hours a night entertaining us with bright costumes and excellent voices.  The musical version flattens what the 1994 movie created and defuses completely any risk or danger in service to a message of tolerance for difference, the courageousness of blended families, and the seemingly genetic legacy that gay people have for gaud and carbonation.

In other words, it keeps those "others" in a politically and culturally useful place: lauded as entertainers and artists but never to mistake that admiration as acceptance or advocacy.

Rent was tolerable and energetic — I still think it's one or two drafts away from being as tight as it could be, but Mr. Larson won't be making edits to it anytime soon. 

What I think Barker is getting at is that musicals work the way Huxley's "feelies" worked in Brave New World.  Their under-purpose, which lies beneath the surface purpose of "putting on a show" and "making some money" (and this under-purpose may not be evident to the creators, the way we we're not aware of the surge of blood against our veins), is to mute the cultural and moral violence at large in the society, either by employing "magical thinking" to lift us to other lands or foreground a minstrel message of tolerance that makes us feel momentarily good or numbs the neural circuits with the novocain of pure spectacle (e.g., chandeliers and helicopters).  They are the artistic equivalent of fast food, satisfying without being nourishing.

They do this, of course, because the producers do need to have asses in seats to make their nut, and perhaps even some profit, and they won't get that by creating something that pisses people off (unless the tongue is firmly wedged in the cheek, such as The Book of Mormon, in which case none of the satire does any serious damage). To appeal broadly also means to appeal superficially.

But the nature of the beast has something to do with it as well. Musicals, to work, have to flatten the material and the characterizations, making their creators rely upon well-worn tropes, rhythms, and psychologies to fit the work into the constraints of time, space, and audience-attention.  It has to move forward at all times, which gives the audience no time to ponder, review, disagree, disapprove — the audience is never invited to review, only to obediently take in what others have decided to give to them.

These tactics — obedience, spectacle, flat portrayals, tested narrative forms, standardized psychologies, the gestures toward some sort of uplift, escape from the outside culture — are not only the elements that Barker refers to when he calls musicals "authoritarian" but also the elements that an authoritarian society uses to captivate its citizens, such as is done in American society these days (e.g., the presidential campaign process). Musicals are a good art form for authoritarian societies because they mimic what authoritarian rulers do to maintain power — there is not that much distance between Mary Poppins and Nuremberg.

I do not mean to tar all musicals with this brush.  Sondheim's output, by and large, shows a man struggling to make the art form do something different with every outing, and people like Rinde Eckert, in pieces like And God Created Great Whales, or even Laurie Anderson, use music in theatrical ways to delve and divine.

Okay, so I wasn't scarred by the experience, and I have a pink ping-pong ball from Priscilla that will bring back fond memories of Belén's visit.  But why musicals are so successful in our culture, crowding out other forms of theatre, bears some thinking about — at least during intermission while one gulps down the $4 wine in the plastic cup.