Does musical theatre have a big enough following to thrive on screen?
Howard Sherman
For musical theatre fans, the new show Schmigadoon! on Apple TV+ will be part joyous celebration and part parlour game.
In addition to being a song-laden musical comedy homage-parody-pastiche, the six-episode series offers theatre buffs the opportunity to play ’spot that source’. The songs variously invoke tunes including Kiss Me, Kate’s Always True to You (in My Fashion) and The Music Man’s Ya Got Trouble to Brotherhood of Man from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
If this all sounds a bit insider-y for a programme that’s being disseminated on an international platform, that’s because it is. In all likelihood, the viewer’s comprehension of Schmigadoon! will be roughly equal to their embrace of classic musical theatre, primarily from the early 1940s to the early 1960s.
While the show’s modern sensibilities allow it to tweak both the form and specific elements of particular musicals, it is clearly made with great affection and directed at those who harbour the same feelings about the genre.
Loving material that spoofs the very thing we love is hardly new for musical theatre. It was a staple of TV variety shows in the 1950s and 1960s, put to brilliant use by Stan Freberg on record albums and in product advertising, invoked often by Trey Stone and Matt Parker in the South Park movie, and targeted by TV’s Documentary Now, which devoted an episode not simply to taking on the musical Company, but the film of the recording of the show’s cast album. No doubt every fan has their favourites.
The question is: how wide an audience will it find? Those who trawl TheaterMania and Broadway World for the slightest news may have already watched Schmigadoon! before sunrise, but there’s no telling how many will sample it or binge the 30-minute episodes in one sitting.
’No telling’ is a particularly apt term because in this era of streaming, the outlets such as Apple TV+, Netflix and Amazon Prime don’t typically tell us how many people watch their shows and conventional Nielsen ratings don’t report them either.
Freed from public scrutiny, paid for by monthly fees rather than ad sales, electronic media projects surely have to meet some metrics, but they are invisible to us. Schmigadoon! might be wrapped up in one series or it could generate subsequent seasons. We’ll only know when Apple TV+ wants us to know.
Further confounding matters are hybrid movie releases that are in theatres and on streaming services simultaneously, undermining the in-theatre revenue metric without offering any sense of how home viewing may have skewed the public numbers.
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The scourge of metrics when applied to onscreen musical theatre has been evident in recent weeks, as the film of In the Heights, despite glowing reviews, was judged to have underperformed at the box office. Just a month after its release, the film is largely gone from New York cinemas and its US gross falls shy of $30 million. This flies in the face of the excitement that flowed through social media channels and theatre websites – and, in my opinion, an expertly executed film that had me in literal tears of joy and sadness for much of its running time.
Of course, that’s the reminder: electronic communications have allowed us to find our communities, but we can develop tunnel vision because our cohorts don’t reflect the population at large.
That’s not to say the musicals we love don’t break beyond a circle of avid fans – movies such The Greatest Showman and Chicago prove it can be done – but we have to remember that we’re not the majority.
The commercial disappointment of In the Heights hasn’t, for the moment at least, had any impact on future Hollywood musicals, with Dear Evan Hansen due out this fall, West Side Story during the holidays, a new Fiddler on the Roof being prepared, and even a project with a score by the Sparks brothers just seen at Cannes. The filmed Hamilton stage production was apparently a big win for Disney Plus, and we’ll be seeing Diana on Netflix and Come from Away on Apple TV+ in the coming months.
If our entertainment increasingly fragments into ever more defined niches, let’s hope that ours in theatre proves large enough to sustain the production of new content, wherever we may find it. History, however, is not encouraging.
After all, the proliferation of channels via cable was supposed to give us an opportunity for arts programming. But tonight’s US schedule shows how that worked out.
A&E, once known as the Arts & Entertainment channel, will be showing a marathon of episodes of a true-crime series called The First 48. Meanwhile, it’s movie night at Ovation TV, which bills itself as “dedicated to celebrating and supporting all forms of arts and culture”. And what is among its fine cinema offerings tonight? The Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell action film Tango and Cash, followed by Wesley Snipes in Money Train. Not a musical number in sight.
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