Musicals for the mass audience

Broadway in the Box: Television’s Lasting Love Affair with the Musical

By Kelly Kessler

Oxford University Press, 2020

 The wedge between adult and youth tastes, and the ongoing emergence of customized technologies, including portable radios, the Walkman, and cellphones, disrupted the notion of an American common culture or pop mainstream consumed synchronously. The ties that bound together parents and children—picture the whole family seated around the cathedral radio listening to a broadcast in the living room—gave way to rock ‘n’ roll and an irreversible split.  Broadway, a lynchpin a shared culture, is now understood as expensive and urban, and in many circles, elite. Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Barbra Streisand built their reputations on the Broadway musicals repertoire. But other than the occasional crossover, such as the Hamilton soundtrack, the songs of Broadway are far removed from the pop mainstream—whatever that might be in 2020.

Author Kelly Kessler examines the ways television has adapted Broadway musicals form its outset through the present.

As media studies scholar Kelly Kessler outlines in her remarkably detailed and illuminating study Broadway in the Box: Television’s Lasting Love Affair with the Musical media culture shifts constantly and the relationship between Broadway and television exemplifies this dynamism. Kessler’s focus on Broadway and television are not arbitrary; both have defined American notions of mainstream culture  in significant ways that render their relationships to each other pivotal for understanding U.S. media. Kessler, author of 2010’s Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical: Music, Masculinity and Mayhem has written extensively about musicals on television in a series of journal articles and book chapters over the last six years. Broadway in a Box synthesizes these observations, and more, through an astute balance of archival research, interviews, and close readings.

 Broadway captures the public’s complex relationship with the Broadway musical form. After decades of relying on showtunes as the basis for popular music, both theatre and radio had to adapt to the competition television presented. As more Americans relished the convenience and accessibility of television the entertainment industry tried to translate its most well-known and prestigious commodity, the musical, to the emerging technology. Even as rock and roll expanded musical tastes—especially among the young—musicals remained a shared cultural touchstone. As Kessler illustrates, musicals were in the blood of Americans transcending genre, generation, and geography.

Network executives wisely predicted that Americans cared about musicals and would watch them, and their stars, in the comfort of their homes. As Kessler outlines in “Chapter One: Small Screen Singalongs: Television’s Infancy and the Cultural Cachet of the Great White Way” the technical dimensions of early television fostered awkward transitions in terms of staging. Yet, savvy producers gradually translated some of the more renowned shows into genuine synchronous live television events. NBC’s 1955, 1956, and 1960 live broadcasts of Peter Pan starring Broadway actress Mary Martin exemplifies this feat. Further, the presence of Broadway celebrities as guests on variety shows, talk shows, and game shows, the popularity of showtunes on pop radio, and the mainstream appeal of film musicals meant quadruple exposure for the Great White Way. Kessler illustrates the prominent male centered variety shows and specials of the 1950’s and the increased presence of female variety specials in the 1960’s.

 By the late 1960’s the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, and youth subcultures more generally, the popularity of different types of television genres, and the demise of the film musical, coupled with the expense of Broadway, challenged the dominance of musicals.  Musicals were also morphing from family friendly sing-alongs with multigenerational appeal to rock oriented shows (e.g., Jesus Christ Superstar), and/or those with darker and more cerebral narrative concepts (e.g., Cabaret, Chicago). The saving grace for musicals were FCC regulations that led to the Family Viewing Hour from 1975-77 which ushered in a spate of variety shows that mixed Broadway songs with Vegas aesthetics, which Kessler terms “BroadVegas.” This included Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gormé specials focused on Broadway composers, a toned down version of The Sonny & Cher Show,  and celebrity driven experiments including Donny and Marie and an ill-fated  Saturday Night with Howard Cosell.

 Meanwhile Broadway shows were becoming increasingly expensive to produce thus reducing the number of new productions. Further, few of their songs reached the mainstream. Cast albums regularly topped the pop charts in the 1950’s and 1960’s but this was no longer in the late 1970’s. Television networks, threatened by the shifting landscape, including the increased wiring for cable television, attempted to drive consumers away by offering them access to musicals through arts themed channels, including ARTS (an ABC Video Enterprises-Hearts joint venture), CBS Cable, and The Entertainment Channel [TEC] (RCA and Rockefeller center joint venture). Though many offered exclusive access to new shows the licensing and productions were expensive, subscriptions were low, and most shuttered for financial reasons. These could not compete with HBO or Showtime’s offerings, covered by subscription fees, and were a poor value compared to PBS’s Great Performances and Live from Lincoln Center.

 MTV inspired musicals further supplanted broadcast networks. Film musicals such as Flashdance and Footloose offered a new synergy between television, film, and music through multi-platinum soundtracks promoted incessantly through constant rotation of music videos. Who needed Broadway when you had MTV? Though occasional tunes from musical’s crossed over to the pop charts (e.g., Murray Head’s “One Night in Bangkok” from Chess) the expensive nature of Broadway, which invested millions on highly produced spectacles like Phantom of the Opera, distanced it from the mainstream audience.

 Several changes helped the musical aesthetic to persist. Notably, television series began incorporating music, notably Ally McBeal’s weekly song and dance numbers, and various non-musical series featured one-off musical episodes, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scrubs, Xena: Warrior Princess, and Grey’s Anatomy whose musical episode “The Song Beneath the Song” receives an extensive close reading by Kessler. One of the main threads characterizing these shows was the savviness of their audiences. Television series needed to the intelligence and savvy of their audiences through irony, fourth wall breaks, and other meta-conscious narrative devices. This paralleled a shift on Broadway in musicals such as 2002’s Urinetown and 2004’s Spamalot that lovingly mocked and parodied themselves to the delight of audiences.

 The emergence of Web 2.0 informs Kessler’s look at the ways broadcast television networks engaged fans of Glee, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Smash strategically. Kessler analyzes the ways networks created social media content that “frame fans as integral parts of the advertising process, with projected assumptions regarding their active roles as part of a show-linked participatory culture” (196). These efforts made fans feel a part of the experience boosting their loyalty. In noting this more involved relationship she captures the complex interplay of companies nodding to fans and simultaneously capitalizing on a new generation of “prosumers” noted as “a moniker coined for consumers who actively produce.”

Kessler examines the marketing , casting, and staging of Broadway network “event” musicals such as NBC’s 2015 production, The Wiz Live!

 For example, Fox coined the term GLEEks for Glee fans and did everything from creating opportunities for fans to audition for a reality show that chose their next cast member to including fan segments in the Glee: The 3D Concert movie.  Rachel Bloom, co-creator of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend built an audience following through her YouTube channel before her series premiered and complemented the CW network’s outreach by using her site for additional series content and sharing aspects of her personal and political life with fans.  NBC’s Smash only lasted two seasons, but its showrunners capitalized on their audience’s awareness of the top shelf Broadway talent cast for the show. All three mobilized the connections of their audiences to musical theatre proudly normalizing a “cult” taste culture. Comparatively, ABC’s Galavant, a medieval themed musical cancelled after two seasons, did not have a clear sense of its audience, and did little to cultivate its fanbase.

 Kessler concludes by exploring the creative ways NBC and Fox turned their live (or rather Live! ) versions of classic musicals—The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, The Wiz, Grease, Hairspray, and Jesus Christ Superstar—into media events, from 2013-18, in an age where 24 hour access makes it difficult for programming to stand apart. She walks you through the ways the networks gradually became more adept at staging the musical effectively for television and employing different technologies to build interest before shows were broadcast.

 For example, NBC’s staging of 2015’s The Wiz Live! capitalized on its iconicity with African-American audiences by casting black actors and singers from different mediums, developing a relationship with African-American social media influencers, providing opportunities for its cast members to get personal with audiences, and airing a behind the scenes Making of special beforehand. Social media influencers also live tweeted as the show aired to keep the conversation going.  Collectively these efforts generated strong ratings and gave them a blueprint for 2018’s staging of Jesus Christ Superstar.  

 Kessler is a passionate and knowing writer whose breadth of historical knowledge and integration of scholarly concepts is seamless. She can introduce this milieu to newcomers and nod to those already predisposed to musicals.  Some of  her more notable contributions include articulating the logistical challenges of musical adaptations with technical proficiency and accessibility, mapping the interplay of Broadway with the record, film, and television industries, depicting the convergence of theater and Vegas entertainment cultures, tracing the shift toward post-network television, and illustrating the profound impact of Web 2.0 on the marketing of contemporary television. There are times when she delves into minutiae, such as her lengthy discussion of the financial and technical challenges of the cultural cable efforts in the 1980’s. The issue here is not the quality or depth of execution; rather there are just details that could be footnoted to foster a smoother narrative flow. Even at 265 pages (excluding 71 pages of endnotes, references, and the index) she acknowledges the range of related topics worthy of future exploration.

 A proliferation of superior scholarly books on musicals have emerged in the 2000’s including Richard Knapp’s The American musical and the performance of personal identity (2009), Stacy Wolf’s Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011), and Rob Kapilow’s Listening for America: Inside the Great American Songbook from Gershwin to Sondheim (2018). By exploring the adaptability of musicals to television, in episodic and serial forms, and the unique creative possibilities afforded by Web 2.0, Kessler, has broken new historical and critical ground with Broadway in the Box. Her insights will surely serve as a valuable reference for future scholars of modern musicals, social media, and television history.

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