In which Dan courts controversy, part II

On the journey back from swimming on Sunday Evan fell asleep in the car. When we arrived home I decided against waking him and so sat out in the car until he woke up. After around half an hour of aimless radio station surfing I eventually let the dial settle on Elaine Paige’s Radio 2 show.

According to her BBC biography Paige is the undisputed first lady of British musical theatre. That may well be true. All I know is that she takes up valuable radio airspace with her inane “songs from the shows” at a time when I’m often driving either to or from work. In fact the entire of the BBC appears to conspire in order to make my journey between home and work as tedious as humanly possible. But that is perhaps a rant for another day. Today my bile will be reserved for the subject of musicals.

Now while I am certainly not the most ardent fan of the bland and tedious theatrical genre, I do concede that musicals do have their place. Granted that place is in the DVD collection of a three year old girl, but I’m not here to advocate they be wiped from the face of the earth. What I am advocating however is that musicals be reserved for professional performers only.

As I’ve mentioned before I used to be heavily involved in amateur dramatics. I feel they are a wonderful way of fostering a sense of community and providing an outlet for people’s creativity. But the obsession most amateur production companies have with staging musicals dismays me. Not because the genre is consistently aimed at the lowest common denominator (which it is), or because the good actors who with poor singing voices get sidelined in favor of poor actors with good singing voices (which they do), but because most musicals are set in America. And if your play is set in America then the actors have to do an American accent.

If there is one thing guaranteed to make my ears bleed it is a bad English actor putting on an atrocious American accent. What’s worse is that they often insist in singing in it too. The whole thing makes me cringe so badly that I have been carried out of theaters in the past because of the mistaken belief that I was in the midst of an epileptic fit.

And another thing. Ever since Jerry Springer: The Opera there has been a complete overload of “alternative” musicals. Trust me, just putting “the musical” after the name of a prominent politician or celebrity (see Tony Blair: the musical, Blunkett: The Musical, of Saddam: the musical to name but three) does not conjure up images of delightfully witty postmodern intellectuals subverting a well worn genre in order to make sparkling satirical observations. No, it just reeks of unoriginal hacks leaping on a tired overloaded bandwagon.

As the mighty Holmes once so eloquently stated: musicals aren’t plays, they are spectacles. In essence they are basically tourist attractions. And, done correctly, they can be magnificent like the Taj Mahal or the Empire State Building. Done badly however they can be as nerve shatteringly tortuous as a week trapped in the Brontë museum in Haworth.

Amateur musicals. Just say no.

_{As a postscript directed towards all my friends who regularly perform in amateur musicals who may be reading this. I obviously didn’t mean your musicals. They were wonderful and I loved every moment of them. No, I meant those other musicals. The ones you weren’t in.}

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