Twenty-First Century Musicals

Abstract

The use of documentary material appeared in musical theatre at least as far back as Joan Littlewood's Oh! What a Lovely War (1963), but it was not until London Road (Blythe and Cork, 2011) when the potential for a more experimental approach to the 'setting' of verbatim material was used in musical theatre.London Road began as an experiment, part of a scheme at the National Theatre Studio (in 2007), were composers and writers were brought together to workshop ideas and exchange practices; among them Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork.Based on Blythe's purist approach to verbatim theatre practice, all the text was directly transcribed from a lengthy series of interviews she conducted in Ipswich between December 2006-July 2008, after the community of Suffolk became the epicentre of the events surrounding the tragic serial killings of five female prostitutes.First performed in the Cottesloe auditorium (14th April 2011), the stage performance transferred to the Olivier (28 th July 2012) and was adapted into its cinematic version and released in 2015 (Live Film Premiere and Q&A, 9th June; general release 12th June) 1 .Both the spoken text and song lyrics were derived from the interviews as recorded (including all the 'ums and errs') with the metre, pitch and rhythm of the music following the patterns of the original recorded speech as closely as possible (Original cast recording CD inlay, pp.3-4).This practice can arguably be viewed alongside a long tradition of exploration into the relationship between music and language that has been at the centre of some more experimental music theatre work (e.g.Berberian, Berio, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Wishart, Maxwell Davies, Gaburo, etc.).The 'verbatim' aspect, however, offers new possibilities of examining this relationship through a different prism of critical and practical engagement especially within the context of musical theatre.The initial jarring between 'verbatim' and 'musical' (and the reconciliation between the hyper-naturalistic approach of verbatim and the heightened language of musical theatre aesthetics (Young 2012: 101-102), introduces only one in a series of initial binaries that this performance dismantles, and in doing so, I believe, London Road offers a very fertile space of research into how we can re-evaluate avenues of exploring not only aesthetic practices, but also political potential through this hybrid genre.In his thought-provoking The Musical As Drama (2006) Scott McMillin suggests a conceptualisation of the aesthetics of musical theatre based on 'disjunction' rather than the more traditional idea of integration.The primary instigator of this disjunction is the existence of two distinct 'orders of time' embedded in the form: book time and lyric time.Book time is concerned with the linearity of the story to be told; lyric time 1 All stage and film versions were directed by Rufus Norris.

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