The Jukebox Musical

An Interpretive History

Kevin Byrne, Emily Fuchs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000614800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theater

This is a comprehensive guide to the unique genre of the jukebox musical, delving into its history to explain why these musicals have quickly become beloved for multiple generations of theatergoers and practitioners.

Providing a concise exploration of the three main categories of the jukebox musical—biographical, genre-specific, and artist catalog—this text is perfect for those wishing to learn more about this relatively recent and unique genre of theater. It identifies the dramaturgical needs that arise in these productions and explains how certain works become critical darlings or fan favorites. How much information needs to be conveyed through song and how much can be left up to interpretation by the audience? What kinds of changes occur when a repertoire of songs is reimagined for the stage? In addition to these insightful explorations, it also reveals how creative teams tackle the unique challenge of weaving together plot and song in order to convey meaning, emotion, excitement, and beauty in these increasingly popular forms of theater.

The Jukebox Musical: An Interpretive History is written for students, performers, and musical theater enthusiasts alike: this is the ideal introduction to one of the twnty-first century's most popular and successful stage genres.

PART IHistorical and Dramaturgical

1Five, Six, Seven, Eight!An Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/​b22939-2

In 1999, on the eve of its debut in London, Mamma Mia!’s producer Judith Craymer gave an interview in which she described the dramatic stakes of her new show: “No one is pretending to make a serious, epic musical here …. There’s a tongue-in-cheek campiness about it that is part of the charm we want to retain.”¹ Twenty years later, with jukebox musicals dominating the Broadway landscape, New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley opened an article on the state of theater by bluntly, and half-seriously, declaring, “Put the blame on Abba.”²

These two quotes, at the ends of the jukebox musical’s journey into a commanding performance genre, typify the playfully antagonistic feelings about this type of musical theater. They encapsulate how creators, critics, and audiences respond to it, what emotions it evokes, and the feelings involved: energetic, joyful, exasperated, unable to take seriously, unable to take itself seriously. Even those who enjoy the form, rather than be able to talk about it affectionately, usually begin on the defensive. These opening quotes are actually remarkably similar, despite their seeming antithetical positions. They capture the spirit of the jukebox musical by being in on the joke of it, that the best defense is to go belly up and plead a naïve innocence. Craymer strikes a calculated position by referencing camp and deliberately making the show seem unimportant. She deflects criticism by lambasting the style itself. But this is not the only, or even best, way to talk about catalog musicals. There is sophistication as well as joy to be found in the form. That is what this book aims to explore.

Musical theater purists reflexively dismiss the jukebox musical as a combination of pieces that shouldn’t be together: an unnatural hybrid, a Frankenstein’s Monster of stitched parts, or the turducken of the live performance world. This book challenges that particular negative stereotype. Jukebox musicals can and do have clunky elements but, in kind, there is potential for rich and entertaining experience. It is easy to glance at Once upon a One More Time, a #metoo Cinderella story with Britney Spears’s songs,³ and see a mercenary and opportunistic entertainment that skims the flotsam of pop culture. But at their most complex, they can alchemically combine plot, character, and libretto with the already existing music. It can hold its own as a work of entertainment and be analyzed through a series of criteria that have developed alongside the form itself. Jukebox musicals may be a knockabout offshoot of a middlebrow musical genre, but it has separated itself enough to be appreciated on their own terms. After several decades of financial and critical success, no reviewer or theatergoer can dismiss them outright. This book explains that trajectory toward legitimacy. It also aims to teach the reader about the shows to better appreciate their craftsmanship and—dare we say it—artistry.

To return to the quotes at the top of the chapter: on the eve of Mamma Mia!’s opening, Craymer suggests a low-key approach to enjoying the show. And Brantley returns to that perspective twenty years later as a sideways rebuke, not to that show specifically or Craymer’s cavalier attitude toward basic dramaturgy, but to the dozens and dozens of productions that were developed in the wake of Mamma Mia! What this volume aims to do is both acknowledge this as the dominant perspective for creating and reviewing a jukebox show while also peeling back the layers of more cavalier enjoyment to discover the intricate decisions and structural commonalities of the genre. The subtitle of this book is “An Interpretive History,” which means that we will be both studying and discussing the past of the form and how individual shows have added up to a movement. But, by not taking as creed the way that they have been written about, we are providing a new interpretation of these shows and how they can be staged.

We examine jukeboxes from three interlocking and overlapping perspectives: categorical, historical, and dramaturgical. These are used to give a true measure of the jukebox musical and how it can best be appreciated as a new and evolving form of popular entertainment. A categorical perspective itemizes the defining characteristics of the jukebox musical as well as the reasons for why they are so important. A historical perspective brings into the conversation earlier kinds of live entertainment that informed the creation and execution of it in production: from earlier musicals to rock concerts to, farther back, vaudeville. Another factor in a historical analysis of this genre is the culture at large that led to it becoming so immensely popular, how Mamma Mia! kick-started a trend that has continued unabated. A dramaturgical perspective to analyzing jukebox musicals is to identify the various parts and pieces that make a show like this, and how the pieces all work together to create something that, hopefully, is entertaining and memorable for an audience. These are the decisions made by the creators in developing the show, from the composition of the book to the orchestration of the songs to the curation of the tunes. These are in addition to those creative decisions made in production, from blocking to costumes to props. These three perspectives are essential for an understanding of the jukebox format and its potentialities.

This introductory chapter, then, is the grounding for the interpretive history that follows. It explains why a musical of Abba songs set on a Greek island actually makes a lot of sense, despite on the surface having nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Or why a musical trip through the life of Carole King is emotionally stirring. Or why an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, in which the title characters survive, can be combined with Katy Perry and the Backstreet Boys to undermine stereotypes of both gender and sexuality. (It’s true! It works!) Fascinating analysis can be mined from these sources, as well as a number of other jukebox musicals. The rest of this chapter looks at what defines a categorical, historical, and dramaturgical approach, with a sprinkling of interesting case studies used throughout as examples.

Categorical

Before delving into the specifics of what constitutes a jukebox musical, sometimes called a catalog musical, it is helpful to know what a genre is and why such designations are useful as a tool of analysis. To study a genre, and even subgenres as we do here, is to group works of art around a common series of characteristics, similar to a scientific taxonomy. But, in the arts, we look at the adjectival, observable elements as well as the manner in which they are conveyed, and the intended purpose for an audience, and how they elicit a response. This gives scholars a way of gathering evidence for comparison to also track a genre’s development over time. Genre studies requires an agglomeration of agreed-upon characteristics. This means that there is not a single element that is necessary or required for something to be considered a catalog show but rather a small constellation of things that revolve around each other. A number of histories of musical theater reduce jukeboxes to just the use of preexisting songs. Though obviously important and central, to do so is ultimately more confusing than illuminating when discussing the phenomena, because such a yes/no binary too rigorously includes some things while excluding others. This single characteristic is frequently used as a way to dismissively ignore them as being less true, authentic, or good. The problems of such a categorization are the lumping together of a set of shows and then an easy dismissal of everything within the category. In this volume, we explain the five core characteristics of the form in a way that also supports the overall organization of the book around the jukebox musical’s three most dominant subcategories: the artist catalog musical, the biographical musical, and the era-specific musical. There is much more to the genre than just the use of preexisting tunes. There are constraints around what can be done within the jukebox musical but there are also exciting variations that push the envelope.

The jukebox musical’s core characteristics connect a number of works under the umbrella term while also excluding several that we believe have erroneously been grouped with it. First off: yes, it must exclusively or nearly exclusively use a preexisting song catalog that was originally produced and released in a recorded format such as record, tape, CD, or MP3. Songs as part of an album is experienced differently than music which originated in or for a live event of any kind, from a musical to an opera or symphony. The act of creation within a recording studio setting is different than the stage. The idea that a song will first be heard (and mostly be heard) through speakers as opposed to in person, is different as well. The phenomena of its creation and reception hinge on an understanding of its mediation. We draw upon Philip Auslander’s seminal Liveness: Performance in a Mediated Culture for a definition of mediation as well as the relationship between live and recorded platforms of engagement. Looking at the long view of music recordings since the beginning of the twentieth century, Auslander writes, “one consequence of the reification of music in recordings is the century-old separation of the musical experience from liveness and, particularly, the aural experience of music from its visual experience.”⁴ In this, he separates live and visual aspects of in-person performance from the aural and recorded aspects of media, particularly in relation to song, music, and concerts. But there is an added wrinkle to this trajectory that is essential to the impact of a jukebox. In Auslander’s schema, the cultural product begins as a live event and then is mediatized. As he states in his conclusion, “To the extent that live performances now emulate mediatized representations, they have become second-hand recreations of themselves as refracted through mediatization.”⁵ And, given the prominence, power, and categorical necessity of existing music, we can place the jukebox musical at the far end of this particular historical and cultural trajectory. It not only replicates mediatization’s stylistic effects, but it is also dependent upon it for its very existence and reason for being. The upending of this phenomenological or ontological hierarchy has lasting effects across story, staging, and reception.

This bedrock component then creates the conditions for a second characteristic of the jukebox musical, something both incredibly obvious and yet needs to be mentioned. The songs are sung by characters, ones with fictionalized dialogue, backstories, and interactions with other singing characters. The choice to sing and what is being expressed through the song are both meant to convey something about that person or group of individuals. We hum along with the melody or tap our feet to the beat, and we are learning more about what these fictional characters are like. When Killer Queen in We Will Rock You sings “Another One Bites the Dust,” we are learning about her ruthlessness as an authoritarian demagogue. As this is true for invented characters in musicals with new plots, it is equally true in bio-musicals which are based on the lives of real singers and songwriters. Killer Queen and Carole King are equally invented characters in their respective musicals. The song needs to be thought of in a narrative trajectory of the singer. In Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, her reinvigorated faith is signaled through the character singing “I Believe in Jesus.” Summer’s emerging religious fervor is encapsulated in the song itself. A song that expresses deep emotion within the confines of the tune itself can become sutured to story, narrative, and theme.

A third element is that these songs are sung by characters in a narrative, an overarching plot with a consistent story, relationships that mature and evolve, and a thematic spine that addresses larger issues beyond what is contained in either the plot or any individual song. There is a resonance of story and song when, for instance, Ray Davies of the Kinks performs “Too Much on My Mind” while bedridden after suffering a breakdown. The song is given an added poignancy because of Ray’s fragile mental state, but the musical amplifies the pathos by crossing between Ray’s song and his wife, Rasa, singing “I’m Tired of Waiting for You” to express her alienation and disappointment.⁶ That a Kinks tune is being sung back to its author in this way is complex and dark, and the moment strikes at how such a choice in a jukebox show can “provide a quick, bold stroke of characterization.”⁷ The whole must be more than the parts. This characteristic also helps to exclude works like the Billy Joel–inspired Movin’ Out, which is a dance performance, the Beatles tribute concert Rain that serves the greatest hits of the Fab Four through costume changes but no plot to speak of, and Thriller Live!, which recreates onstage the look of Michael Jackson’s music videos.

A fourth characteristic, that the work begins as a stage musical and exists primarily as such, impacts the structure of the show and how the songs and plot beats are organized and dramatized. If the show is intended for the live stage, it generally follows a format with specific rules, expectations, and limitations to accommodate for, such as a fixed number of locations and a compact cast of characters. This excludes musical films that have preexisting pop, such as the Beatles-inspired Across the Universe. We need to include this criterion, which builds upon the others, because without it, the definition of a jukebox musical can get overly vague and confusing. This book spends a good deal of space discussing Mamma Mia!, which was turned into a film, but it won’t be analyzing Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the cinematic sequel to the film. We also won’t be discussing the 2001 movie Moulin Rouge, which has a pastiche of contemporary tunes within its turn-of-the twentieth-century Parisian setting. But, happily enough, it was then turned into a musical! We will look at the later stage version, because the music originated before the film, as preexisting pop. The limiting of location and character, which is done for both dramaturgical and financial reasons, compresses the story and focuses the audience’s attention on things that are essential to live musical theater’s tone and feeling. This weighs heavily on how a jukebox show is received.

A fifth and final characteristic relates to the creation of the songs themselves. To qualify as a jukebox, the songs should not be originally intended for a musical in any medium. So, goodbye Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. Both were originally released as concept albums by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, but with the notion that they would help promote an eventual stage production. Because this intention was present from the inception, it cannot be considered a jukebox musical; the songs, music, and orchestration were already too clearly tied to the musical form. Putting “Everything’s Alright” or “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” in a live show doesn’t require the logistical and dramaturgical juggling that is part of a catalog show. This criterion also excludes stage ve...