Tootsie. Beetlejuice. Waitress. What do they all have in common? They’re all films, yes, but unfortunately they’re also all musicals. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against adaptations – my passion for the on-screen versions of Stephen King’s IT has been called a mania, and I enjoy telling anyone who will listen about how good a musical Pacific Rim would make. I even enjoyed Shrek The Musical. But in today’s musical theatre landscape, the film-to-musical pipeline is becoming a bit of a joke. In the 2018 Tony Awards, all four nominations for Best Musical were based on films or tv shows. Changes made are  superficial at best to ensure they keep the original fanbase, and considering the world only keeps changing more rapidly this is often at the expense of the story. Sure, they’ll give us ‘Frozen except Anna’s horny’, but they don’t give Janis’ story in Mean Girls extra depth by making her a lesbian as many fans of the film hypothesised she could be. The Heathers musical has already had to be changed since its first run in 2010 in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Inundated with yesterday’s stories, today’s Broadway stage is looking a little stale. 

The problem with musical theatre comes down to expense. It’s not the most popular medium to begin with, and the high ticket prices only serve to reinforce that fact. Theatres not only charge for putting on musicals in their space, but as they take a percent of the box office they can evict a musical if it consistently underperforms targets. This results in ‘safe’ choices that will draw in tourists and the wealthy which aren’t always the most interesting. For example, the nine stage musicals based on animated Disney movies and the seven based on live-action ones. Most of these were already musicals to begin with, meaning there was even less need to reimagine them in this way. To be fair, the theatre landscape isn’t completely barren of creativity – the amount of people who’ve outright laughed at me when I said one of my favourite musicals was about 9/11 can attest to that – but we’re still saddled with an influx of musicals based on already successful stories.

Enter stage left: Starkid Productions. Starting as a college group, ten years on they have a solid fan-base and sell the rights to perform several of their original shows. Instead of producers, they fundraise online, and know that they’ve made a profit before they ever reach the theatre. This allows them to take creative risks in ways that Broadway can’t. Yes, they started off with Harry Potter parodies but they’ve moved on, tackling a political cave-man musical and a choose-your-own adventure-style Oregon trail adventure where the audience chooses who dies every night. They’ve evolved without ever losing their comedic origins. Their current project is a horror-comedy trilogy. This is particularly interesting as musical theatre doesn’t have a lot of horror works or sequels. The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals is a musical in which each song-and-dance number occurs in-universe, because of an alien parasite that causes the infected to burst into song. It’s not perfect, but the lead soprano never ends a song by singing “Dead mom!” and throwing her fist in the air, like in the musical that inspired this article.

It’s clear that Starkid takes a lot of risks. But they’re able to take these risks because instead of charging hundreds of dollars for tickets, crowdfunding can keep actual ticket prices low. Furthermore they encourage donations from all over the world because they release professionally recorded stagings of all of their shows on YouTube for free. They don’t have to discourage bootleggers who distract the actors because everyone will be able to see it relatively soon after the first performance. Broadway musicals are filmed and archived in the New York Public Library for Performing Arts, available only to the select few. This refusal to air recorded musicals combined with astronomical ticket prices keeps musical theatre for the ‘right’ kind of audience.

It’s fitting that Starkid’s most recent musical, Black Friday, needles the capitalist hellscape we currently find ourselves in, because alongside the job market, the climate and our own wellbeing, it’s severely negatively impacting our musical theatre. Clearly the audience sees something in this – the album hit number one on the Billboard cast album charts. We have more entertainment than ever at our fingertips, and it’s only getting easier to access. With the difficulty that the film industry has with getting butts in seats, despite their infinitely cheaper barrier to entry, shorter run-times and overwhelmingly more popular medium, musical theatre has to make sweeping changes to continue making profits. Packed houses are certainly impossible for the foreseeable future due to coronavirus. Hopefully the world of musical theatre will start taking tips from Starkid, so that our generation can have the quality stories that we deserve, but also so that I never again have to be as disappointed as I was with the bland lyricism of Janis’ solo song in Mean Girls.