Rock and theatre

The world of musical theatre responded much more slowly to the rock-and-roll revolution than did Hollywood, which in 1956 alone produced such films as Rock Around the Clock, Don’t Knock the Rock, and Rock, Rock, Rock. The first Broadway musical to deal with rock music, Bye Bye Birdie (1960), was actually a spoof of Elvis Presley and rock and roll’s effect on small-town America, and its songs were more in the tradition of show music than rock and roll.

Theatre’s failure to embrace rock music in the 1950s may have stemmed from the fact that theatregoing audiences generally were older than rock audiences. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t until 1967 that rock and roll made its presence felt in American theatre, when a self-described “American tribal love-rock musical” that attempted to capture the 1960s hippie culture was developed at New York City’s Public Theatre. In 1968 the musical, Hair (written by Gerome Ragni, James Rado, and Galt MacDermot), reached Broadway. Its score, an eclectic mix of original compositions influenced by both show music and mid-1960s rock, provided several pop singers with Top Ten hits: “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” for the Fifth Dimension, “Good Morning Starshine” for Oliver, “Hair” for the Cowsills, and “Easy to Be Hard” for Three Dog Night.

To capitalize on the international popularity of Hair, more rock musicals were mounted. Seemingly in an attempt to reach both older and younger audiences, several Shakespearean plays were transformed into rock musicals. Twelfth Night was produced Off-Broadway in 1968 as Your Own Thing. Othello was transformed into Catch My Soul in London in 1971. The Two Gentlemen of Verona was produced on Broadway in 1971 with a black and a Puerto Rican in lead roles (Clifton Davis and Raul Julia, respectively). That same year, Jesus Christ Superstar, the British rock musical written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, was staged in the United States. First produced as an internationally successful album, it featured two songs, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and “Superstar,” that were pop hits prior to the show’s opening. Stephen Schwartz and John Michael Tebelak’s Godspell, another rock musical with a religious theme, also opened in 1971.

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The 1950s rock revival, which began in the late ’60s, made its way to Broadway in 1972 as Grease (by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey). This parody of the 1950s rock-and-roll milieu went on to become one of the most successful musicals in American theatrical history. Beatlemania brought the music of the Beatles to Broadway in a concert format. Rhythm and blues was introduced to Broadway as a style in 1975 with The Wiz (by Charlie Smalls and William F. Brown) and as a theme in 1981 with Dreamgirls (by Henry Kneger and Tom Eyen). In the tradition of Grease, there were several musical revues that were comic celebrations of 1950s and ’60s rock—notably Beehive and Leader of the Pack, which focused on girl groups, and Smokey Joe’s Cafe, based on the music of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. In the mid-1990s Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk (by Reg E. Gaines) and Rent (by Jonathan Larson), two of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful shows on Broadway, demonstrated that rock and musical theatre had finally met on equal ground—both because the two art forms had evolved separately and converged and because the original rock audience had matured into a theatregoing audience.