The Death of Originality on Broadway

 The readings in this unit made me reflect on a speech I wrote once for the persuasive speech unit in my AP English class my junior year of high school. In that speech, I made the case that the theatre industry, especially Broadway, was losing originality, with the Great White Way being plagued by copious amounts of revivals and adaptations of films. Since then, this issue has gotten worse, and now I have more specific language to describe the phenomenon that is happening. 

Though reviving a musical on Broadway is different from mechanically reproducing a piece of art, with a different cast, directors, designers, and more, it’s still a recycling of an already done idea. There’s a case to be made for this breathing new life into older works. The recent Broadway revival of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along was a smash hit, whereas the original production was regarded as a famous flop. However, this is rare, with most revivals simply blending into the background of each Broadway season.

Lindsay Mendez, Jonathan Groff, and Daniel Radcliffe in "Merrily We Roll Along"

The real culprit of this replication phenomenon is the newer trend of adapting well known movies into musicals. Countless movies are adapted into musicals, ranging from Mean Girls to 9 to 5 to Elf. These musicals are not bad, with songs from each of them making their way into countless performers’ vocal books, but they aren’t reinventing the wheel. Much as Benjamin says about mechanically reproduced works, these musicals lack the uniqueness of the original film’s place in time and space. 

This was especially true with Mean Girls, which started as a 2004 film, then was brought to Broadway in 2018. This Broadway adaptation was adapted again into a 2024 film that was widely panned by audiences and critics alike. There are many surface level reasons that this may have happened, but ultimately it can be boiled down to the fact that it’s a poor imitation of the original art. The musical and movie musical do not feel original or authentic. 

Erika Henningson, Ashley Park, Taylor Louderman, and Kate Rockwell in "Mean Girls"

This ties back to superficiality as well, with superficial monetary based reasons being largely behind all of these adaptations. Despite how these musicals cheapen the art they were based on, fans love them. They crave something familiar, that reinforces the societal ideas that have been historically engrained in them. This inadvertently leads to more original ideas and concepts not being as well received, closing on Broadway much faster than many adaptations do. 

Eva Noblezada, Andre de Shields, and Reeve Carney in "Hadestown"

Many of these original concepts go against the ideologies that are generally engrained in people, as theatre is inherently political. Musicals such as Hadestown or Maybe Happy Ending, with original concepts not derived from films, may be seeing commercial success and are currently running, but other original concepts like The Prom or Come From Away close on Broadway well before their time. Meanwhile, The Lion King is the third longest-running show on Broadway, having opened in 1997.

How then, can we make it known that we want less Lion King and more Hadestown being brought to the stage?