There's a very strange thing happening in pop culture these days, and it has to do with show tunes.

Show Tunes. The very phrase has been associated with, variously, little old ladies with blue hair, tourists from Kansas, and Teh Gay. And yet, we're now finding that there is a Vast Show Tune Underground, a club that surely meets in dark basements in bad parts of town, serving up bad liquor and requiring a password for enter. Its members are neither little old ladies with blue hair, nor tourists from Kansas, nor gay men. In fact, they are some of the most unlikely people you'd ever think would be aficionados of the Songbook of the American Theatre. For one thing, they're straight guys. For another, they're "guy-guys", with sophomoric, Apatowan senses of humor which lean towards jokes about getting high and jerking off, about farts and anal probes and the reality that "clitoris" is a funny-sounding word. And yeah, there's a fair amount of undercurrent of homophobia to what they do, which is why they are as rich as Croesus and is no doubt their way of overcompensating for the fact that these guys really, really love show tunes.

Seth MacFarlane, who created Family Guy, a show that uses any excuse to include a musical number (preferably a big production number), has often revealed in interviews his love of show tunes and the American songbook. The CD Family Guy Live in Vegas, a collaboration with composer Walter Murphy, gave a taste of what MacFarlane's amazing pipes can do. But MacFarlane takes his American songbook as seriously as Michael Feinstein does, and in September will release Music Is Better Than Words, a compilation of "hidden gems" from musicals of the 1940's and 1950's. But because Mac Farlane's Broadway sensiblity is so tied up in his own voice, and because he's busy producing three hit TV shows and doing live performances, a move to Broadway is unlikely. Still, given the demographic of his audience, a guy with the snark cred of Seth MacFarlane can do a great deal to open the eyes of the youth demographic to the emerging Broadway that is not just for bluehairs anymore.

The bluehairs are the reason for the hue and cry over the years about the impending Death of Broadway, about where the next generation of audiences is going to come from when everyone who could possibly stand to sit through Andrew Lloyd Webber bombasts has already seen them and started to die off. All the hoopla about Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark, at least before it became a national joke, was about keeping the same young audiences in the theatre that made Avenue Q a hit and a Tony Award winner in 2003-2004 -- one with staying power that is still playing off-Broadway.

The plethora of jukebox musicals that dot the theatre district like Starbucks these days aren't going to do it. The songs in these shows, such as Jersey Boys, Million Dollar Quartet, and Baby It's You, have no resonance for younger audiences. They're for the neo-bluehairs that constitute the first wave of baby boomers. Perhaps this group has enough disposable income to keep Broadway going all by themselves, because there's yet another one coming: Natural Woman, based on the life and music of Carole King. It's all enough to make me rue the fact that Leader Of The Pack opened in 1984, before the jukebox musical became a cheap way to make money. Frank Rich hated it, but I actually SAW Leader Of The Pack and was rewarded by some great belting by Annie Golden and a rendition of "River Deep Mountain High" by the great Darlene Love that turned the Ambassador Theatre into the First Church of Awesome Gospel. "Leader" ran for only 120 performances, which should give the producers of Natural Woman pause, Jersey Boys notwithstanding. The jukebox musical set is starting to retire, and doesn't have a whole lot of money for Broadway. There's only so many ways you can slice that bologna before it starts to go bad. At some point you have to bring in new audiences.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise that snark sells. Yes, musicals like South Pacific are classics, but among the high school drama club set from whence new audiences come, the standard bearer is the ubiquitous Guys and Dolls -- to this day the gold standard of marriage of wit and music. The wit is out there; the question was from whence the music would come.

And it's coming from some highly unlikely places.

Anyone who's followed Green Day over the years knows that even back in the Dookie days, it was clear that while Billie Joe Armstrong may have been a snotty punk pothead, he had a gift for ditties -- 3 minute pop songs filled with angst, rage, and yes, snark. We knew that Billie Joe was prolific, and we knew that his brand of 3-chord punk had those damnedly catchy pop hooks that left "Walking Contradiction" playing over and over in your head for three days. What we didn't know, is for all these years, what Billie Joe was writing was show tunes. What we learned when American Idiot hit Broadway was just how glorious some of those songs are when performed by people who can actually sing.

For example, here's "Whatshername" performed by Green Day:


...and by the original Broadway cast:



American Idiot on Broadway was a vibrant, exciting show with a great cast, hampered by a weak book, but it still played a respectable 422 performances, closing this year on April 24. And now we know that while Billie Joe Armstrong became a rock star writing songs about getting teenaged rage, there's something else brewing there -- a knowledge and feel for the conventions of theatre that in the aftermath of American Idiot have no doubt had him thinking he might at some point write something specifically for Broadway.

Sort of like what Trey Parker and Matt Stone have done with The Book of Mormon. Back in February, I started receiving postcards for bargain preview seats for this show. I knew that these two guys combined with Bobby Lopez, who along with Jeff Marx wrote the hilarious, yet still tinkly songs for Avenue Q, would produce a winner. But Mr. Brilliant had been jettisoned from his employer a month before, and I couldn't justify spending even $49 a head for a show.

Of course now I'm kicking myself, now that Book has become a monster hit, and is expected to pick up a wheelbarrow of Tony Awards this weekend. Who would have thought that the same people who fifteen years ago created a cartoon that started with a foul-mouthed character getting anally probed by space aliens via an expanding satellite dish would become the Toast of Broadway? But even if you can't get tickets until sometime in 2016 (which is what seems to be the case; just try looking for tickets during the time period that Telecharge allow you to enter and if you want to really get sick, try looking for tickets at StubHub), you should run out and buy the original cats recording.

Here's composer Bobby Lopez on this week's Studio 360 on NPR (full interview link) playing the opening to "I Believe", which I've read will be the song performed on the awards show tonight. It wouldn't have been my choice, but this song is a small miracle -- it demonstrates the full goofiness of some of the Mormon precepts, and yet for one brief moment, it makes you believe them too.



Parker and Stone may be getting all the press, but for my money, it's Bobby Lopez, likely to be two-for-two by the end of this weekend, who is the unsung hero of this production -- a Frank Loesser for a new generation.

Labels: Broadway, I Welcome Our Snarky Comic Overlords, pop culture, religion

Competing by relative headcounts at rallies seems to me to be a bit like the people who used to fight with each other over the relative box office of Star Wars vs. Titanic. What the hell difference does it make? You're not getting the money anyway.

From where I was watching comfortably at home, a rally that spills over off the National Mall and into the streets, where a wave takes almost a full minute to make its way through the crowd (courtesy of the Mythbusters), is one hell of a lot of people -- not that you'll get any crowd estimates from the media pundits that Jon Stewart ended the rally today by blasting in a speech that is sure to revive the Stewart/Colbert 2012 bumper stickers once again. The Murdoch St. Journal has pretty much refused to do so at all:

How many people are on the National Mall for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? The final answer? We don’t know.

CBC News, being outside the US, doesn't have the same qualms as the US press, and estimates the crowd at over 200,000.

I'm sure in days to come we'll see dueling aerial shots as the Who Got More Glenn Beck Or Jon Stewart debate plays out amidst the same cable news blather that was the subject of more than one photo montage today. Relative crowd counts for the two rallies are important to the extent that the Tea Party has been treated as a huge majority of Americans by the press, receiving attention far in excess of its actual numbers. Christine O'Donnell is likely to lose, but you'd never know it from the press attention she's received.

Here's what DOES matter about the comparative crowds, however.

Age.

While attendees at both rallies skewed predominantly white, many of the Beck rally's attendees were older, a good number of them on Hoveround-type scooters. Today's rallygoers skewed far younger, for all that our very own jurassicpork, who is no spring chicken, attended (and hopefully can be talked into writing a report, including photos), today's rally represented the future, while Beck's rally represents the past -- some of which never even existed the way it was remembered.

I said to Mr. Brilliant this morning that Jon Stewart would walk away today either having jumped the shark, or as the most important man in the country.

Was there ever any doubt that it would be the latter?

.

Whatever happens next Tuesday, think about the young faces you saw in the crowd shots from Washington DC today. The people on the Hoverounds who watch Glenn Beck and believe that Barack Obama must be a secret Muslim terrorist because he has a name that isn't English...or Irish...or Italian...or Polish; who still don't want black people moving into their neighborhoods, who are grossed out by two guys kissing because they're not used to seeing it, and who think that this is Jesus' America and long for the 1950's? Their day is over and a new one is ahead of us. They know it, and that's why they're so afraid. What we know, and what they don't yet, is that there's nothing about that new one that they should fear.

I know that there are young teabaggers, like the young Joe Miller supporter Rachel Maddow talked to in Alaska the other night who hates Obama for nominating Eric Holder, who will to take people's guns away -- but can't identify one thing Holder has done or said about guns. But the National Mall and surrounding streets were teeming with fresh young faces; yes, mostly Causasian ones, but sprinkled with black and Latino and Asian ones too. They get it. That they are this nation's future gives me at least some hope that we just might be able to survive the dying embers of hatred, greed, and bigotry.

And whether he likes it or not, whether he realizes it yet or not, a short Jewish comedian from Jersey is going to lead them.

(UPDATE: Chris Good of The Atlantic says "The immediate takeaway: The crowd was massive. Way bigger than the Glenn Beck rally in July." Of course in the alternative universe of the Teabaggers, Chris Good is a subversive liberal commie anti-American traitor for even suggesting such a thing.)

Labels: I Welcome Our Snarky Comic Overlords, Jon Stewart