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Stage Preview: 'Rent' overdue for radio
Sunday, September 24, 2000 By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In New York's East Village, a group of hip, struggling artists cope with the headaches and heartaches of modern life in a contemporary rock opera treatment of Puccini's "La Boheme." The show picked up a Tony for Best Musical and even snagged a Pulitzer, rare for musical theater. The rock songs whine like the early '90s, a certified R&B superstar makes a cameo on the soundtrack, and in a break from tradition, good, cheap seats are made available for every show.
As if "Rent" needed anything more to generate a sympathetic buzz among American youth, playwright Jonathan Larson, a rock 'n' roller at heart, died famously of an aortic aneurysm hours after the show's final dress rehearsal.
If any modern musical was going to spawn a contemporary radio crossover hit, it was "Rent." But like its valiantly losing characters, "Rent" was avoided like the plague by rock radio formats.
"It is a little bit curious," says Tim Weil, "Rent's" musical director since it debuted off-Broadway. "One of the things that makes it a good show is its pop songs, but [they're] theatrical in nature. Pop songs are illustrative. How I feel, in theater, is best sensed through songs that make the story move forward. That's not what pop audiences are used to hearing."
There was a time before niche radio when pop music and musical theater were the same thing. The themes from "Hello Dolly" and "Camelot," bolstered by popular film versions, played alongside Chubby Checker's "Twist" and Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" Even "Good Morning Starshine" from "Hair" and "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from "Jesus Christ Superstar" were still getting air time when AM passed the torch to frequency modulation in the 1970s.
In recent years, softer Adult Contemporary stations have tried "Memory" from "Cats" and "The Music of the Night" from "The Phantom of the Opera." Some radio programmers, hired to tell stations what their listeners want to hear, have recommended non-Broadway highlights from Michael Crawford's recording career. Pop artists Pete Townshend, Randy Newman, Barry Manilow and Paul Simon have written or retooled material for musical theater, but none of those efforts registered a radio hit. Disney, realizing what it would take to place a song from a musical on the radio, bankrolled a guarantee of moderate AC airplay by teaming Elton John and Tim Rice on "Aida."
But not since the "Godspell" days have new rock and Top 40 stations gotten behind a musical theater tune. Somewhere along the way, Broadway went heavy, requiring songs to propel complex story lines as well as carry a tune. Radio went niche, requiring songs in increasingly narrower formats to sound fresh, yet similar enough to keep listeners from touching the button that separates them from the influence of commercial sponsors.
Depending on the radio format, pop music fashion can change as quickly as the introduction of a hip new song on stations across North America. Musical theater changes, too. But it takes years to prepare a show for launch at one of a few select Broadway venues, and progress is incremental. Even the rock music of "Rent" was a few years behind the times.
As a result, pop music has become a driving force behind the ephemeral whims of popular culture. Change is prerequisite, and the very introduction of each new tune implies superiority over everything that came before.
Musical theater, however, with its frequent and cost-effective revivals, reveres its past. And if there's any question that the Broadway hit machine turns its nose up at new ideas, just ask Squonk Opera. Progressive musical theater, composed to attract younger and more adventuresome audiences, is left with no machinery to carry the music to its intended audience.
"I think there are a couple of things that determine what gets on a pop record, and then what gets played on the radio," says Weil. "It's not just a good song. There's lots of other machinery at work. At the time when we did the ["Rent" cast album], there was talk of who can we get to cover these songs. The value of getting a song from your show on the radio can't be underesti-mated. But nobody was interested. Finally we got Stevie Wonder to cover 'Season of Love,' which is great. But if Stevie ain't getting on the radio, it ain't gonna happen."
"Rent's" banishment from pop radio surprised some theater people, who saw radio crossover as a way to attract a vital new audience of young people to musical theater. Others saw irreconcilable differences between pop and musical theater and accepted the separation as permanent.
A few, however, still feel a reconciliation in the air.
On the heels of two long-running Broadway hits, composer Frank Wildhorn started "The Civil War" with airwaves on his mind. His initial idea was to hire country and R&B stars to sing ballads of loss and glory in a traveling concert performed on musical theater stages. The theater industry, smelling money emanating from the creator of "The Scarlet Pimpernel" and "Jekyll and Hyde," pushed Wildhorn to retool his show for Broadway by adding dramatic war scenes. The idea and the show flopped, and Wildhorn sent his original conception of "The Civil War" on the road.
"I'm a composer," he said in an interview previewing the show's April visit to Heinz Hall. "I'm interested in songs, good songs. When you have John Schneider and BeBe Winans on the bill, it closes the gap that exists between the title and its intended audience. Next year, when we take it back on the road, we're going to put more country stars in it. There's no reason that radio couldn't play this soundtrack."
Wildhorn has an ulterior motive to pack "The Civil War" with stars. He moonlights as head of a tiny division of Atlantic Records that markets pre-cast albums of Broadway musicals. In addition to his own shows, he's marketing "Smokey Joe's Cafe" and the off-off Broadway drag-queen rock revue "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," another show intended for young, nontraditional theater audiences.
When it comes to the music of non-traditional musical theater, nobody out-squonks Squonk Opera. Admire their moxie or scoff at their naivete, but the Pittsburgh group's short-lived Broadway run brought new sounds and concepts to musical theater's inner circle.
Even as the show was being chased from the Helen Hayes Theater, the group was being chased by the head of a record company who saw a future for their avant-garde music.
"Squonk, to me, is just an amazing machine," says Gilbert Hetherwick, senior vice president and general manager of Angel Records, a subsidiary of BMG. Overruling the advice of his colleagues, he signed the group even after they lost their Broadway gig. A recording of the show's music was remastered for radio and recently released not as a cast album, but as "Bigsmorgasbordwunderwerk," an ethereal, progressive music disc.
"I signed them because I think they could be extremely successful in whatever they do, and they have tremendous chops," says Hetherwick. "It's wonderful what Jackie [Dempsey] and Steve [O'Hearn] have put together -- a true work of art. The music stands alone. I can see it on college radio, maybe alternative rock stations, in indie record stores that break cutting-edge music, and it definitely has a shot at AAA," the "adult album alternative" format played in Pittsburgh by WYEP.
Hetherwick says he isn't expecting gold records, "but a nice set-up for their next show, and we get in on the ground floor. We're putting them out as a pop group, positioning them as a band."
Young audiences might like the music of progressive musical theater if they were exposed to it. But as long as commercial radio refuses to touch it and theaters cling to the preferences of older season ticket holders, it's unlikely that young adults will hear the music of musicals or embrace it as an important part of pop culture.
"The thing about musical theater is, it's hard to do," says Weil. "It takes a large investment and a lot of time with no promised return. ... I think 'Rent' has a lot of what young adults would like, but they don't flock to theaters like they flock to rock concerts, and they go to concerts because they hear it on the radio."
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