Top 10 Broadway Shows That Changed Theater FOREVER
These Broadway shows changed theater FOREVER. Welcome to MsMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the benchmark Broadway musicals that completely upended the artform and theater industry itself.
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00:00People walk out on shows, and those are very often the shows that become historical.
00:06And if you told them, you know, you walked out on West Side Story in 1957.
00:11Welcome to Ms. Mojo.
00:13And today, we're counting down our picks for the benchmark Broadway musicals
00:16that completely upended the art form and theater industry itself.
00:20Broadway shows?
00:21Uh, touring company.
00:25Okay, I'm eliminating Dalvin. I call out your number, please, form a line.
00:30Number 10, Rent.
00:32Let he among us, without sin, be the first to condemn
00:38La Boheme! La Boheme!
00:45While based on the Puccini opera La Boheme, Rent is pitched to a modern-day audience
00:49and full of modern-day tragedy.
00:51Jonathan Larson's aim in bringing this mega-hit to the stage
00:54was to introduce musical theater to audiences who had grown up on MTV.
00:58He was someone who was as much wanting to be a part of a musical theater tradition
01:02as he wanted to blow it up and change it and reinvent it.
01:06Rent's rock music score and themes of disaffected youth carving out communities
01:10in opposition to corporate greed and sellout artists
01:12stuck the landing with its intended audience.
01:15Rent heads were arguably the first modern-day musical fandom.
01:19One song, glory. One song before I go, glory.
01:27One song to leave behind.
01:31Fans would camp out overnight to get tickets, and as a result,
01:34the show may have single-handedly created the lottery system shows still use today.
01:39Number 9, Beauty and the Beast.
01:41One thing forever true, I love you.
01:51The Lion King would blow the roof off of the New Amsterdam Theater in 1997,
01:56but three years before, Disney Theatrical Productions would have its first success with this show.
02:01Adapted from the 1991 animated feature,
02:03Beauty and the Beast proved that the Disney brand had legs on Broadway.
02:07No, no, not the kick lines!
02:09On course, one by one.
02:15Till you shout, enough are done.
02:18Then we'll sing you off to sleep as you digest.
02:21They kept the creative team mostly in-house
02:23so the company could maintain creative control over the production.
02:26Broadway critics gave it a mixed reaction,
02:29but the audiences came out in droves.
02:31Everyone's awed and inspired by you,
02:35and it's not very hard to see why.
02:41It played for 13 years,
02:43closing only to make way for Disney's 2007 production of The Little Mermaid musical in the same theater.
02:48Number eight, Company.
03:03Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim constantly pushed the boundaries of the musical theater.
03:07Company does deal with upper-middle-class people with upper-middle-class problems.
03:12Broadway theater has been for many years supported by those people.
03:16They really want to escape, and here we're saying,
03:22bring it right back in their faces.
03:23Company wasn't even supposed to be a musical.
03:26Book writer George Firth had originally envisioned it as 11 loosely connected plays about marriage and relationships.
03:32Listen, everybody, look, I don't know what you're waiting for. A wedding? What's a wedding?
03:35It's a prehistoric ritual where everybody promises fidelity forever,
03:37which is maybe the most horrifying word I've ever heard in which is followed by a honeymoon
03:40where suddenly he'll realize he's saddled with a nut and want to kill me, which he should.
03:43Thanks a bunch, but I'm not getting married.
03:45Once Sondheim got involved, they were suddenly exploring a new frontier in the form.
03:49While Company isn't the first concept musical,
03:52its focus on contemporary relationships and its use of songs more to develop its themes than further its plot was novel.
03:58Someone to crowd you with love.
04:03Someone to force you to care.
04:08Someone to make you come through.
04:11Its innovative structure and representational staging has also made it ripe for reinterpretation throughout the years,
04:17with each new adaptation highlighting a different facet of its message.
04:20Number seven, Showboat.
04:22Don't you know this show is going through?
04:26Hey, just a few seats left here.
04:30It's light at night and outside there's no moon.
04:34Premiering at the Storied Ziegfeld Theater in 1927,
04:37composer Jerome Kern and lyricist-librettist Oscar Hammerstein II brought Showboat into the world.
04:42Based on Edna Ferber's popular novel, Showboat was a revelation.
04:46The history of the American musical theater is divided quite simply into two eras,
04:50everything before Showboat and everything after Showboat.
04:53Before Showboat, Broadway was a place for sumptuous but light spectacle.
04:57Musical comedies and vaudeville acts weren't as interested in telling narrative stories with real human emotion or social relevance.
05:04I'm tired of living and tired of dying.
05:09The whole man river.
05:13Despite its innovations in the form, the show has been a lightning rod for controversy
05:17due to the treatment of its African-American characters.
05:20Nonetheless, it paved the way for the theater-going audience's desire for musicals that had a heftier story to tell.
05:25Suddenly, the musical could say something with an integrity that it hadn't quite said before.
05:32Thanks to Kern, thanks to Hammerstein, thanks to the performers, but mostly thanks to Siegfeld.
05:50Developed from writer Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical novel,
05:53the story of a writer and a second-rate cabaret singer living in Weimar-era Berlin was unlike anything on Broadway before it.
06:01A cabaret is a buffet of styles.
06:03Blending commentary numbers with plot-advancing songs,
06:06the musical often volleys between two different settings, forcing audiences to acclimate to its structure.
06:11There were two musicals on stage.
06:13One took place in real rooms and one took place in limbo.
06:17And in limbo were these numbers which indirectly commented on the real book upstage.
06:26Its experimental style and themes of hedonism and fascism have also left it open for reinterpretation,
06:31which often leads to fans arguing over whose version is best.
06:34You want to start an argument between musical theater fans?
06:37Ask if Sally Bowles is supposed to be a good singer.
06:56Star-crossed lovers and warring gangs already provide material for drama.
07:10Add in all that beautiful dancing and a sensational score and you have a lasting piece of Broadway history.
07:16Director-choreographer Jerome Robbins' background in ballet heavily informed his approach to this Romeo and Juliet adaptation.
07:23I read it and I said, what the hell would I do to try to make this alive?
07:26And I thought, well, what if I made it today?
07:28How would I feel about it?
07:30And that was it.
07:31While many musical comedies before it utilized dancing,
07:34West Side Story integrated beautiful movement into its story in ways that felt classical and new all at once.
07:40Unlike many other shows, where an anonymous chorus of dancers would do a lot of the heavy lifting,
07:45the show's entire cast had to be able to pull off the high-level choreography.
07:53["Hair"]
08:16In the late 1960s, the brewing counterculture didn't exactly lend itself to the Broadway stage.
08:22Anti-Vietnam War protests and civil rights struggles didn't exactly make people want to forget their troubles and get happy so much as scream and shout.
08:29Hair laid bare the basic hippie ethos and presented it on stage in all its liberal, vulgar, and sexual excesses.
08:36["Aquarius"]
08:50Its songs entered the culture via acts like The Fifth Dimension,
08:53but the show became dogged by accusations of profanity and so-called anti-American sentiment.
08:58Its communal spirit deeply affected audiences,
09:01with some productions welcoming the audience on stage to dance with the cast.
09:05The national tour faced legal injunctions and threats of violence.
09:08Rarely has a Broadway show been such a volatile cultural flashpoint.
09:12["Hamilton"]
09:31We start rehearsals for Hamilton, and then that becomes whatever it becomes.
09:36Lin-Manuel Miranda had already wowed Broadway with 2008's In the Heights,
09:41one of the first successful hip-hop musicals.
09:43His follow-up took nearly seven years to arrive, but it was well worth the wait.
09:48This hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton features rapping founding fathers and modern political sentiments.
09:54["Aquarius"]
10:11Far-reaching press attention and fan engagement made it one of modern Broadway's biggest successes,
10:16and its diverse cast made us ask deeper questions about traditional casting practices.
10:21Its effect on politics and pop culture was a brief return to a time when Broadway songs could penetrate mainstream culture.
10:27Hamilton's impact will be studied for years to come.
10:30["Beebop"]
10:49["Evita"]
10:58The Beatles started the first British invasion.
11:00Andrew Lloyd Webber may have started the second.
11:02Though he had some success on Broadway with Jesus Christ Superstar,
11:06his 1979 musical Evita was a barn burner.
11:09The Patti LuPone-led production jumped from London to New York with relatively few changes,
11:14and became the first British musical to win Best Musical at the Tonys.
11:18["Pherom"]
11:25The Beatles also set the precedent for spectacle-driven British mega-musicals
11:28that would dominate Broadway for the rest of the decade.
11:31Without the success of Evita, there might have been no Cats, Phantom, or Les Miserables,
11:35and given how long those musicals stayed on Broadway,
11:38the British musical explosion also made producers re-evaluate just how long an original Broadway run could last.
11:44["He's About You"]
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12:131. Oklahoma
12:15["Oklahoma"]
12:28This classic show was a trailblazer that launched one of the most enduring
12:32and influential partnerships in Broadway history.
12:35This first collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II
12:39was a complete reinvention of the art form.
12:42According to Hammerstein's previous contributions with Showboat,
12:45the pair wrote what is essentially seen as the first musical
12:48to completely integrate its music with a show's plot.
12:51While this seems like a no-brainer now,
12:53that isn't necessarily what people expected from musicals before 1943.
12:57["Never to violate or corrupt the basic intent.
13:01The style may be stretched, elaborated, made more broad for effect,
13:06but the meaning of the dance must not be altered."
13:09Essentially, we have Oklahoma to thank for decades of great stories on Broadway.
13:14["I got a beautiful feeling and rhythm's going my way"]
13:23What show do you think changed Broadway forever?
13:25Let us know in the comments.
13:27["When you live through history, you don't know it's history."
13:29Do you agree with our picks?
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13:39["I got a beautiful feeling and rhythm's going my way"]