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"]