BROADWAY’S GOLDEN NEW AGE?

A SCI-FI MUSICAL. A POP SHOW INSPIRED BY AN ancient story. An Alice in Wonderland with music. A blues-infused jukebox show. A stage adaptation of a wildly popular musical film.

Quick, name the year those musicals hit the boards. Is it 1982, when Little Shop of Horrors, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Alice in Wonderland, Blues in the Night, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers opened on and Off-Broadway? Could be—but it also sounds a lot like 2019. This, after all, is the season that includes Be More Chill, Hadestown, Alice by Heart, Ain’t Too Proud, and Moulin Rouge!. We can still describe the latest wave of musicals, it seems, the way we did more than 30 years ago. So how far exactly has the musical landscape and the form itself progressed in those decades?

Musicals have had “I want” songs and “11 o’clock” numbers since the days of Gilbert and Sullivan, and out-of-town tryouts, developmental workshops, and producer/writer partnerships have always been crucial to the writing process. But changes are afoot. The biggest of these changes comes, ironically, not from developments onstage but in film. The American musical has found its way back into the mainstream zeitgeist via such films as The Greatest Showman and Mary Poppins Returns.

In tandem with that on-screen renaissance, cast albums for and are hitting the Billboard Top 20, marking the first time in 54 years—since and —that two stage-born albums were in the Top 20.