NY Public Library for the Performing Arts Curator Doug Reside on Meta-Commentary and Mockery

BroadwayWorld.com continues our exclusive content series, in collaboration with The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which delves into the library's unparalleled archives, and resources. Below, check out a piece by Doug Reside (Lewis and Dorothy Cullman Curator for the Billy Rose Theatre Division) on Meta-Commentary and Mockery:

When I saw Something Rotten recently at the St. James Theatre, the applause for the big act one production number, "A Musical," was almost as enthusiastic (and long lasting) as that usually reserved for the curtain calls. In the song, the Renaissance soothsayer Nostradamus (no, not that Nostradamus, another one it seems), describes his vision of the future of theater, and tries to make playwright Nick Bottom understand the strange new form that will be called "the musical!" The music, lyrics, and staging quote and satirize many of the biggest hits of the last few decades as Nostradamus attempts to convince Bottom that, however ridiculous it may seem as a form, musical theatre will be popular with audiences.

This song is not the kind of good-natured roasting that takes place in a musical like Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell's [title of show] which, in the cast recording version, has its characters decide that jokes about "Les Miz or Phantom of the Opera" are "too easy," but the kind of humor that almost seems more like mockery than parody. The creators of Something Rotten, best known for country and contemporary Christian music hits in the 1990s, seem to celebrate their lack of stage credentials in their playbill bios: Karey Kirkpatrick's reads "Broadway theatre credits: none (please don't judge). Regional theatre: Nope! Awards: first place, Bible verse memorization, Horseshoe Drive Baptist Church." This positioning allows them to stand apart from and skewer the form. Of course, the irony of critiquing musicals within a musical theatre production number is part of the comedy. However, it also seemed to me that, at least on the night I saw the show, the song serves another function, to give Something Rotten, and perhaps its audience, the option to reserve some ironic distance.

Meta-commentary on the musical form is a trope that is common enough in musicals since at least the 19th century. Gilbert and Sullivan mocked operetta and its conventions in many of their comedies, perhaps most famously in the patter song in Ruddigore (appropriated by Joseph Papp for his 1980 revival of The Pirates of Penzance) in which Despard sings:

This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter
Isn't generally heard, and if it is it doesn't matter!

Ira Gershwin similarly mocked the trite lyrics of many of his contemporaries in his famous "Blah Blah" song (first used in the movie Delicious):

I studied all that rhymes that all the lovers sing
And just for you I wrote this little thing...

Blah, blah, blah, blah moon
Blah, blah, blah above
Blah, blah, blah, blah croon
Blah, blah, blah love.

Gershwin reprised this joke in lyrics for the 1934 revue Life Begins at 8:40:

Mmmm, surrender
Mmmm, so tender
Mmmm, forever more
What can you say in a love song
That hasn't been said before?

Gershwin's songs satirize trite sentimentality of popular love ballads rather than musical theatre itself. More recently, Spamalot, made the same kind of joke with the Lady in the Lake's "Song that Goes Like This":

Once in every show
There comes a song like this
It starts off soft and low
And ends up with a kiss
Oh where is the song that goes like this?

Spamalot, though, provides running meta-commentary throughout the score (e.g. "What ever happened to my part") that, like the "Musical" song in Something Rotten!, demonstrates a kind of basic familiarity with the history and conventions of musical theater, but seems to mock them from an outsider's ironic distance. Spamalot famously drew new audiences unaccustomed to going to musicals to the Shubert Theatre, so perhaps this self-conscious standing-apart humor does provide a way in to the form for new and potentially skeptical audiences who are reluctant to fully embrace their role as Happy Audience Member at a musical.