Upon listening to "Rose's Turn" for the umpteenth time

The musical theatre is Aristotelian!

All musicals are about being recognized and known!

Every female character in musical theatre wants to be beautiful!

“Rose’s Turn” is the apex of the musical theatre form and also the beginning of the anti-musical. “Rose’s Turn” negates the principles of theatrical fantasy that ground the musical itself. Just as there are no more songs in Gypsy after “Rose’s Turn,” so the musical can never be pure again after Gypsy. The form begins its nose-dive into the theatricalism and anti-theater of the 1960s and 1970s. Eventually what was once a thriving form became a style that has then bred anti-musical-theatre-style musicals (Urinetown, Spamalot, The Producers, Bat Boy—how much more decadent can one get?).

And so, yes, the musical theatre began to die when Ethel Merman sang “Rose’s Turn,” and now it is dead, in the sense that it is no longer vital. But that does not mean that music in the theatre is dead. Nor does it mean that the musical theatre will not have many heirs, certain characteristics of which are already being suggested in concert-plays like Striking 12 and Passing Strange and in the through-sung theatre operas of See What I Wanna See, Rent, and most promisingly, Caroline, or Change.

Nor, incidentally, does it mean that great musicals do not continue to be written that employ the same forms and impulses as the musical. Legally Blonde and Wicked are two of the most commercially successful examples. Grey Gardens and Light in the Piazza two of the most critically successful. There also continue to be great well-made plays, great melodramas, and even great neoclassical dramas. This does not mean negate the fact that these forms are dead.

To throw a wrench into the works, imagine being a musical theater queen in 1959, ten years before Stonewall, and seeing “Rose’s Turn” for the first time. Consider how that experience is harder and harder to recapture as openly gay men are assimilated into normative society. The reasons for a form to die are cultural as much as they are aesthetic.

I do not have time to develop these thoughts. But perhaps I could write a dissertation on anti-theatricality in the musical theatre. It could include a theory chapter on the form, function, and phenomenon of musical theatre. Then a chapter on Kander and Ebb and Bob Fosse. Then a chapter on Sondheim. Then a chapter on musical theater since the 1980s and the “death” of the musical theatre. Then an epilogue that is a manifesto for new forms.

Now that’s an idea!