EVERY GENRE PROJECT - June 14 - Show Tunes

Genre of the Day - Show Tunes

Album of the Day - DOUBLE FEATURE! Lullaby of Broadway by Doris Day (1951) and Punk Side Story by Schlong (1995)

Show tunes might not be everyone’s favorite genre. But for the people for whom it is, it really is. Everyone is by this point familiar with the theater kid archetype, probably because you were exposed to someone of the ilk at some point or perhaps had a phase of your own. It’s been a while since I saw a musical, but I get it.For the people who put on musicals, whether part of stagecraft, lighting, a lead or helping carry the ensemble, musicals are one of the best, most joyous displays of communal effort that in turn constitutes a marvel for spectators. Today, the curtain rises and the spotlight shines on a genre that represents the convergence of hundreds of years of western European dance, singing, and theatrical performance into storybook wholes.

For a figure, historical moment, or person to be blessed with an array of showtunes, whether you’re Shrek, Evita, or a quaint store of frights or something along those lines, it’s an honor—an indication that a story is compelling enough that it has to be conveyed via a musical medium rather than an album or on a flat silver screen. The modern musical scene as we know it, led by Broadway in New York and the West End in London, got the ball rolling in 1866 with the release of the Black Crook on Broadway. The modern musical revolutionized entertainment: previously, musical entertainment was divided along class lines with the upper class favoring operas, the middle class, and risqué variety shows at the lower end. 

The beauty of a show tune is that it can be any tune featured in a show, but it usually follows some norms. Show tunes are a genre that has been pioneered by prolific and genre-defining auteurs like George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Stephen Sondheim. While there’s plenty of examples of show tunes being integrated into unconventional genres like punk rock on one of today’s albums, the general and traditional sound of show tunes follows that of pre-rock-and-roll American popular music, with grand piano, orchestra ensembles, and hammy horns writ large in orderly to properly convey the sweeping drama of the music’s purpose. 

For today’s column, I decided to listen to two albums in a watershed moment of overconsumption for me. One album always only scratches the surface of a genre and tells me one interpretation of it. Two can show me the key sides of a genre’s coin. On RYM, the albums under the show tunes genre that I saw getting the highest reviews were loose collections by already-hailed musical legends rather than recordings from Broadway casts. I initially thought this made sense given RYM’s music nerd status. But after having scrounged the list for two albums that I felt could be interesting meditations on the genre, I found a tricky feature in RYM’s advanced chart settings that excludes soundtracks unless you explicitly click to include them, revealing the many Broadway musicals one might expect and that should’ve been my figureheads for today’s column. 

Despite this, I still feel that I got a good taste of two iterations of show tunes: one, showtunes expressed in the setting of a Technicolor-studio-magic cocoon, and the other a buckwild but surprisingly pertinent take on one of the most famous American musicals. Doris Day’s 1951 set is a selection of tunes from her movie musical “Lullaby of Broadway”, a cinematic wonder that chronicles the highs and lows of Broadway life. From the grandeur of the opener which exalts a Broadway that never sleeps where you’re up until the milkman is coming—the listener is forced to imagine some kooky milkman performer running across the stage, milk possibly spilling—to the dramatic shifts from soft balladry to big band horn explosions on “Somebody Loves Me”, it’s a rousing listen even if you derive little semblance of a plot. Nonetheless, a voice can sell a show, and Doris Day deftly injects emotions into a climactic track like “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone”, wearing the melodrama like second skin. 

“Punk Side Story” is a whimsical take from a ‘90s punk band with a penchant for the theatrical on Sondheim’s hit West Side Story. While Broadway and punk on paper don’t seem to coincide, especially given the hierarchical, big-bucks nature of Broadway, the themes of West Side Story as well as the emotional pathos that drives most musicals aligns considerably well with punk thematics. The theatrical romance of “Tonight” transformed with a sneer is a bewildering but effective extension of the two forms’ emotional excess. “Gee Officer Krupke” with its broken-home spun tale and the ska of “America” easily slot into punk’s outsider slant. While polar opposites in terms of tone, these two albums represent the way musicals touch our deepest emotional instincts and elevate them with grandeur and pathos. When I go to my next show, whenever that may be, I’ll make sure to really take it in: there’s nothing that can accurately describe the feeling of being wholly absorbed, musically and visually, into a slice of another life.