Is "American Idol" hurting Broadway?
By Ann Althouse
The NYT's Ben Brantley bemoans the effect of "American Idol" on Broadway singing:
nytimes.com
The tentacles of the "American Idol" sensibility ... reach much deeper, into the very throat of the American musical, and may change forever the way Broadway sings. This is not a happy prognosis.
The style of vocalizing that is rewarded on "American Idol" - by its panel of on-air judges and by the television audience that votes on the winners - is both intensely emotional and oddly impersonal. The accent is on abstract feelings, usually embodied by people of stunning ordinariness, than on particular character. Quivering vibrato, curlicued melisma, notes held past the vanishing point: the favorite technical tricks of "Idol" contestants are often like screams divorced from the pain or ecstasy that inspired them.
The Broadway musical has always had its share of big-voiced belters, from Ethel Merman to Patti LuPone. But they have usually belonged to the tradition of Broadway as a temple to magnified idiosyncrasies, to performers for whom song is an extension of individuality. Which is why when Simon Cowell, the most notoriously harsh of "American Idol's" judges, describes a contestant as "too Broadway," it is meant as a withering dismissal.
Hmmm... I don't think that's what Cowell means by his "too Broadway" slam. I think he thinks Broadway is traditionally exactly what Brantley thinks "American Idol" is turning it into. I think "AI" wants the contestants to have more life and individuality, but the people with the nerve and stamina to get through such a high-pressure competition tend not to have soulful, artistic depth.
That self-congratulatory element is also part of the "American Idol" package - the subtext that goes, "I deserve to be a star because it's my right as an American, and because I try so hard." It seems appropriate that musicals as seemingly different as "Wicked," a politically corrected back story of "The Wizard of Oz," and "Little Women," adapted from the Louisa May Alcott classic, both have first-act finales that are brassy (and virtually interchangeable) declarations of self-worth and self-determination.
Well, actually "American Idol" judges and voters are constantly hitting I'm-a-star kids with on-the-spot rejection, and many of us viewers watch to see the smuggest ones get the boot. (Kimberly Caldwell -- known as KimberME -- was a Television Without Pity punching bag in Season 2.)
And those brassy first-act finales are scarcely a post-"AI" development, as Brantley himself must concede. He notes, among other things, that "Jennifer Holiday was bringing down the house in 'Dreamgirls' by wrapping her voice like a boa constrictor around an angry ballad called 'And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going.'" And that, of course, was the original song choice of "American Idol" fan favorite, Frenchie Davis -- blamed in the article for bringing "AI" to Broadway. Last season's winner, Fantasia, became the frontrunner by singing a beautiful and sensitive rendition of "Summertime," a Broadway musical song.
There is some kind of interplay between "American Idol" and Broadway, but it's more complicated than Brantley lets on. Brantley hates "American Idol" -- I can surely understand why he (or anyone else) hates it -- but he also can see that Broadway is pretty bad. Both are bad, but he wants Broadway -- and not "AI" -- to survive. But that's no reason to blame "AI" for Broadway's problems. |
