The Spectacle Musical

It is surprisingly difficult to find a high-quality image of the helicopter scene from Miss Saigon online. I realize taking a good picture of it would be complicated, and you’d probably want to do it not during the show but separately just to take a publicity still. That would be nuisancy. However, since the scene was in all the commercials when I was a kid—how to tell I lived in LA; there were commercials for musicals—I’m still somewhat surprised. It seems to me that it’s because the show has largely faded from the public consciousness, probably because it was only really known because of the helicopter scene.

The master of the kind of musical where you mention one specific scene, because of its pure spectacle, was of course Andrew Lloyd Webber. Sometimes, it was one scene—the chandelier, for example—but really, most of his shows were about a gimmick of some sort. I’m an unironic fan of Jesus Christ Superstar, but I don’t deny the gimmick there. It’s a rock opera about Jesus. That’s a gimmick. But also you get Starlight Express, a musical about trains where all the characters are on roller skates. And someday I will see that simply because, come on, that’s a hell of a thing.

But there’s more to the great age of the spectacle musical than Lloyd Webber. There’s Doonesbury, where the gimmick is, you know, it’s a musical based on a comic strip. The Rink, which starred Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera, is about a roller rink and logically probably also had roller skates. Return to the Forbidden Planet features a spaceship and, yes, more roller skates, for Ariel who is Robby the Robot. (The musical returns to the Tempest origins of the movie, apparently.) The Mystery of Edwin Drood was, of course, based on an unfinished Dickens novel, and the audience votes on the ending.

The ‘90s would shift into the jukebox musical and the musical adaptation, especially the Disney ones, but there’s still a musical about the Titanic featuring a three-story set to convey the size of the ship. Cats crawled all over the stage so that The Lion King could, well, whatever The Lion King is doing. They seem, to my deep regret, to have dialed back on roller skates, presumably because roller skates onstage are actually a terrible idea and should not have been that popular.

What would have been the ultimate spectacle musical is, of course, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Can you imagine how much more that would’ve been if they’d tried roller skates there? It was already made into a Sesame Street sketch with Grover and that guy who’s always getting screwed over by Grover, and if there had been roller skates, it’s entirely possible someone would have died. But beyond that, there was already so much going on. There’s no way I can adequately summarize it here. But that’s okay; you already know.

It is possible to be both spectacle and good. I happen to actually like The Phantom of the Opera, but that’s another show where there’s just so much going on. The makeup. The masquerade ball. The boat. Yes, the chandelier. There’s trap doors and arias and the entire backstage of an opera house. It’s fantastic. There’s a huge everything to that show, and it also has some genuinely good songs. If you’re a soprano or a tenor, the show is a great test of your abilities. But you can’t do an understated version of the show; it’s just not possible.

Mostly, though, no one remembers if the show is actually good or not. Cats, okay, it’s a bunch of people in cat costumes and one really good song. But can you name a single song from Starlight Express? I know what Miss Saigon is about, because it’s Madame Butterfly but in the last days leading to the fall of Saigon. I can’t remember if I’ve ever listened to the score, though, because who actually cares? I just remember seeing the helicopter in commercials over and over again in probably the early ‘90s. What else is there to remember?