No matter how desperately you try to imbue the form with substance and meaning and importance, a musical is still just a musical: a ridiculously implausible, trivial, trite, and boring art form.
So with all the raves “Hamilton” received, I think I kind of thought Lin Manuel Miranda was different. That, like the creators of “Cabaret”, he had found a way to integrate the form into a serious drama with real art to it. Sadly, I now know that Miranda’s models, his ideals, include “The Little Mermaid”, and “Chicago” and “Moulin Rouge” and “The Bandwagon” and– god help us– Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth”, which I believe is one of the worst movies ever made. Let me emphasize: it is extremely difficult to reconcile the acclaim given to “Hamilton” with it’s creator’s fondness for one of the worst fantasies, with the worst script, and the most inept direction, ever perpetrated on the screen.
I grew up ridiculing musicals, for obvious reasons: people sing to each other, accompanied by invisible orchestras and choirs, in the middle of what otherwise appears to be a realistic drama. (The “Wizard of Oz” is different: it is a fantasy set in a fantasy world– it makes “sense” to establish ridiculousness as part of the fantasy landscape.) But there is more to it than that: most musicals had plot lines that made situation comedies like “My Mother the Car” seem plausible and richly developed. It seemed to me that the art form itself, the musical, was hospitable to the most heavy-handed, clumsy, contrived expression imaginable.
Just to confirm my views, both “Mary Poppins” and “West Side Story” dubbed the voices of the stars. I mean, all musicals are dubbed anyway (the songs are recorded in the studio and then lip-synched in front of the cameras). What kind of artist would use the body of one actress and the voice of another? The same kind of artistic imagination that would use a drum machine (and today, believe me, they do and they are).
I do not anticipate great things from Miranda. I think his current projects reveal that “Hamilton” was a bit of a fluke.