Once there was a spot

I never saw this place as an ends. But nobody expects you to want to leave, nobody but the people who know you. When you don't feel right in the room and you feel the walls bowing with the pressure, wouldn't you agree it's time to get out. When I think of other places I want to be there more. Other missions aren't sent out to crush you, other people make art and aren't burnt out. But I think the people that push and shove and never give in are the lucky ones. If you can do that then you will love the product. I am happy to go home and lay on the couch with a glass of cab and my man. It is indeed what makes me the happiest, followed closely by a low key rehearsal process and then here as my least favorite place to be. If I was happier at work would I be less happy at home? If I found a way to devote my daytime hours to something I was really passionate about would it take away from my loves? Possible. But in the here and now of the world you spend the majority of your waking hours at "work." Be it for profit or non, is there a way for an ordinary person, who perhaps lacks the drive to be extraordinary, to be happy? Happy in everything?
Bleh that was gross...could I write more soul numbing drivel?
Here's the burning question in my mind:
Spring Awakening, leap forward or giant step back to the 30s?
The musical theatre is a dying art form if you believe the age old adage that once there's a comprehensive PBS documentary the art form has officially passed on. But I don't believe it, merely because I don't want it to be so. I see plenty of evidence that the art form has come to a startling halt in all things creative but as a whole it seems somewhat commercial successful on some inane level.
The question then to address is are the musicals that are on the rise working toward a future. I'm reading Richard Rodgers autobiography right now and that man had a mission. His mission was to extend the art form into more that a silly play with songs. Musicals, as of 1943 had a benchmark thanks to he and Oscar Hammerstein (and we shan't forget what Show Boat did for the form either). A musical became a show propelled by music, and dance if you were really lucky. Songs flowed seamlessly in and out of dialogue (the Bench Scene, Carousel) to expressed the heightened emotion of the characters. This is where the art seemed to be going, in a direction of higher concept.
Spring Awakening is maybe looking at the whole thing too narrowly but I intend to point it out anyway. The score, utilizing popular sounding music, does almost nothing to propel the plot. Nice music, "pop"y music, but what do the lyrics mean?!!!!!! Anybody? "It's like I'm your lover or more like your ghost/ I spend the day wondering what you do, where you go" Does it rhyme with anything even? Nope. Larry Hart would roll in his grave.
There was a movement once that music would sound like where the show is set, and yes I realize that was not the concept for spring awakening, and maybe the concept was "this is how kids sing now so to make this 18th century German story of adolescence true lets set it to some kind of garage band music" but does it help? I guess some would argue it does. And even those that don't approve will say "at least it's not based on a movie. But in the words of Dorothy Fields "There's gotta be something better than this!"
Or is it that the time of Richard Rodgers has passed us by completely. I understand that nobody thinks Oklahoma is hip but it's more than the shows and the music that is being lost. It is the entire way one tells a story. Is it possible that culture has made it impossible to take the art form seriously. Songs that move the plot along has become passe? If that's what has happened I've outstayed my welcome and I am better off with my ibuds in humming On the Twentieth Century to myself, taking time to discuss music only with middle aged gay men who were there or other rejects of society whom I love more than life.
Even the age of Sondheim seems to have passed with a glimmering sparkle. Don't let it be forgot...oh AJL, I like to pretend I'm on an initial basis with Alan Jay Lerner, I like to think that in my past life I was one of his wives.
So wow, that went from depressing to really depressing and I'm still here wishing this was all. I guess I'm really just a Seth Rudesky want to be and since I'm not gay, middle aged, play the piano well, or in New York, I'm not making my Broadway debut doing one liners in a Terrance McNally play. Sigh.
But maybe one day I will be folks. Maybe one day.
Next one won't be so depressing I promise. Seeing as I think I've said everything sad I've ever thought in this one blog. I just want to get it out so I can start discovering if I really have enough passion to write a masters thesis about what I just established is a dying art form.
Woahoooo!
Pins.