Theatre of opportunity... a musical is planned based on the songs of the Flaming Lips.
For people who consider such judgments possible, there seems to be general agreement that the "highest" form of art is poetry. It's a more crowded field toward the other end of the ladder: should it be action movies? Soap operas? Any kind of artistic endeavour "on ice"?
It's as tricky a question as it is a pointless one, but the stage musical must only be a rung or two above pornography in terms of its chances of being taken seriously as a cultural form. And within that lowly genre, the musicals built around a particular band's pop songs sit squarely at the very bottom of the heap.
Such "jukebox" musicals have taken off in recent years, following the runaway success of Mamma Mia - a young bride's search for her father set to the hits of Abba. A string of shows have followed in its tinselly wake, built around the hits of Rod Stewart, Madness, Elvis, John Lennon. New York played (brief) host to Good Vibrations, a Beach Boys-themed evening memorably described by the New York Times' critic as sacrificing itself "night after night, and with considerable anguish, to make all other musicals on Broadway look good".
Mamma Mia has a lot to answer for: the various productions now under way around the globe generate around £5m a week for the show's producers - enough to set some people's eyes ringing up dollar signs. The logic appears simple: take a band with a huge following, write any old story that will thread the songs together for the uncritical fans, sit back and watch your bank balance skyrocket.
Perhaps the producers of the Take That and UB40 stage shows currently under construction have been inspired by something other than the sweet music of tills ker-chinging, but somehow I don't think so.
Shows like We Will Rock You throw in lasers, huge screens and video projections and pea-souper quantities of dry ice to camouflage the thinness of the drama. It seems to work for ticket buyers, who carry on queuing up for an experience I'm inclined to imagine is likely to be their first and last time in a theatre.
The miserable quality of most of these has inclined many to feel that, in what is already pretty cheap entertainment, these are at the very bin end. On second thoughts, though, I'm not entirely sure.
But, with a lively imagination at work, pop songs should lend themselves perfectly to the musical form: sufficiently serious to be heartfelt, but steering clear of really tough questions (I'm assuming here that no one is planning a Dylan or Leonard Cohen show, though they probably are). For if weightless shows that string together songs for no better reason than that lots of people like them are bad news, so too are the ones that go for heavy-duty gravitas.
I'll make too many enemies if I use Les Mis as an example (and I confess that I've only ever heard the turgid tunes), but there are plenty of other examples of these grim projects. I still sometimes wake in the middle of the night harrowed by the memory of Out of the Blue, a musical journey through the bombing of Nagasaki.
(The score, I recall, regularly reminded its audience that it was about explosions with heavily clanging bells. There was an unforgettable refrain that went, "Children sing (Bong!) Bells ring! (Bong) Silent Spring! (Bong Bong Bong)")
So, high falutin' suspicions aside, I'm glad to hear that the Flaming Lips' album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is due to be made into a musical: it has a decent writer attached (Aaron Sorkin); the band are known for a very theatrical approach; there's even a story already sketched out in the sequence of songs. (According to singer Wayne Coyne: "There's a Japanese girl; she fights some robots." So there's room for some invention from Sorkin, too.)
Perhaps most importantly, you know that the Flaming Lips' modest fan base means the project is not driven by calculations of box office potential. All of which makes me want to book up.
