Dream theatre... scene from The Harder They Come. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Why are so many new musicals so bad? This thought was very hard to escape in the stalls of the Theatre Royal Stratford East during a performance of The Harder They Come last week, writes Martin J Smith.
This was musical theatre that ticked all the boxes: it was a new adaptation of the 1972 Jamaican movie of the same name which tackled guns and ganja culture head-on and showed a Jamaica that you don't see on the Malibu adverts and, through a fabulous soundtrack performed by Jimmy Cliff, launched reggae on an unsuspecting world.
The stage musical version the other night was terrific, I thought: it raised serious political questions, was stunningly sung, danced and acted, and it also created a fabulous vibe with the theatre's audience.
What's my problem, then? Well, it's this: why is this experience so rare? Why do most new musicals set the bar so low?
It used to be that if you wanted to find poor-quality acting and unconvincing drama set to relentlessly loud music, all you had to do was hop along to the nearest opera house. However, anyone who saw Simon Keenlyside's athletic and brilliantly acted Billy Budd for English National Opera last year will realise that things have changed, and that Anthony Minghella's magnificent Madam Butterfly at the same house last season is now more typical of operatic fare.
But it seems the musical has moved into the ground opera has vacated. Stitching together a series of hits and calling it a show has become the quickest way to make a cultural buck since the urinal showed the way forward for contemporary art.
As a result the concept of developing a story - not to mention a drama - has pretty much disappeared. It's hard to blame performers for treating the padding between the numbers as, well, padding between the numbers. Their scripts have just become extended sequences of cues.
Instead of properly developed dialogue, all leading actors have to work with are lines such as, "I wonder if I'll ever find love..." or "Come on, guys, all you need to do is..." in order to crank up the next song.
And once they've given up interesting themselves in the character or the drama they're engaged in, it's presumably hard to remember why they're bothering to sing at all, which explains why numbers are banged out without any sensitivity or even accuracy. It's a case of switch brain to auto and pocket the cash.
The reaction among serious critics to all this is usually to reflect yet again on the death of the West End. But there's no need for that. The Harder They Come is a piece of theatre with a real agenda, and is politically savvy without wearing those credentials on its sleeve. It is a shining example of what community-based programming can achieve, and in time I hope it'll get a deserving transfer westwards.
In the meantime, let's hope that it sends a message to the rest of Theatreland that a proper musical can aspire to much more than banging out the hits.
