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British musicals 'at risk without subsidies like other theatre'

British musical theatre is at risk of being left behind by America unless there is investment in original work that values underrepresented voices, according to industry figures who have called for arts subsidy to be spent on the sector.

Rupert Goold, the artistic director of the Almeida theatre who has directed several musicals – including Made In Dagenham, American Psycho and the Oscar-nominated musical biopic Judy – told the Guardian that the genre suffers from “a bit of snobbery” in the UK.

“We’re happy to spend millions on having a Royal Opera House, but we would never spend public money in that way on new British musical theatre because we think that’s part of the commercial sector’s remit,” he said.

Goold believes musicals should be subsidised in the same way as the Royal Shakespeare Company, which received £14.9m in Arts Council funding during its 2018/19 season, with a focus on writers that cover non-traditional areas. “Money should be earmarked so songwriters are able to write in the areas that are not obviously commercial and see what comes out of that,” Goold said.

“Many great musicals that have been successful came out that way; I don’t think anyone would have said that Hamilton was commercial on paper. It’s not out of some ‘woke agenda’ but because that’s where the exciting music is.”

Paul Hart, the artistic director of the Watermill Theatre in Berkshire who staged Kiss Me, Kate last year, echoed Goold’s comments, saying more investment is needed in developing British musical talent. “Musicals often come from two or three people chatting in a room and that can often ascend to these massive blockbuster hits,” he said. “It comes down to supporting emerging writers of musical theatre.”

Rupert Goold
Rupert Goold: ‘We’re happy to spend millions on having a Royal Opera House, but we would never spend public money in that way on new British musical theatre.’ Photograph: Ettore Ferrari/AP

For Goold the “holy grail” for British musical theatre would be producing work such as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton because of its originality and huge commercial success (it grossed more than $4m in a single week in December 2018), but warned that the UK system is not able to produce similarly diverse work at the moment. “Take someone like Stormzy who is a storyteller, an icon and a political voice – you would love to be able to get that into a show,” he said.

In 2019, exclusive research by The Stage revealed that black, Asian and minority ethnic performers made up 38% of cast members in the 19 commercial West End musicals it focused on, which was better than Broadway where 26% of musical actors were BAME according to a 2014/15 study.

Quiara Alegría Hudes, the Pulitzer-prize winning playwright – who wrote the book for Miranda’s musical In The Heights, which is being adapted into a film, said the landscape has shifted for musical theatre in the US with more diverse writing bringing in new audiences to the genre, but only after decades of work.

“When we started in the studio system we couldn’t gain traction, it was a very long path to get to Warner Brothers, which was finally willing to make the movie,” she said. “Rather than saying ‘We need to have X amount of big box office names or the movie is not viable’, they were not prescriptive like that. In the past it had to have that or the movie would not be possible.”

Goold said the success of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, the musical about a teenage drag queen, which started life at the Sheffield Crucible before a West End transfer in 2017 and is now being adapted into a film, shows original musicals can be produced in the UK. Other recent British successes include Six, the “tune-and-toe show about Tudor queens” by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the RSC’s The Boy in the Dress and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s School of Rock.

Mark Herbert of Warp films, which is producing the movie adaptation of Jamie and has a reputation for gritty northern dramas, said there was no hesitation in taking on a musical. “We’ve always been drawn to authentic stories about slightly complex outsiders. We did not want Jamie to feel gritty; we want it to feel magical. We want people to say: ‘Oh, this is not La La Land.’ It is Sheffield, and there is beauty in it.”

Hart, Goold and Herbert all said the negative critical response to Tom Hooper’s film adaptation of Cats, which was hammered for its CGI and hard-to-follow narrative, would not stop the rise of musicals with several big-budget Hollywood adaptations planned for 2020, including Spike Lee’s Prince of Cats, Leos Carax’s Annette and Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story.

Hart said: “People love to hate certain things, and I’ve always felt that – and Cats is a prime example of this for me – that musical theatre is about as experimental an art form as you can get, and it definitely leads to some pretty mad stuff.”

Goold said he believed two things would improve the situation in the UK: subsidising musical theatre becoming more acceptable and more joined-up thinking on cooperation between emerging commercial producers and subsidised houses.

“People want to feel joy and there’s a real gap for that at the moment,” said Goold. “It’s no surprise that the real rise of musicals in the 1930s came against the backdrop of the great depression, and there’s definitely a space for that in Britain now”.

Musicals to watch in 2020

Come From Away

The surprisingly uplifting 9/11 musical about how Newfoundland took in thousands of diverted passengers after the World Trade Center attack is now on at the Phoenix in London. Typical of the new breed of North American musicals that fashion show-tunes out of unlikely material, it’s been widely praised and has travelled well from its origins as a Canadian college show to Broadway and beyond.

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie

Billy Elliot meets Kinky Boots in this big-screen transfer for the West End hit about a Sheffield teenage boy with a talent for drag. The film cast is mostly new to the production, from lead Max Harwood to supporting cast Richard E Grant, Sharon Horgan and Sarah Lancashire, but the show’s creator and director, Jonathan Butterell, retains the reins.

In the Heights

While we wait for the Hamilton movie, here’s the long-gestating movie proper of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s previous hit, starring Anthony Ramos. It was supposed to have come out in 2011, but behind-the-scenes cast changes – including a Weinstein association – delayed first curtain.

West Side Story

The spectre of Cats looms large and rabid over 2020’s musical offerings, yet some of them are among the year’s most major hopes. One such key release is this second film version of the Bernstein/Laurents/Sondheim classic, directed by Steven Spielberg and written – apparently more faithfully to the original stage show than the 1961 movie – by Tony Kushner, with whom Spielberg previously collaborated on Lincoln. Ansel Elgort is a nagging concern as Tony; schoolgirl discovery Rachel Zegler plays Maria.

Oklahoma!

“How is it that the coolest new show on Broadway in 2019 is a 1943 musical usually regarded as a very square slice of American pie?” asked the New York Times critic Ben Brantley in his review of Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma!, which stunned Broadway last year with its inventive reimagining of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic. Like Trevor Nunn and Susan Stroman’s National Theatre version, Fish strips the production back and presents a darker version.