Zeitgeist

While the mood of the nation continues to emerge and reports of discontent and of satisfaction grow ever more divergent, it was instructive and relevant to think about the zeitgeist of the commercial theatre world. This year I saw all but two Tony eligible shows and, with the awards ceremony just behind us, I have some overall observations about what was produced for Broadway.

First, there was a remarkable amount of live video used to tell stories on the stage. Sunset Boulevard, Good Night and Good Luck, and The Picture of Dorian Gray featured screens explosively large or resembling mid century televisions with camera people in constant motion (even going outside to catch a lead singing in the streets!). Dorian Gray’s star, Sarah Snook, a Tony Award winner who played all the characters of Oscar Wilde’s original imagination, turned to face different moving camera shooters who projected onto screens in different locations and of different sizes.

In all three cases, the effect, much like the amazing effects of projection and other technologies that are fixed and not done live, defined the adaptations. This, to me, was both good and bad. The images in some cases were overwhelming in scale and revealing of too much of the faces performing. While I appreciated these projections as a live part of the effort of theatre (rather than pre-recorded components), I finally found the efforts way more distracting than elevating. The performers were so terrific that I wished to pay more attention to THEM rather than the screens. I grew up in the television generation, but I love the theater because it is NOT TV.

My second big observation was the number of shows built around historic events and of, largely, bleak tragedies elevated, because of the passage of time, to humor and heroics: Oh, Mary (a total pastiche of Mary and Abraham Lincoln); Operation Mincemeat (the story of a goofed up but ultimately successful effort to confuse Hitler and surprise his troops); Floyd Collins (a successful in all ways dark musical of a trapped young Kentucky cave hunter in the early 20th century); Dead Outlaw, (the amazing story of a lost young man, killed by law enforcement in the late 19th century, but whose body, preserved with arsenic, was used in circuses and for fright shows until someone realized it was once a person and a second autopsy figured out who); and Swept Away (the plights of four sailers lost in a shipwreck in the late 1880s).

Now, I love history and I love the weird and odd. Seeing Dead Outlaw as the last show of my Tony viewing left me wondering, though, “Why now?” What about our times in 2025 has invited 5 disaster productions to open on Broadway and four of them musicals! What makes Abraham Lincoln now a mockable character? What has made the really wild and weird story of Glyndwr Michael, a homeless person who had died from rat poison but whose body was used as a military decoy, fodder for a slapstick and madcap retelling?

Do century old “believe it or not” stories better capture our attention than the modern disasters world wide? Are screens attached to and around our stages a statement vaguely tied to the disasters of the past and setting us up to understand the ones of our future?

Am I trying to find connections where there are none, or are our collective psyches trying to say something?