It has been an illuminating year for old-fashioned musicals masquerading in contemporary hip-hop clothing. This is particularly the case with "Passing Strange" and "In The Heights".
These musicals are about coming-of-age, and discovering that after all the searching is over, you are led back to where you started. Wrapped in rap, hip-hop, and rock musical trappings, these shows are both similarly about the nature of the journey -- leaving in order to find your place in the world --- which is back home!
While they are both described as innovative, even in their disguised structure, they linearly take us through a beginning, a middle, and an end. They "work" as theatre because they are traditionally entertaining --- which, after all, is a major goal of the commercial (Broadway) theatre experience.
So going forward by going backward can be a good thing, and recycling -- in the best sense of the word -- can bring us successful new musical styles. Let's not be afraid to take the best of the past as a guide for future -- even if skeptics like me sometimes call it "old-fashioned".
scenebyme -- ijb
