There’s a wonderful moment in the life of a secondary school music teacher when everything seems worth it. That moment occurs annually, at the end of the last night of a musical production, when we look around, see our students’ elation and reflect that the creativity, teamwork and sheer energy required to bring a school show to life have an almost unique power to build memories and make people happy.
But with great power, so the proverb goes, comes great responsibility. Staging a production isn’t only an act of performing; it’s a learning experience that bring students into close contact with a dramatic text and with the ideas, problems and biases that it contains. So, what happens when that text presents values that are incompatible with those of contemporary society? Should we worry that to stage such a work is to condone its prejudices or even to perpetuate identity-based harm?
A flick through the catalogue of popular stage musicals is all that’s required to uncover a variety of problematic storylines that raise some thorny and important questions. How should a 21st-century director of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! approach Nancy’s devotion to the abusive Bill Sikes? Does the coercive relationship at the heart of Beauty and the Beast have a place in an educational setting? Is it ever possible to reconcile our responsibilities as teachers with the genre’s tendency toward racial stereotyping? Obvious examples of objectionably drawn characters litter the works of the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, but they are also strewn across more recent box office hits such as Schönberg and Boublil’s Miss Saigon, and Disney’s Aladdin.
These questions are practical as well as important. And for our community the stakes are high, since it’s the directors and musical directors of school productions who must shoulder responsibility negotiating a path through this potentially perilous territory. To be comfortable with our decisions, our first task must be to read each libretto closely, and to identify its pitfalls. The time taken to do this – ideally collectively, as a group of adult stakeholders – is never wasted, and it’s worth remembering that lines in songs, as much as lines in the dialogue, can pose problems.
Reframing the narrative
Our next responsibility is to take up a blue pencil and wield it like a surgeon’s scalpel. There are plenty of fun and otherwise appropriate musicals that can only be saved from themselves with the excision of a line or two of dated or inappropriate dialogue. Dracula Spectacula – a generally amusing 1976 Hammer Horror spoof by John Gardiner and Andrew Parr – is none the poorer for the removal of its gag about sex below the age of consent. Sometimes a performance licence will state that this kind of patch-and-mend operation requires formal approval. More often, educational versions of shows come with the most obviously unacceptable text already removed. The most widely used version of Grease, for example, now omits that cringeworthy line – ‘Did she put up a fight?’ – from the song ‘Summer Nights’.
Some problems don’t rest with individual lines but with themes that run through an entire work. Here, a blue pencil can’t put things right, but directorial decisions can sometimes help to reframe or subvert ideas. The delivery of a line, the emphasis on a particular word, an actor’s use of body language or gesture – these can all be used to provide a commentary on a text. So too can costumes and sets. I once saw a youth production of Godspell in which a digitally-projected set cast Stephen Schwartz’s re-telling of the Gospel of Matthew into a dystopian future, tilting the show away from the religious towards the political. Did that device work? Well, it was certainly a talking point, and that’s never a bad thing.
Finally, working with your cast and crew to understand the idiosyncrasies of your chosen piece is an absolute must. At first glance, Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady presents a number of gender- and class-based problems. But with an understanding of the historical and cultural context in which Shaw’s precursor Pygmalion was written, young people can use the musical to engage with a number of significant contemporary issues about social mobility, notions of femininity and the purposes of education.
Are some works beyond redemption? I think so. Notwithstanding its fantastic score, it’s hard to imagine a youth production of Carousel grappling successfully with that story’s normalisation of Billy Bigelow’s violence towards Julie Jordan. And with so many excellent pieces available, is there really any justification for such a problematic choice?
