My love/hate relationship with musical theatre

I love musical theatre.  I really do.  I cried when I saw The Phantom of the Opera's national tour when I was ten, was entranced by Cats in London when I was eleven, cried at Miss Saigon's national tour that same year (and said a college-age Steven Pasquale would be famous one day -- I was right), cried again in college when I saw Randal Keith's Valjean in Les Miserables despite having listened to the London cast recording approximately 500 times already and having never once shed a tear over it.  I grew up on movie musicals and love Oklahoma and Carousel and everything Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly ever did.  I thought critics were too uptight and pretentious when they blasted Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Rocky on Broadway, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed and got lost in.  I love everything from tiny critical-darling musicals like Next to Normal and Side Show that never got off the ground to the spectacularly flawed musicals that nevertheless have great music and acting (cough cough Lestat cough cough).  What all those musicals have in common is characters who are grounded, messy, conflicted, flawed, and full of real emotion.

But there's a side of musical theatre I hate.  It makes me feel vitriolic feelings towards it.  I want to eviscerate this side of musical theatre.  It's the phony, fake, feet-planted-like-you're-going-to-do-the-times-step, jazz-hands-up-like-you're-a-mime-drying-your-nails, head-tilted-up-to-sing-like-you-took-your-drama-teacher-literally-when-he-said-sing-to-the-back-row-of-the-balcony, stop-the-plot-to-sing-straight-to-the-audience side of musical theatre.  To me, singing in musical theatre should come about because the emotion is so high that there's no outlet for it other than to burst into song and dance.  It elevates the emotion in a way dialogue can't.  And singing without another character on stage should be a moment of self-reflection, an explosion of internal thoughts, a monologue, or to God.  (Or, in the case of "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" in Oklahoma, it can also be to the cornstalks and the sky.  I find that acceptable.)  What it shouldn't be is an aimless rambling declaration set to music delivered straight to the audience with no conflict and that advances neither plot nor character.  So I was beyond disappointed when I viewed a promotional television appearance of one of my favorite performers in a Broadway musical only to find that in this show he has become the poster child for the aforementioned jazz hands, fake smile, head-tilted-up, singing-to-no-one-in-particular style of musical theatre.  He was joined on stage by a leading lady who was snarling and sneering at the television camera in what I think was an attempt to look either sexy or dramatic but instead came off as mentally deranged or an attempt to satirize soap operas and Lifetime movies.  Face vamping is completely unnecessary in musical theatre.  If you need extra weird facial expressions on top of the music, the show is so seriously flawed there's no rescuing it. 

Also, to play this bizarrely peppy, unrealistic character portrayal, the extremely talented performer in question was asked to shave his routinely-two-day-old facial hair, to which I ask why do characters in musicals have to be clean shaven?  Is there a rulebook somewhere with a dress code for musical theatre characters?  What happens if a perfect, "Leave It To Beaver"-type character in a peppy musical wakes up one day and decides not to shave?  Does the whole world come crashing down?  Does everyone forget how to tap dance and then suddenly start to sing off key?  And what if he does something other than smile with teeth showing while singing?  Is it like the film Pleasantville where people become paralyzed with fear because their perfect lives start to go askew?

I'm not going to share this clip, because it's everything I despise about bad musical theatre and everything that I think gives musical theatre a bad name (and because it pains me to see someone so talented give such a bad performance), but instead, I'm going to share a clip of everything that is right about musical theatre done well.  So for musical theatre perfection (by which I mean characters who are messy and real and seriously flawed and anything but perfect, portrayed by actors who bring themselves to their characters rather than stripping away all their beautiful humanity to play an archetype), watch this instead:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPfxUGMKgLA