On Theater: New musicals dance with controversy

Are some subjects just too serious, or too sensitive, or too unpleasant to be appropriate material for a musical?

I've been festering on this since last week, when the Public Theater took a second look at Paul Simon's 1998 Broadway flop, "The Capeman." The press has been asked not to review the three semistaged concert performances in Central Park that Diane Paulus ("Hair") directed as an end-of-summer investigation into the show's stage-worthiness. So this is not a review.

But the show, based on the 1959 murder of a white kid by a Puerto Rican gang teen named Salvador Agron, has reignited the validity - even the morality - of such a project. "Why choose a murderer?," asked one irate Newsday reader, suggesting Simon "kick it up a notch and write about a cop killer this time. . . . Can't wait to see the choreography for that!"

In other words, even if artists think a story has a good beat, is it right to dance to it?

The question is hardly new, but it is likely to raise its psyched-up head again in the upcoming season. I count three new Broadway musicals with the potential to infuriate some of the theatergoers all of the time, or all of the theatergoers some of the time.

First comes "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson," the Broadway transfer of the audacious, adorable, politically incorrect emo-rock / historical satire that was a hit last spring at the Public. I thought there might be a reaction from the disabled community when our seventh U.S. president shoots the show's prissy narrator in her wheelchair. Instead, there is an outcry from Native Americans, furious about the show's insulting humor ("I love you," he lightheartedly says as he abandons his wife, "but I have to kill the entire native population") and portrayals of their heroes as traitors and clowns.

In October, "The Scottsboro Boys" will retell an infamous Southern racial injustice from the '30s in the wildly inflammatory racial form of a minstrel show. "The Scottsboro Boys," with music and lyrics by John Kander and the late Fred Ebb, had its premiere Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre in March. Susan Stroman, whose production of "The Producers" had brilliant fun with unfathomable reactions to "Springtime for Hitler," again directs and choreographs.

Come spring, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the irrepressible creators of "South Park," are expected to dance onto the third rail of religion with "The Book of Mormon." The musical, the fearless satirists' debut on Broadway, is said to involve two young Mormon missionaries in Uganda as told alongside the story of Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Robert Lopez, composer and co-creator of "Avenue Q," is collaborating.

Is nothing sacred? If the artistry is up to the challenge, I think not.

It may surprise decades of fans of the smash revival of "Chicago," but in 1975, Bob Fosse's masterwork (with its joyfully tough Kander and Ebb score) was felt by some to glorify the glamorous murderesses and insult the judicial system. Stephen Sondheim got a bit of flack in 1979 for bothering to make a major work, "Sweeney Todd," on the unworthy subject of killers who bake innocent Londoners into meat pies. Criticism of Sondheim's 1990 "Assassins," a carnival about people who have killed or tried to kill American presidents, has been harder for some to laugh off, even after the splendid revival in 2004.

When "Evita" returns to Broadway in 2012 with Ricky Martin as Che, who will remember the scandal the 1979 New York hit first created in London? Before director Harold Prince brought his spectacular production to New York to win seven Tonys, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice responded to criticism by rewriting Eva Perón to be less sympathetic.

Even after the changes, there were questions here about the ethics of making a musical about fascists, about Argentine dictators who admired Mussolini and Hitler, and who filled prisons and cemeteries with the opposition. By the time the show was made into a movie, of course, the only question involved the ethics of casting Madonna.

In the heat of the controversy, the creators bristled at suggestions that they might easily turn next to the story of Hitler and Eva Braun. "Why do all musicals have to be about orphans and dogs and the like?," Rice said. "If you think musicals ought to be dealing with serious topics, as we do, then why can't Eva Perón be that topic?"

Lloyd Webber, who soon went solo to grapple with such serious topics as cats and phantoms of the opera, said, "We decided it was important that people see the dangers of a cynical and manipulative politician like Eva Perón. Especially one so attractive, because an attractive extremist is so much more dangerous than an unattractive one."

Author-director Alex Timbers and composer Michael Friedman are planning to make adjustments to "Bloody Bloody." "We have had deep and substantive talks with the Native community," the producers said this week in a written statement. "And we are mindful of those conversations as we continue the life of the show." I do know that the focus of "Capeman" has been changed from the young killer's story to the story as seen through the sympathetic eyes of his devastated mother.

Although I disagree with Walter Kerr's negative New York Times review of the original "Evita," I cherish his belief that the best shows allow audiences the chance to arrive at their own conclusions and judgments about controversial characters. I also know that, throughout human history, people sing and dance when words fail. Successful musicals do the same.