Skipping a generation

Classical music concerts and recording projects are planned years in advance, so cultural relevance is like Russian roulette in our
industry. “Fingers crossed something happens to make that Bartok
relevant in St. Louis in 2013.”(“Or not, we don’t really care.”)  One might argue that certain pieces (certain plays, musicals, books and visual art) will always be relevant despite what is going on in any given time period; precisely the reason they are shown, read, and performed for generations beyond that for which they were created. A driving desire for up-to-the-minute relevance is why art didn’t simply stop production in the 1740s, 1840s, 1940s. (“That’ll do it! Let’s just coast on The Trial and West Side Story for a while.”) Assessing what determines relevance, however, is highly dependent on what makes a work of art significant to the beholder. This is obviously a broad topic, but I’ve recently been thinking about one slice of it: are pieces of art more relevant when you’ve discovered them for yourself or when forces of your generation pressure you to come to them?

I saw Rent in previews with my mom. I remember her calling for tickets from our landline in the kitchen, muttering about getting them “before the damn thing wins all the Tonys.” Having no idea what to expect, we left my younger sister at home, though to this day none of the three of us knows what most of the drug references mean, so Aliza hardly would have figured it out at age 11 (“no you cut the paper plate”??). Sitting in the second row of house right just under a speaker, my mom and I didn’t think we were going to make it through when the song “Rent” blasted out at us, but by “Today 4 U” we were completely sold. I saw a lot of musicals growing up (including unmitigated disasters like The Red Shoes, as well as the Andrew Lloyd Webber parade, Les Mis, Miss Saigon and my beloved The Secret Garden), but this was the first I could really relate to. Relate to for no one reason in particular, since growing up in New Canaan, Connecticut hardly prepares one for life in Alphabet City in the 90s, but relate to completely nonetheless. We did go again with Aliza just after Rent opened, not wanting her to miss out on what we were sure and continue to be sure was the most culturally relevant piece of theater we would see in our young lives. To this day, I can sing the entire musical through without the music playing. It’s not what I would call a “pleasant” “listening” “experience”, but I can do it start to finish. Next time you see me at a meeting/concert/party, just ask. Or don’t, actually.

One of the most obviously meaningful things about seeing Rent so early on was that the cast was still crying over Jonathan Larson’s recent death. My mom and I had the overwhelming sense that we were seeing something so fresh that it would become increasingly less raw with every performance, so while the work itself would remain powerful, seeing it after it became a hit would somehow make it less dynamic.  Many years later, I saw Spring Awakening in previews by myself. I know about as much about adolescent date rape and failing out of school in 19th century Germany as I did about AZT and “trisexusals”, but as with Rent I had this sense that, due to the style of music, the choreography, or the untried spirit of the performances, I was seeing something that was and would become important when our cultural history was written.

Avenue Q opened on Broadway in July 2003 and spoke to a generation of young adults – many of whom probably wouldn’t consider themselves “theater people” – like Rent did and Spring Awakening would. I saw it for the first time last week, and on August 18, 2009, it did not speak to me. I don’t know why I didn’t see it when it sooner. I distinctly remember saying that I didn’t want to see a musical “with puppets and no dancing”. This is odd, of course, because Rent doesn’t have so much dancing, and I am very much in the Jim Henson camp; I grew up watching Sesame Street (as I’m sure most Avenue Q superfans did), I own two seasons of The Muppet Show on DVD, I was one of the few people who actually watched Muppets Tonight when it was on TV, I’ve seen all the Muppet movies, and Emmet Otter’s Jug-band Christmas is quite possibly my favorite movie of all time. But I really had no interest, even when Avenue Q won the Tony (over the much-hyped and extremely flawed Wicked, which was an amazing moment in Broadway history), even when non-artsy friends would reference “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”, even when it was discounted on TDF for months.

At the end of June, it was announced that Avenue Q would be closing, at which point I thought, “I’ve been told this is an important musical. I need to see it.” Of course at that point it was no longer on TDF or TKTS, so I plopped down the $70 and up to the rear balcony I went.

I wanted to see Avenue Q before it closed because I knew it was relevant to my generation. I knew exactly why it was relevant to my generation, in fact, and I knew which moments made it so. When one of the puppets is outed by his roommate (”  “), I knew he was going to sing a song about his “girlfriend” “who lives in Canada”. When the song, “It Sucks to Be Me” started, my friend leaned over and said, “this is the YouTube clip that’s always forwarded around.” I knew the puppets were going to have sex. I knew the main character was named Princeton, and that he would lament what he was going to do with his English major. I had never actually heard any of these songs, but knowing they were coming conjured an even stronger effect of meaningless-ness. 

A similar dichotomy occurs in classical music, though over many more than the six years it took me to come to and reject Avenue Q.  Some audience members like myself are so obsessed with seeing works that are Of This Moment that they are too quick to dismiss performances of Beethoven, say, as culturally irrelevant. Maybe though, the soloist or orchestra or conductor had a reason to perform that Beethoven now and brought a new, contemporary perspective that would have been “so 2009”. On the opposing team, we have audience members who will only attend concerts (plays, musicals, art exhibitions; read books) that have been proven as Important Things to them by buzz, media coverage, awards and longevity. I saw Avenue Q because I felt I should, and surprise of surprises, it meant nothing to me. Audience members want to see Mozart because they’re sure it will be good, and again, not surprisingly come away completely bored.  Or they know it’s important and that’s enough reason to love any performance. Or they just actually love it and can relate to it, like hundreds of years worth of audience members have done before them. I could and hopefully will see and read hundreds more plays in my lifetime, and I really don’t see anything knocking Twelfth Night out of my top three.

Epilogue: Lucy Slut, the bad-girl puppet from Avenue Q, is on the cover of Time Out New York this week. I was with a friend when I got my magazine in the mail, and exclaimed to him in a self-satisfied tone, “Ah-hah! I just saw that. And before Time Out told me to!”

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Choose Your Own Adventure, Blog Edition: I wrote another version of this blog entry that went something like this. I don’t know if it’s more or less interesting – relevant? – than the above. I saw Rent for a third time a few years back because my friend was playing Angel and also saw the movie version when it was released. In both instances, watching Rent as a period piece was truly unsettling.  When something is written for one generation and promoted that way, how can it be publicized and marketed when it becomes something else, even a few years later? If we promote new works’ capacity to speak to audiences in a way that theater or music pieces from the past cannot, then what is left to say about them when the their cultural moment is over?
Is the ability to market to one generation inversely related to promoting a piece in later years; the more relevant is was, the less relevant it will become?

Other sub-topics I left out in the interest of not making this a book:
If my future children asked me to take them to a Rent revival, would I take them? My dad saw the Hair revival with my sister recently, and at intermission told her, “I’m really enjoying this, but when your mom and I saw this the year we graduated high school we were all sitting in the audience wondering if we were going to be drafted.” AIDs could have a cure by the time I have kids, and then what would Rent be?

And, though I did not find Avenue Q relevant on the whole, I did buy the song “There’s a Fine, Fine Line” the next day and have been listening to it for a week straight. I call those songs “audition songs”, that is, songs that people will use in auditions for the Rest of Time. “Corner of the Sky”, “On My Own”…you know the type. So how and when does one song – or even one movement or musical phrase – continue to be relevant long after its source is not?