Off Broadway & On the Tube
From Pizazz! The Fabulous History of Musical Theater from Broadway and Beyond, by Tony Worthy
Based on an idea by Mrs. Khan
The Road to Ruin was a watershed moment in musical entertainment. That’s been established. ‘Nuff said.
But that had an absolutely
crazy effect on Broadway and the Small Screen alike. By this point Disney had basically taken over Broadway, which even became a joke in
The Road to Ruin. Why wouldn’t it? Disney knew what they’d done. I mean, seriously:
Muppets Way Off Broadway,
Muppetational!,
The Producers,
War of the Worlds,
Aladdin,
The Lion King, even (ironically)
The Road to Ruin itself were all produced by La Souris himself! And those are just the
successful shows! (Sorry,
The Dark Crystal; console yourself with that stage design award.)
Universal, Warner, and Columbia all followed suit, either buying up theaters or grabbing stakes in theater chains. Michael Eisner snagged a big stake in the Nederlander Company for Columbia in 1996 in what was probably the biggest move into theater. So, by the late 1990s Broadway itself was practically locked out for anything that wasn’t already a part of a media conglomerate. If you were a talented up-and-coming theater writer, well, gurl, tough titty. Get a job as a set designer or something because your original show had little to no chance of making it to Broadway unless you were willing to write something based on Daffy Duck.
So, well, talent needed to look elsewhere and the same kind of forces that diverted Ashman and Menken to write for Disney Animation were leading would-be Broadway performers to other opportunities. Sadly, Feature Animation was increasingly in the hands of established stage musical producers (my God, even Sondheim!) so even the sainted Howard’s coattails were cut off!
Meanwhile, Thomas Schumacher was totally done with Broadway and just about totally done with Disney. He’d tried to transfer out of Theater and into Animation, and had done well, but Glen Keane was promoted to the job that he wanted, so he nearly left for Warner or Filmation or Universal. But Bernie Brillstein at MGM pulled him into
The Road to Ruin before releasing him back to Theatrical Productions.
But then the Schu-man saw filming on Joss Whedon’s insane
Final Girl Musical Episode[1], which aired in ’96. It won an Emmy. Now, most saw a one-time stunt in this, but Tom saw the Future of Television in those tap-dancing demons. Or I should say he saw
half of the Future of TV.
He saw the
other half Off Broadway.
Specifically, he saw Jonathan Larson. You may have heard of him.
Well, Schumacher, based on the recommendation of Sondheim, with whom he’d been working on adapting
Into the Woods and who’d been writing the music for
Heart of Ice, went to see
Tick, Tick…Boom! Off Broadway in 1995. And when Sondheim tells you that you need to see a show, however small, you see the damned show!
He was floored. I mean, it was so original and groundbreaking! There was such a youthful energy to it. It was like nothing else. True. Meaningful. Addressing serious topics in a meaningful but entertaining way. He approached Larson and asked him what else he was working on. Larson showed him a workshop he was doing of
Rent. Schumacher was beyond floored. This was, he realized, the future of musical theater.
Larson had lined up an Off-Broadway venue and was fighting to get the show on Broadway, and the Nederlander had showed a lot of interest, but by this point Columbia had a stake in the Nederlander Company and was pushing for them to do their
Forrest Gump show (which while I like the film well enough, the show was just
awful, just saying). So Schumacher tried to get it a slot at a Disney-linked theater, but they were already booked with
Lion King and all. And eventually Schumacher did get
Rent on Broadway, but in the meantime he helped set it up Off Broadway.
But that’s just the beginning of the story.
Schumacher took Jamie Tarses at NBC to see Larson. Disney and NBC were in talks for a merger at the time, and it seemed likely that the two would soon work for the same company, but even if the merger fell through both knew that NBC was exactly the network for something like
Rent. “We need to get this on Television!” he said. He was thinking of a live performance on NBC, produced by Hyperion. A one-time event to take advantage of an audience primed for a renewed interest in musical entertainment.
She was thinking something more: a TV Series.
“Hear me out, Tom: an ongoing musical drama series,” she told him, pausing to take another long drag on her ubiquitous cigarette (or so I like to imagine it happened – I’m shameless, I know!). “He has the characters. He has the vibe.
Final Girl [the Musical episode] polled through the roof with Test Audiences. TV is primed for this!”
Schumacher grabbed Larson and Tarses and flew them both out to LA to meet with Bernie Brillstein.
Now, here’s where things get
super-dramatic: on the flight, Larson started having chest pains and other signs of heart attack! They took him straight to Cedars-Sinai to one of the best cardiologists that they knew. He rushed Larson into surgery! Larson had an aortic dissection[2], which let me assure you is as bad as it sounds. Any day it could have ruptured and he’d have died in seconds! They fixed the dissection and he recovered. Whew! The world nearly lost a genius just at the moment he was breaking out! He was later diagnosed with Marfan Syndrome, which they see in Hollywood fairly frequently since those with Marfan (like Chewbacca star Peter Mayhew) are often very tall.
But, crisis averted, Schumacher, Tarses, and Larson pushed the idea for
Rent: The Series even before it’s 1996 Off Broadway debut. Brillstein was skeptical (naturally) that a TV series could carry a musical experience for more than a single stunt episode, but he agreed to support a Pilot. In the meantime, Larson was asked by Steven Spielberg to write a musical episode for
ER, because by this point why not? While all expected George Clooney to steal the show, it would be Ming-Na Wen who became the breakout star from this, leading to her career breakout, starting with a revival of
Madame Butterfly. Unfortunately, this “career” was a typecast as “Asian Lounge Singer of questionable repute”. Typical. When Joss Whedon ultimately approached her for a certain Sci-Fi show, asking her to audition for a “hooker with a heart of gold” role, she stood her ground. “Captain or nothing, Joss.” God, I love her.
Anyway.
Rent: The Pilot debuted in early 1998. Anthony Rapp continued his role as the lead (and narrator) Mark, Neil Patrick Harris was recruited to play Roger in his big return to TV, Marcy Harriell played Mimi, Jesse L. Martin reprised his role as Tom, Wilson Cruz was recruited for Angel, the divine Idina Menzel stayed on as Maureen in her TV debut, Fredi Walker stayed on as Joanne, and Taye Diggs reprised his role as Benny. Series choreographer Savion Glover even made recurring appearances as The Squeegee Man, a homeless man with an incredible talent for dance who served as a source for wisdom and wry observation. It was an epically diverse cast for the time, and included lots of demographics like Trans Women (Angel) which was revolutionary for the time.
By this point Tarses had moved on to PFN and Les Moonves had taken over at NBC, only to quickly leave for The WB after getting caught pressuring actresses like Idina for sex in exchange for fame (OMG, what a shithead!). Even before this, musical episodes were starting to become a thing for existing shows, with even
Kenosha getting a musical episode (which, let’s face it, as great of a Dramedy[3] as it was, they did
not have the cast to pull that off!). So having an all-musical show wasn’t
quite as thoroughly insane as it might have been any other year. The Pilot got great numbers and so
Rent: The Series was greenlit with the same cast as the Pilot.
Rent: The Series debuted for the Fall ’98 season and it took over the Tuesday Night lineup, becoming the Tuesday Night anchor. The combination of the fun, rocking soundtrack and the youthful energy attracted that coveted 16-40 demographic, grabbing a wide swath of demographics with its diverse cast (basically anyone who was not a racist homophobe was tuning in, and frankly so did a lot of people who were!) and it made NBC a lot of money and helped put them back at the top of the ratings. The death of Angel to AIDS, which had been alluded to for several episodes, occurred late in Season 2 in time for the 2000 Sweeps, and became a “Who Shot JR” level event that drove NBC back to the top of the ratings, becoming second only to the Super Bowl that year.
(Image source Playbill)
Many expressed actual shock that they actually killed a popular main character (it would have been like
Happy Days killing Fonzie!). Larson told
The Today Show “That was one of the main points of the show. The tragedy of AIDS. If you don’t get that decision, then you don’t get
Rent.” The ratings took a hit without the popular and scene-stealing Angel (though there were a few flashback appearances, because they’re not evil), but it still made great numbers. Other characters would “die of AIDS” later on as actors left the show (the ultimate “trap door”), to the point where “
Rent Character dies of AIDS” became a running gag in comedy circles, with Roger ultimately dying in the finale. It would run for 5 seasons and was cancelled largely because Larson insisted on quitting while he was ahead. A non-Larson-linked spin-off called
Breakout, following some of the surviving characters moving to LA, died a quick death. Not from AIDS, but from Ratings.
And, well, obviously to us after the fact, it
was a breakout hit, but seriously
nobody expected that to happen. Some people say that all the musical episodes and the Tween musical stuff on Teen Disney like
Helium Kids and of course
The Road to Ruin had “primed the well” for a show as daring as
Rent, and maybe they did, but I think that the bigger issue was that by the late 1990s with a whole new millennium looming audiences were sick to death of the same formulaic crap again and again year after year. “Oh, hey, another three-camera Sitcom. Yaay.” “Ooh, look, another Hospital Drama. Hooray.” “How wonderful, yet another
Law & Order spinoff. Break open the effing champaign, gurl!”
Let’s face it. Anything truly fresh and original was bound to break out in that era. They could have followed Gary Bussey around with a camera. They could have brought back the
$64,000 Question starring Regis Philbin or launched celebrity cooking competitions. They could have mixed
The Prisoner with
Gilligan’s Island and marketed it as a cerebral action-drama and it would have been a breakout hit at that point. It just happened that TV Musicals became that “new thing”.
So naturally, with
Rent setting the stage, as it were, everyone else followed suit and 1998-2008 became “the decade of the TV Musical”. In addition to multiple existing series getting Musical Episodes, there was a flurry of TV Musical series launched between 1999 and 2004. CBS launched the C&W themed musical series
Smokey Mountain Jamboree in partnership with Dolly Parton’s Sandollar in 1999 and the hip-hop themed
Project made with Oprah’s Harpo Productions in 2001. ABC launched
Cheer in ‘99. NBC and Judd Apatow launched
Losers in 2000 as a response. ABC re-countered with the
Cheer spinoff
Glee Club Rejects in 2001. Steve Bochco even resurrected
Cop Rock in 2000, and this time made it actually work, eventually bringing over Jesse L. Martin after the end of
Rent[4]. PFN asked Trey Parker and Matt Stone to relaunch the totally ahead of its time musical TV series
Time Warped, but they instead pitched and got greenlit
Gold Rush, an irreverent and surreal comedy musical western that followed prospectors, homesteaders, cowboys, Native Americans, and even Mormon missionaries in the American West; it debuted in 2001 and gained a rabid cult following. The WB launched the musical teen drama
The Valley set in the San Fernando Valley of LA in 1999 and made a musical version of the comic
Shazam! in 2002. CBS even relaunched
The Flintstones as a musical series in 1999, helmed by the talented young Seth MacFarlane[5] in his first solo project, which naturally turned weirdly popular and popularly weird.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg as other musical shows appeared on all five networks and all over Cable and musical episodes became an ongoing stunt episode.
And frankly few if any of them honestly delved into the serious issues that
Rent did, at least in a more than a superficial way. Well,
Losers and
Project both did pretty good by this score.
Cop Rock tried, God bless it.
So, yea, Tom Schumacher took a little trip to see an Off Broadway one man show at the suggestion of Sondheim and suddenly TV Musicals are a thing for a decade. They fell out of fashion in the 2010s, naturally, and Musical Episodes, when they happened, were inevitably dripping with irony from that point forward. But just as Disco was reevaluated in the 1990s and 2000s, we’re starting to unironically see Musical TV again.
Larson, of course, has had an ongoing career in stage and screen. Schumacher, of course, became a high-level executive at Disney-NBC Television after this, and a member of the Disney-NBC board. One of the first things that he did was set aside one of the Disney-linked theaters on Broadway exclusively for original productions by talented producers not linked to existing IP.
Lin Manuel was one of its first.
Isn’t it funny how things like this can work out?
[1] Joss Whedon reportedly had wanted to do a Buffy musical episode from the very beginning of the show. Here, production of
The Road to Ruin has spurred him to do it sooner.
[2] In our timeline he experienced chest pains, dizziness, and other signs of serious heart issues, but the doctors at Cabrini Medical Center and St. Vincent's Hospital completely missed the dissection and misdiagnosed Larson with flu or stress. He died of a rupture in January of 1996 just as
Rent was breaking out Off Broadway. NY State investigators faulted the hospital, noting that with surgical intervention he could have lived. Here, the pressure change of the flight led to a blood pressure change that initiated some of the symptoms.
[3] More on this in an upcoming guest post.
[4] At one point Jerry Orbach will guest star as a corrupt ADA.
[5] Hat tip to
@nick_crenshaw82, of course. MacFarlane’s
Larry & Steve pitch and pilot were rejected by CBS and Cartoon City for being superficially a bit too much like
My Dog Zero and
Wallace & Gromit. However, he jumps at the idea of running
The Flintstones and ends up pitching it as the first animated musical TV show.
