Populism and The Public’s Broadway Pipeline
“Empire State of Mind,” New York City’s unofficial hip-hop anthem, blasts every night in Times Square from tourist buses and bike carriages speeding by. Thirty blocks south, the song marks a triumphant but baffling finale for the mostly-jukebox musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” with songs by Alicia Keys (Mostly-jukebox, because she did write a few songs for the production, but the bulk of the show is populated by hits from the Grammy-winning artist’s catalog). The Public Theater prides itself on being a populist institution by the people, for the people. Artistic Director Oskar Eustis frequently likens its mission to that of the Greek theater in ancient Athens: the center of civic life in the polis, where the great issues of the early democracy were aired and debated. This noble mission still guides programs like each Summer’s Public Works and the free Shakespeare in the Park offerings, but it seems the mainstage productions have strayed off course.
Technically, this one’s not about Alicia Keys. Instead, we follow Ali, a bi-racial 17-year-old girl navigating her relationship with her single white mom and a crush on the 20-something man, Knuck, who plays drums in the courtyard of their Hell’s Kitchen apartment building. We’re surely meant to imagine this as a semi-autobiographical story, but that slight fictionalizing does little more than sand down the edges of whatever true details we’re missing out on. Playwright Kristoffer Diaz (The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity) keeps that fictional tale within a safe range of realism, the plot reminiscent of the coming-of-age fare one might find a Netflix original movie.
It’s fine, it’s good, it’s in the same ballpark of quality as most other jukebox musicals featuring the music of a famous artist. If you like Keys’ music more, you’ll like this more; if you like Carole King’s music more, you’ll like Beautiful more. Some examples of the form have transcended, such as Jersey Boys and Tina, owing mostly to the authentic drama of those artists’ life stories and a willingness by the creators to delve into those depths. But most of these jukebox shows aren’t so much pieces of theater as they are Wikipedia pages brought to life by musical-theaterified versions of your favorite songs where you can also enjoy some visual spectacle. Typically — and Hell’s Kitchen was no exception — that spectacle is a lightly-stylized version of the artist’s hometown.
That said, Camille Brown’s choreography shines in Hell’s Kitchen, an exploration of hip-hop and social dance that with perfect ’90s outfits by Dede Ayite becomes the main source of fun for the evening. And other than Keys’ four new songs, it’s the most original artistry on display in Hell’s Kitchen.
The girl-meets-boy love story gestures towards the political a few times, mostly during brief episodes of police violence. Far from engaging with these politics at all, though, they merely feel like window dressing in a 90s period piece. These moments reverberate in the fact that they still feel tragically current, but they don’t feel like they tie even remotely into anything else the show is saying. It is, of course, totally acceptable for this show to exist as a sort of apolitical celebration of New York City, as it seems to be structurally. But what can we make of these attempts at depth? The whole mood reminds one of the recent Academy-Award nominated Freddie Mercury biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, where Mercury’s queerness is framed as irresponsible party-boy behavior. Incidental and inconvenient but hardly a focus.
Some mainstage shows at the Public Theater in recent years have promised entire works based on the supposed progressive politics of the theater and its audience. But these shows mostly end up offering the aesthetics of political and civil discourse, with little substance. Suffs (now headed to Broadway, produced by Hillary Clinton) and Joan of Arc (songs by David Byrne), for instance, both approached feminism in broad strokes designed to appeal to popular audiences. Another by Byrne, Here Lies Love, made a great stir for its immersive disco design, but failed to say much of anything about its subject, Filipino dictator Imelda Marcos.
Maybe it is not possible for Oskar Eustis’ vision of a People’s Theater to exist as long as the economic conditions for theater remain so dire. The apparent strategy for the mainstage shows is to play host to extremely likely Broadway-transfers, with the hope of marketing to that corner of the brain we all share to some degree: the smug “I saw it downtown first” reflex. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with their financial plight — The Public has reduced staff over the past few years and put their Under the Radar Festival on hiatus — much has been said about how hard it is out here for nonprofit theaters. But if the commercial model is part of what is eating away at nonprofit theater, there is no honor in becoming a willing cog in that machine. You’re not going to fight the rise of an American theater dominated by cynically produced, cookie cutter jukebox musicals, by helping to “develop” those shows. And the rubber stamp of artistic legitimacy provided by that “development” is quickly losing its caché.
The model of hosting likely Broadway transfers is by no means new to nonprofit theaters. Every year the Public makes a healthy chunk of change off the great successes that have passed through their doors, as part of royalties they get in these developmental agreements. The allure of bringing up the next HAIR, or Chorus Line, or, perhaps most enticingly, Hamilton, must be all-consuming for the programming staff. But the ethos that gave rise to those daring, first-of-their-kind shows seems sorely missing now. Instead, the focus seems to be on getting members to shell out thousands of dollars to see Alicia Keys herself in person.
The concept of “selling out” seems to have gone out of vogue now everything’s gotten so bad that everyone has to do it. But that toll of shame, paid when sacrificing morals for financial gain, had a function: encouraging us to rage against the dying of the light. I didn’t hear a hint of it when listening to Oskar Eustis’ preshow speech passionately arguing that this show was the best of what we do, the pinnacle of the populist work the Public does. But there’s a difference between what is popular and what is populist, and it’s disheartening to see them so confused.
