Back to school….

Yesterday I went to a class myself, as an invited guest of my good friend Bert Fink, who is teaching a course on the history of the musical there this semester; and my own contribution was to talk about British and international musicals. In an intriguing and completely unexpected coincidence, we had a warm-up act yesterday: Sir Elton John, in town for the opening of Billy Elliot, came into to talk to the group before we arrived. If Andrew Lloyd Webber has come to define the British musical of the last forty years, Elton John has been bringing the pop arena into play with a series of contributions to musicals like The Lion King (first written for film), Aida (as yet unseen in London) and the flop Lestat, all on Broadway, and of course Billy in London, Australia and now Broadway.

But his celebrity - and already-established musical credentials - have put him in a different category entirely to the aspiring, unknown young writers that are participating in this programme. And it was fascinating to see them lapping up the past as they think about forging a future in this precarious world; and to find such a full class, too, and from such international sources (as well as Americans, there are three Brits, a New Zealander, a South African, and Far Eastern participants).

All 33 registered participants turned up - a testament indeed to the palpable enthusiasm that Bert instils in them (faculty chair Sarah Schlesinger, who has herself written musicals that have included The Ballad of Little Jo, first seen at Chicago’s Steppenwolf and subsequently at London’s Bridewell in 2003, told him before the class that students keep telling her how much they are enjoying the classes and want them to continue).

It’s always fun, of course, to share one’s own enthusiasms, so no wonder Bert has such a good time teaching this class, and I did, too, especially with such a receptive and attentive audience. Of course, we had a lot of ground to cover in just two hours; but it was a pleasure to provide an instant overview of Novello and Coward, Sandy Wilson, Lionel Bart, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, and on to Lloyd Webber, Howard Goodall and Richard Thomas; but while most of these once travelled regularly to Broadway, writers like Goodall and Thomas are yet to do so (though I saw Nottingham-based company New Perspectives bring The Hired Man to off-Broadway’s 459E59 Street Theatre as part of the Brits Off Broadway season there at the start of the summer, and I came over for a concert performance of Thomas’s Jerry Springer - the Opera at Carnegie Hall at the start of the year, too).

I came away inspired with hope for the future of musicals; though the cynic in me wonders if we are over-training people for a career that ultimately may not be there for many of them, since so few original musicals are actually produced, at least the building blocks are being put in place to enable some of them to at least try to succeed. And meanwhile, they are surrounded by peers who are trying to do the same thing: it can only be inspirational.

In Britain, by contrast, trying to forge a career as a composer in musical theatre is at best going to be accidental; there’s no structure for it all. The Tisch initiative proves that there’s another possibility.