THE MIND-BLOWING MUNY SHOWS MUSICALS ARE NOT JUST FOR GEEKS AND ELITES

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Anyone who has the impression that Broadway musicals are just for theater kids, gays or Manhattan elites with hundreds to spend on a single ticket should travel to the center of the country to check out the The Muny in St. Louis. It just won the Regional Theater Tony Award this month, and I attended for the first time on its opening night on Monday June 16, a day declared “Muny Day” by St. Louis’ mayor to celebrate its new national status and the opening of the new season. What I found was that this 107-year-old, 11,000-seat outdoor theater, the oldest and largest in the country, which gives away 1,500 of its tickets every single summer night – even Broadway is dark on Mondays, but not The Muny! -- to fans devoted enough to spend the day picnicking in Forest Park to get in, is unlike anything else in the country and is a place where, you might say, everyone is a theater kid.

While most musicals make millions of dollars per week on Broadway, and are viewed as big commercial enterprises (especially to fans of straight plays, which make much less even on Broadway), a certain perception of marginalization persists. Hollywood, for example, has been trying to disguise the fact that it’s making a rash of musical movies by promoting them in ads that completely fail to mention they’re musicals. This strategy was used with Mean Girls, Dear Evan Hansen, The Color Purple, Willy Wonka and even Wicked, among others. Why hide the fact that the characters sing in these movies if mainstream audiences aren’t turned off by theater kid fare? But The Muny was packed with families last Monday night, and though it was pretty white there it was diverse in age, with audience members from childhood to at least 94 (that would be my father, who attended with me).

The season at The St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre (as it is still officially known, though it no longer performs any operas) is beginning with a rarely produced sort of Broadway “deep cut” called Bring It On, which picked up a Tony nomination for Best Musical in 2011 and was written by three previous winners of the Best Musical Tony: composers Lin Manuel-Miranda, who had won for writing In The Heights and would go on to sweep for Hamilton, and Tom Kitt, who had won for the music in Next to Normal, and book writer Jeff Whitty, who had won for Avenue Q. The musical is not Broadway’s finest, stuffed with high school cliches, but it was entertaining and played with amazing clarity to almost everyone in the 11,000 seat house, including those in the far rear free seats. In fact, though I was in the middle, I could tell this because the loudest cheers and laughter always came from the back, often at moments you’d have to be following the show closely to be laughing. The show, based on the Bring it On film series, is about a high school cheerleader who has risen in her senior year to become captain of the cheer squad until she is suddenly “redistricted” into another, more diverse school on the other side of town without a cheerleading team. Using a mix of Miranda’s hip-hop and Kitt’s showtunes, the musical charts her attempt to start a team at the new high school. Its chief virtue, amid so much that is not original, is its message: one does not have to win to succeed.

The Muny is located in Forest Park, a giant Central Park-like area with 1,326 acres of green space that features art and history museums, tennis courts, a golf range, lots of picnic area, and more. Finding the right parking lot for the first time in this vast park was somewhat of a challenge. Google Maps took us to the front of the theater where the roads are blocked off for VIP parking, but we found a spot in a visitor lot a 16-minute walk from the front gates and discovered on a beautiful 80-degree Monday the joy of this mind-blowing theatrical resource, nestled on a hill as a gorgeous sunset enveloped the stage, surrounded by food and beverage stands like those at a baseball stadium. There are of course concert venues as large and larger, but they don’t fill a summer schedule almost exclusively with musicals (there is one concert scheduled this summer). The theater was first envisioned over 100 years ago by the then-mayor, who stood between two trees and declared he would build a theater there, according to a speech before the show began that celebrated the new season and the Tony win.

Attending The Muny keeps up my streak of visiting all – but one -- of the Tony-winning Regional Theaters, as described in a blog post last month that ranked the almost 50 theaters nationwide.

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