Are critics snooty about musicals? Sheila Hancock thinks so and has said so forcefully in a Radio Times interview. I beg to differ. A lot of my colleagues are musical buffs and can tell you precisely which numbers got cut in out-of-town try-outs of Broadway hits. And even I, often characterised as an anti-musical puritan, was reared on the genre. One of my earliest West End memories is of a superb Joan Littlewood musical, Make Me an Offer, in which a young Hancock stopped the show with a number called, if memory serves, Isn't it Romantic? But that was an age ago and times have changed.
If I'm more sceptical now, it's for several reasons. The first is what I see as the unhealthy dominance of the musical in the West End. Sheila is right to point out that certain theatres – Palladium, Drury Lane, Apollo Victoria – demand big musicals. But many of the medium-size London theatres also now house tune-and-toe shows. Walk along Shaftesbury Avenue and you'll find a Michael Jackson tribute at the Lyric, Hair coming into the Gielgud and Les Miserables at the Queen's. Totter along a bit further and you'll discover Priscalla at the Palace – where I once saw Olivier in the Entertainer – and Hairspray at the Shaftesbury. My point is simply this. Once the West End offered a rich diet of comedies, thrillers, straight plays and classic revivals as well as revues and musicals. Now, as on Broadway, one particular genre dominates.
This also has a wider effect on the culture. TV, in particular, treats the musical as the only theatrical form that matters. Hancock is taking part in the latest BBC reality show, Over the Rainbow, in which 10 hours of peak-time TV will be given over to helping Andrew Lloyd Webber find his Dorothy. Obviously it's priceless free publicity for the new Wizard of Oz. But can you imagine the BBC giving over 10 hours to the National, the Royal Court or the regional theatre? Or, for that matter, mounting a Shakespeare play? And it's a measure of our sycophancy towards the musical that my phone rang regularly last week with TV and radio shows – which normally aren't a bit interested in theatre – seeking a comment on Love Never Dies.
I'm not actually knocking Lloyd Webber since he, at least, periodically writes new musicals. One of my big beefs about the genre right now is that it lives almost entirely off the past: either revivals of golden oldies, transpositions of film hits (Sister Act, Legally Blonde, Priscilla) or songbook anthologies (Jersey Boys, We Will Rock You, Dreamboats and Petticoats).
Where, I've asked a score of times, are the new musicals? Every time I pose the question I get anxious invitations to see try-outs in fringe venues. But the point is that mounting costs and managerial timidity mean that brand-new shows, unless they're by Sondheim or Lloyd Webber, stand no chance in today's West End. And that, for me, is a sign of a form in desperate crisis. Far from being snooty about musicals, I feel sad that a once vibrant form is currently dwindling into a state of neon-lit necrophilia that no one dares to discuss.