Hairspray, Jekyll and Hyde, Jesus Christ Superstar, Phantom of the Opera, Lion King, Wicked, Tommy, and more!

Fusions in nature have been going on ever since the Big Bang. In fact, none of us would be here if it weren’t for the combination of disparate elements. Fusions in food occurred a little more recently—in my home state of California. We have everything from Asian to Latin to Swedish fusion—all at the same table. Not to mention the granddad of them all – Reese’s^® Peanut Butter Cups^® in 1923. Composer Gustav Mahler was a fusion artist himself, combining gypsy, military band, and klezmer music to create a series of Woody Allen-like symphonic psychodramas (Mahler and Sigmund Freud were close friends, after all). Leonard Bernstein didn’t shy away from musical borrowings either. His hit musical West Side Story was one of the first to incorporate popular Latin musical styles, and the sultry heat of those mambo drums mixes effortlessly with Bernstein’s Upper West Side Copland-meets-Rodgers-meets-Cugat aesthetic. You could hardly imagine the swaying samba rhythm of “Tonight” being replaced with the bouncy beat of a Lawrence Welk polka.

Tonight we celebrate another musical fusion—that of Broadway and rock ’n’ roll. It seems perfectly natural now, but it caused a sensation 42 years ago when something called Hair—The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, with its songs of hippie “free love,” anti-war protesting, and nudity, burst on the scene. Three years later we had the first Rock Opera with the young Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. Lord Lloyd Webber comes from a family of classical musicians (his brother is the famous cellist Julian Lloyd Webber), and he is probably the single most popular composer for the theater alive today. Along with rock influences, there is always a strong classical and operatic undercurrent in his music. His biographer has noted the strong similarity between J.C. Superstar’s “I Don’t Know How To Love Him” and the slow movement of the Mendelssohn violin concerto: “Lloyd Webber brings a new dramatic tension to Mendelssohn’s original melody through the confused emotions of Mary Magdalene.” That’s some fusion!

The Tony Award-winning musical The Wiz, along with Dreamgirls, is in part a Motown/Broadway fusion that goes back to the first African American productions of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle and their 1921 landmark musical Shuffle Along. Fusion musicals like Wicked and Lion King exist happily side-by-side with the more traditional South Pacific and Mary Poppins. It is exactly this reinvention of the Broadway musical that has reinvigorated the American art form. Just as our culture thrives on a regular interjection of new ideas, styles, languages, and music, the arts and theater thrive on new ways of looking at old forms and stories. Who would have guessed that Baltimore’s “King of Trash” John Waters and his movie Hairspray, featuring a 300-pound drag queen, would be the source for Broadway’s runaway hit of 2002? The music you are listening to tonight has become, for the most part, like an old friend. Now “Pinball Wizard” and “Dancing Queen” are about as edgy as a rousing rendition of Perry Como’s “Hoop-de-doo.” So what will be the next wave to hit Broadway? Look no further than last year’s Tony winner In The Heights, a joyful mixture of musical theater and hip-hop, with salsa, meringue, and soul music thrown in for good measure. Maybe next summer we’ll have a program called Broadway Raps. I’ll probably be at home watching my director’s cut DVD of Pink Flamingos.

—Emil de Cou, NSO@Wolf Trap Festival Conductor