Has Theatre Finally Run Out of Ideas? 🎭
This week, while reading The Economist, I stumbled across a terrific article titled: “Has culture in the 21st century become samey and dull?” Ooh.
The 21st century, author W. David Marx argues, has stopped innovating. “Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention,” he writes in his new book, “there is now a blank space.”
Another way to understand 21st-century Western culture, with its subtle variations and recurring patterns, is as a chronicle of relative complacency.
Global upheavals have certainly shaken the arts, but none have matched the cataclysms that propelled the creative leaps of the early 20th century, which Marx so admires. In extremis, could today’s meme-addled creators rise to that level of genius? Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.
Lionsgate bet that its newest franchise gamble will pay off as The Hunger Games: On Stage landed with a thud at London’s Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre. Indeed, the latest entrant in Hollywood’s increasingly desperate flirtation with theatre.
Spare a thought, then, for Deadline’s Baz Bamigboye, who delivered the best review of the lot: “It’s adapted by Conor McPherson from The Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins and the film starring Jennifer Lawrence. There’s nothing more to say about it.” Oof.
None of this is new, of course. Disney rewrote the rulebook decades ago, turning The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin into Broadway cash machines. But with studios choking on franchise fatigue and battered by unpredictable box office returns, theatrical spin-offs are no longer indulgent experiments, they are a survival strategy.
Universal tried it last year with hit Broadway musical of Death Becomes Her. Lionsgate has gone further, building a full theatrical pipeline: a Wonder stage adaptation opens in Boston this December, while Now You See Me Live occupies the Sydney Opera House. Next year brings a La La Land musical and a new staging of Dirty Dancing. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Talented Mr Ripley, Freaky Friday, Beetlejuice & Karate Kid – The Musical. And on it goes.
Meanwhile, the pipeline runs both ways: Wicked is now completing the holy trinity: book to stage to mega-budget film(s).
Studios say they’re merely responding to shifting audience behaviour. “In an age dominated by digital consumption, that shared live experience is hugely appealing,” says Jenefer Brown, Lionsgate’s president of global products and experiences. It’s hard to disagree. “Experiential” remains the industry’s favourite magic word.
Yet quietly, a more intriguing shift is underway: London has become Hollywood’s R&D department. Soaring costs in New York mean US producers are fleeing to the West End, where it’s cheaper to test, tweak, and *if necessary* crash a new show without obliterating the budget. Why risk a Broadway belly-flop when you can incubate your next franchise hit in Canary Wharf?
If you are just joining us, the West End itself is thriving. Last year, attendance reached 17.1 million, an 11% jump above pre-pandemic levels. One American investor told me, only half-seriously: “I don’t want every producer in the States getting the same idea.”
They already have. London’s 2024 season resembled a parade of American imports: glossy musical machines (Clueless, The Devil Wears Prada), star-led prestige offerings (Brie Larson in Elektra), and quirky experiments (Oscar at The Crown, Shucked). On the surface, this looks like an injection of new blood; beneath it lies a more troubling question: is British theatre becoming a convenient laboratory for America’s unfinished work?
This might be easier to swallow if the West End weren’t already drowning in shows built from existing IP. Paddington: The Musical isn’t awful; it just lacks crucial musicality.
Either way, original musicals, meanwhile, are thin on the ground. In their place: historical remixes, jukebox nostalgia, reimaginings, movie remakes.
Producers argue that spiralling costs leave them no choice; familiar titles are the only dependable way to keep the lights on. Perhaps. But London’s stages cannot become a playground for Hollywood risk-management. Nor can they survive on a diet of recycled brands. The West End is booming, but unless we protect space for bold, original work, what’s the point? Audiences deserve more than factory-farmed storytelling dressed up as innovation.
And it’s not just about movie musicals. Nadine Rennie, co-chair of the Casting Directors’ Guild, recently claimed that casting household names in shows is “killing” the industry.
Are producers increasingly lazy, arrogant, or simply incompetent, or are they being unfairly chastised for paying warm homage to the movies and intellectual property they, and we, grew up with? And after 2,500 years of this thing we call theatre, are the chances of writing something brand new simply, mathematically, fewer?
So let’s put some sensible bans in place: no more staging movie adaptations purely to cash in, no more flying in celebrities to drain the energy from a production, and no more long-running shows monopolising our great West End theatres.
Anyway. Broadway diva Patti LuPone nailed it this week when she said: “I think that Congress, federal and Supreme Court judges, and Broadway musicals should have term limits.”
That’s all.
