Thank you Allison from The Orpheum. I don't know much about art, but I know what I like !

Whoa on your total insult of U2. The most over rated rock band ever? That is why you are a critic, Elisabeth. If you had any talent you'd be on the stage instead just an observer.

Thrity years in Broadway theatre has taught me that
the unique collaboration required to create, stage, and market a muscial theatre piece -- particularly with the mystical, mythologized, and moribund business model that remains stubbonly in place in both the not-for-profit and commercial theatre -- can indeed be realized by artists who have met their successes in recording studios and concert arenas. Good is good, and the process is painful for anyone and the odds of success --artistic and commericial -- have been slim-to-none since Thespis stepped out of the chorus. (And pissed off Aeschylus, who hated ad libs, believe you me). Egos will always be painfully deflated, talents come up short, dedication and passion will be stretched beyond their endurance, and the bottom line sticks itself up the crack of creativity when it is least desired or expected.

When its magic is present, it transcends category, genre, formula, and market niche.

Good is just good.
Go for, whoever you are -- plunk out a lead sheet, cut the fat in Act Two, get your chiropractor to invest -- just go for it.

Go Green Day. Go Duncan Sheik. Go Lady Gaga. Go Ahrens & Flaherty and Yip Harburg and BMI workshop.

Just make it good, that's all we can ask...

Though I'm giving Green Day a bit too much credit...and it's hilarious that they're comparing them to, say, the Ramones.

The false dichotomy that your guests are presenting, that rock is hip and rebelious and musicals are "art" is ridiculous. As pompous as the critic is, she's right that Green Day and other old rock is hardly cutting edge...but it has an inherent substance to it that is utterly diluted when turned into the gutless cheesiness of a musical. What a way to destroy an album but have musical-theatre actors warble through it.

This woman's understanding of musicals and rock music is very amusing, everything she says is incorrect, how does someone get a job as a music critic who thinks that the musical on the town was written in the 60's???? And then she says it is her favorite musical of all time?

POWER METAL MUSICAL!!!

This is the first I've heard Elisabeth Vincentelli's voice. Nice to put it with her reviews finally, liked her fiesty take today, and I'm more of a fan now.

The Tim Burton show is vapid tripe expressly designed to lure the slack-jawed yokels from flyover country and move merchandise in the museum's Design Store. Burton is an abject hack.

This segment is nauseating, can we talk about just music on this show from now on, musical theater just doesn't qualify.

We can't really lump all rock musicals together. Jersey Boys and Movin' Out were crap while Rent, Hair and even Rock of Ages were much more enjoyable (because the latter weren't just a story based on an entire album but rather songs written for the story or a collection of songs from an era).

Broadway is great at dumbing things down. the medium of the musical seems to take things from other mediums and make them very bland. i do like the rock opera, ie jesus christ superstar, tommy. however broadway is the ruiner of things.

Greenday, like U2, is perfect for midtown, totally generic. I would love to see a marilyn manson musical, he gets theater.

"Great Musicals"? Do they really exist? Musicals as an artform, like soap operas, have always struck me as pretty ridiculous. As to the "we've become a pop culture society" / "its not literature!" / "hey kids get off my lawn" hand-wringing, please. "The Wire" crushes anything in the Dickens ouvre.

Great artists will always continue to make great art. There's no point in crying for cigar-chomping producers and execs to bring that art to the mainstream because it can't exist there. The mainstream will probably always be this banal slop for the masses, even if they have their moments of being clever, whether in the form of a pop rock group or a popular musical.

PS- Yes, U2 is awful!

That Green Day trailer looks ridiculous. Fake punk rock vocals (until his vibrato slips through) complete with up with people voices and inane dancing. When you add the incoherent 'plot' what you get is a sad case of watered down rubbish.

yesterday's pop is today's classic. e.g., Shakespeare, Wagner

I don't think you can rule out a style; rather, it is the quality of the work itself. I found In the Heights to be an interesting mix of current pop/latin/rap/etc styles that by definition shouldn't work on the GWW, but it was staged and orchestrated in a way that brought something new while understanding the history and traditions of the theater.

Exactly what your male guest said.

I think it's GREAT to have rock musicals. Like some of your other listeners mentioned, Tommy, Rent, Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair were VERY successful shows. I did not get into theater until I started performing in them. Theater goers are not into classic theater and I think in order for theater to survive, it must change with the times.

Good luck to American Idiot.

By the way you forgot to mention another really good current rock musical, Memphis.

I don't have an issue with a rock musical. I just think it should be original.

What's the difference between a rock musical and a rock opera?

All the concern with the meeting of rock (punk/rap/etc.) and Broadway is about "purity" (of genre) and "authenticity" (whatever the hell that means), two ridiculous concepts when talking about ANY kind of popular music.

Certainly some pop/rock musicals are more successful than others, but rarely because of the ethical "integrity" of their scores.

You talk about how Lady Gaga is like the Flo Ziegfeld of today. FYI - she went to NYU to study, what? Musical Theater!

The wife just told me to turn off the radio and turn on the TV....What is on Turner Classic Movies now? One of several of the Ziegfield films..with a big musical number featuring lyrics "...you'll be glad in Trinadad"...
Creating "musicals" around pop songs have been around for years...think of the songs in the Abbott and Costello or the later Marx Bros. movies. Yes the did make a movie/musical around Dorsey's hits.

Nothing is new under the sun.

Whoa, maldo, the tim burton show? Strange place to grind your axe... Its a great show by the way.

PASSING STRANGE was excellent, but I saw it as a film. Loathed NEXT TO NORMAL, SPRING AWAKENING (good underlying play, though). The lyrics were sophomoric in both those shows. MOVING OUT worked. CONTACT worked. SMOKEY JOE'S CAFE was enjoyable. I liked Sondheim's ROAD SHOW.

This discussion is ridiculous, try choosing some guests who have equal knowledge about anything, these two people are highlighting the idiocy in each other beautifully. Stop this smackdown, i can't listen to one more second.

I would like to see a Musical with Elton John's pre 1980s music. It's catchy, has great lyrics, and many of the songs feel like part of a larger story.

I'm totally in Mark's corner. The idea of rock used in musicals is just a cave-in to the lowest-common-denominator music.

Neither the "music" (being generous here) nor the words ("lyrics" is too high a praise of a word to use) have nothing to do with how musical shows work.

I have no issue with rock musicals but Green Day? What hackneyed, drab, repetitive teen angst.

Most rock on Broadway is just tourist bait, a way of luring the lowbrow fannypack set from Missouri. It's just like the Tim Burton show at the Museum of Modern Art -- blatant pandering.

Mellisa is correct.

I remember once asking a rock star friend if he had read Dom Dellilo's, Great Jones Street which I was reading and thought was fantastic. His reply without any derogatory tone was, "That's my life. I live that. To me it's completely cliche and uninteresting."

NTN is as cliche as it gets. Your other guest just doesn't know rock music enough to know. Saying the music is harmonically interesting means nothing. NTN is a totally ridiculous cliche to anyone who is IN rock music. If you're a tourist from the Midwest choosing between singing cats, lions, brides or NTN, it might be very compelling.

Why not make a Ziggy Stardust musical?

This woman's voice is among the all time most irritating and the man is pompous and boring. Other than that, this is a fabulous segment.

If you want to kill the art form of musical theater then keep making these juke box rock musicals. All it is is disposable theater.

As a sort of foreword, theatre and music are probably the two contenders for being the oldest art form, and for that reason they necessarily go well together.

Although I am not a fan of musical theatre, I agree with the guest, that at the moment it is rock music that has dried up and become stagnant, many would argue with the death of Kurt Cobain, and I would tend to agree with this as well. The problem with musical theatre, on the other hand, has been more of a chronic illness: shallow cliches, predictable plots, and pandering to a low denominator in order to make a huge profit (much of the same ailments we have been seeing chronically in Hollywood). If rock has one thing to offer musical theatre, it is that punk rock "F*** You" attitude which has been conspicuously missing from Green Day, who are punk only via a bygone aesthetic.

I don't get the hand-wringing over 'rock musicals.' The music of the classical musicals of the '40s and 50s WAS the pop-music of the day. A lot of the songs we think of as standards are from now-forgotten Broadway musicals.

I think it's weird that there isn't more rock music on Broadway. Not to mention hip-hop and rap. And the rock-based music you do hear is just that: rock-based. Like rock music filtered through a Broadway-orchestra filter. The reviews of Stew's Passing Strange drove me crazy, because the reviewers acted like the music was some crazy revolution.

Glee + Ramones is inherently uncool. Therein lies the rub- rock is supposedly cool and subversive and musical theater is "totally lame" (as it were). Of course, Green Day is about as subversive Cream of Chicken soup, but the dichotomy still exists.

My problem with rock music in the theatre, is that the rock genre, with the repetative and one-dydnamic form of the songs, is not readily suited to lyrics as act-able speech. The lyrics in a Beatles song are too poetic to make sense as a theatre song. One of the reasons Tim Rice and ALW were so successful with JCS and Evita, is that they creatively bridged this divide. Spring Awakening was less successful in this way, for me. Jukebox musicals suffer from this flaw as a rule. I don't think it really works to use Rock in the theatre.

It's not a rock musical. There was no intention to make a musical out of American Idiot.

I've heard some dreadful "traditional style" showtunes over the last 20 years, so the "jukebox drama" ala Jersey Boys was a breath of lively air. I've actually heard there's a good possibility of a musical based on the Tommy James upcoming memoir "Music,The Mob and Me" hitting the GWW.

I went and saw We Will Rock You in London a few years back on the advice of a 13 year old girl.
I learned 2 things that day, 1-good music does not make a good musical and 2-never take advice from a 13 year old girl.

Major in your Major. There's no place for punk rock on Broadway. If The Lion King started a club tour of punk rock palaces, it would be almost as bad- probably worse. In the words of the mid 90s Offspring hit- Keep 'em separated.

But then- CBGB's in now a Varvatos boutique, so what do I know?

The guest mentioned Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. Both made movies or had movies made about them and their bands and music.

I have the same concern with this that I do with album re-issues and Pop Artists doing standards. There is no creativity. It's just producers trying to make money off of a ready-made audience.

I don't see any problem with translating rock to the stage. However, I often find that rock music is written to be performed with a one-off intensity that rarely translates well from the vocal screaming and belting to a trained sustainable style of singing.

The difference between Ian Gillan and Ted Neely's portrayals of Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar is a perfect example. Neely can hit the notes and could long after his initial portrayal. Gillan's version is in my opinion considerably more intense and powerful but hardly an example of sustainable performance style.

Rock and Roll is a fine fit for Broadway but there's no way to maintain the raw intensity of the screaming and yelling over the long run.

Hello? Ever heard of Hair or Jesus Christ Superstar or more recently -- Rent? All wildly successful "rock" musicals.

I'm a huge closet musical theater nut and hell yes, rock should have a place on Broadway. I'd take Green Day over Billy Joel but that's just me.

Worse-case scenario the Green Day musical increases interest in Broadway among younger audiences. Isn't that what Broadway needs?