Rapture or Ruin?

Theater Talkback: YouTube on Broadway
By BEN BRANTLEY
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Eamon Foley plays a teenager who goes by the screen name Broadwayislove09 in the musical “Everyday Rapture.”
There was a time, not so long ago, when if a Broadway diva – say, Carol Channing or Patti LuPone – wanted to watch somebody else singing her signature songs in her signature style, she had to leave her dressing room and find a drag show.
Now she need only turn on her computer and settle in at that 24-hour virtual piano bar called YouTube. There, staring into their own cameras (usually from their own bedrooms), would-be Carols and Pattis and Bernadettes and Idinas of all ages and sexes can be discovered crooning (or lip-synching) away on private clouds of narcissism, for the delectation of the general public.
Of course, such dedicated exhibitionists weren’t meant to be confined exclusively to the small screens of laptops and iPhones. This season, a chosen few of them are making – gasp! – their Broadway debuts. Yes, in one of the stranger new moves in the evolving dance between venerable old Broadway and new technology, YouTube has become a supporting player in two recently opened shows (both, as it happens, Roundabout Theater Company productions): “Everyday Rapture” (at the American Airlines Theater) and “Sondheim on Sondheim” (at Studio 54).
In “Sondheim on Sondheim” — a multimedia tribute to Stephen Sondheim that mixes live performance, filmed interviews with the composer and a variety of video clips – one of the highlights is a masterly YouTube montage of different people singing “Send in the Clowns.” The featured vocalists include Sinatra, Streisand and LaBelle. But the segment that particularly captures our attention (and is allowed to end the sequence) appears to be homemade, by a preadolescent girl who has obviously put great time into her own rendition.
Fascinating as this Sondheim compilation is in tracing the many lives of a single song via Internet tools, it’s “Everday Rapture” that takes us to a new level of identity-blurring surrealism. In this semi-memoir of the self-described “semi-, semi- semi-star” Sherie Rene Scott, the show’s heroine (played by Ms. Scott, natch) discovers she has a fan on YouTube, one with whom she kind of identifies. His nom de screen is Broadwayislove09; he is 15 years old, and he does a lip-synch to a recording of Ms. Scott singing “My Strongest Suit” (from one of her semi-Broadway hits, “Aida”), with a panoply of gestures that Lady Gaga could learn from.
Sherie reaches out to this seemingly Scott-struck lad, whom she imagines to be a misfit in school, rather as she was at that age, when she would sing to her reflection in a pie plate. But Broadwayislove09 (played with deliciously rabid self-obsession by Eamon Foley) sticks to the logic of virtual reality, in which no one’s identity is to be trusted. This leads to an increasingly bizarre exchange of e-mail messages between Sherie and her imitator that leaves her asserting “I am me,” but in a feeble, self-doubting voice. It’s as if musical comedy has met “The Matrix.”
What’s great about this scene, from a theater-lover’s point of view, is how it re-translates a mini-cyber-drama into completely theatrical terms. (Broadwayislove09 appears on a make-believe computer screen that’s rather like an old Punch and Judy puppet stage.) And did I mention that the connecting musical number in the sequence – in addition to “My Strongest Suit” – is “Killing Me Softly With His Song”?
The show is taking back the Web, as it were, for the purposes of an older form of self-expression. At the same time, “Everyday Rapture” is one of the first pieces of mainstream theater to suggest how the rules of the game of Broadway stardom – and Broadway music – are changing. The hall of mirrors that the Broadway musical has become in recent years – with its insider references and quotes and jokes and homages – has acquired a new set of reflections that may well stretch into infinity.
How do you feel about the impact of the Internet on Broadway? Is it a friend or foe? What Web-born forms and influences can we expect in the future?
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/theater-talkback-youtube-on-broadway/