Hair, Rent, and the R-rated live TV musical

There’s a reason why amateur theaters across the country have spent the better part of the last century performing musicals set in royal fantasyscapes or nondescript slices of small-town America where locals sing entire songs about the arrival of a train. Put your finger on a U.S. map, and in any given state you’ll likely find a high school mounting a production of The Music Man or Bye Bye Birdie or Oklahoma! or Grease, or Into the Woods or The Wizard of Oz or Once Upon a Mattress or Cinderella. The popularity of these choices is not just because these shows contain classically accessible scores and vast ensemble opportunities and limited necessity for elusive male dancers; the School-Appropriate Musical is a very specific type of musical, one that proved its initial merit in the Broadway lexicon as an original piece of fine art but transcended to immortality by finding happy inclusion in the limited catalog of shows deemed safe and friendly by PTAs. It’s no insult, to be clear — these shows are beloved, and though they may carry a patina or the scent of squeaky cleanliness where they once smoked with fire and excitement, their frequent production is the most important way that American musicals are kept alive.