Musical theatre in quiz bowl

[Lawrence Simon]

So when I was a wee freshmen, in the spring of 2012 I first looked at NAQT's You Gotta Know List about Composers and noticed that Andrew Lloyd Webber appeared on the list twice: once for his 1986 magnum opus "Phantom of the Opera," and also for his musical "Cats." However, in my recollection of events of the previous year I could not remember him ever coming up, but then again I only went to one NAQT competition that year, so I assumed it must be a distribution thing. However, over the summer at ACE Camp and my sophomore year I noticed that Webber never came up again, in fact, I noticed that the only musical theatre tossup the entire year was an introductory set question on "1776." There were a few bonuses that mentioned Stephen Sondheim, one of my favorite modern composer, and a "Sweeney Todd" tossup that came one round to late for me to play at NCIS.

This has led me to contemplate why musical theatre almost never comes up in quiz bowl: Is it because it's too recent? Which noticeable works of literature and art seem to dispell. Is it because it's in English and people could just have heard the songs? Which I think Gilbert and Sullivan tossups seem to work against. As someone who does Drama Club with similar seriousness as I do quiz bowl I have a hard time understanding why people would not consider it worthy of being part of the fine arts distribution and thus coming up more often. Personally, I think the works of Webber, Sondheim, as well as Schoenberg/Boublil should come up more often than they do, as well as some more well known musicals. Of course this is just my opinion, what do you guys think?

[Frater Taciturnus]

It doesn't come up as often as it probably should because it is a small fraction of a huge category that gets less than 1/1 per packet in most distributions.

[Great Bustard]

Personally, I'd be fine with musical theatre coming up more frequently, though George is right as to the main reason it doesn't come up more often than it does. This begs the larger question, though, of whether it really makes sense to define subjects as fine arts or pop culture/trash based on form alone. Musical theatre straddles this line uneasily - I think there are people who would object if Sondheim were lumped in as trash, but then, what do you do about The Book of Mormon or, to stick with Webber, Starlight Express? Film and Television also presents the same problem. I know this has been debated before, and I know that not everyone will agree with me, but I think that the more seminal topics of 20th century pop culture (as opposed to contemporary stuff which is often fleeting in significance) should come up far more frequently in general. There's no reason an expanded canon of suitable and significant topics couldn't be established here. Like it or not, much of that stuff has a lot more significance on people's lives in the 21st century than lots of other topics, and it's increasingly being studied from an academic standpoint. Anyway, one of these years, Bob Dylan is going to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and that, if nothing else, may prompt a rethink of how quizbowl currently looks at this stuff.

[vcuEvan]

Personally, I'd be fine with musical theatre coming up more frequently, though George is right as to the main reason it doesn't come up more often than it does. This begs the larger question, though, of whether it really makes sense to define subjects as fine arts or pop culture/trash based on form alone. Musical theatre straddles this line uneasily - I think there are people who would object if Sondheim were lumped in as trash, but then, what do you do about The Book of Mormon or, to stick with Webber, Starlight Express? Film and Television also presents the same problem. I know this has been debated before, and I know that not everyone will agree with me, but I think that the more seminal topics of 20th century pop culture (as opposed to contemporary stuff which is often fleeting in significance) should come up far more frequently in general. There's no reason an expanded canon of suitable and significant topics couldn't be established here. Like it or not, much of that stuff has a lot more significance on people's lives in the 21st century than lots of other topics, and it's increasingly being studied from an academic standpoint. Anyway, one of these years, Bob Dylan is going to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and that, if nothing else, may prompt a rethink of how quizbowl currently looks at this stuff.

I agree. Let's revisit the discussion of the place of musical theatre in quizbowl when Bob Dylan wins the Nobel.

[Cheynem]

A Chorus Line and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (and others) have won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama already; I'm not sure if winning a prestigious "literary" award really affects how quizbowl views things.

[Lawrence Simon]

Not to mention Sunday in the Park with George, Rent, and Next to Normal, which have all won Pulitzer Prizes and have never come up in quiz bowl. And I'm not just talking about NAQT but sets in general, if I needed to make that clear.

[AKKOLADE]

Not to mention Sunday in the Park with George, Rent, and Next to Normal, which have all won Pulitzer Prizes and have never come up in quiz bowl. And I'm not just talking about NAQT but sets in general, if I needed to make that clear.

That's a strong statement.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Well, you've forced my hand - as a lifelong Broadway fan and someone who is actually studying musical theater in an academic setting this very semester, I think I need to weigh in.

To start with a factual point: Musical theater *has* come up occasionally in quizbowl before, at many times over the past few years. RENT in particular has come up in the 2012 DII SCT and the 2013 Prison Bowl (I'll try to keep my examples to high school, but it also appeared in Collegiate Novice 2 and the 2012 DII SCT, which HSers may have seen/played). More notably, at the PACE NSC (a tournament which has no trash), Oklahoma! was tossed up in 2011, and West Side Story was tossed up in 2013 as Other Arts (Oklahoma! was also tossed up in BHSAT 2012 as Other Arts and asked as a bonus in Maryland Spring 2010). LIST III had a bonus on the Les Miserables musical. In general, NAQT reserves 1/1 of every Invitational Series set for "Pop Culture_Broadway", as can be seen in the distribution it posts on the website. All this goes to show that no one's outright preventing people from writing questions on musical theater if they so desire, and it's not absurd to expect that any given high school tournament will have 0 to 3 questions on the subject. George's point is also important to keep in mind: regardless of where they go, there's only at max 1/1 per packet of Other Arts and 1/1 per packet of Trash into which questions on musical theater *could* go - and some tournaments have less of either/both of those categories.

But it seems like the most important question in this thread is where Broadway/musical theater questions do go when they are written (as they are and will continue to be). Dave Madden is right that the art form as a whole straddles a line. Historically speaking, musical theater as an art form emerged from the confluence of "fine arts" and "pop culture" traditions. Call them what you will, but the first musicals had a lot of influences from "high art" on one hand (opera, operetta, ballet) and "low art" on the other (minstrel shows, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley one-off songs) within turn-of-the-20th-century New York.(And they were winning the Pulitzer as early as George Gershwin's 1931 political comedy Of Thee I Sing, though Gershwin's own name was struck from the award and the music was overlooked, giving it to the show entirely for the lyrical/book half.) It's also always been true that American musicals (and their non-American descendants, such as Andrew Lloyd Webber's shows and Les Miz) have also been very attuned to commercial success, with very involved producers attempting to make back money by appealing to a wider, more popular, less "artsy" audience. So it can be hard from an academic point of view - when asking "But is it art?" - to get to an answer which doesn't acknowledge that many Broadway pieces are somewhere in the middle.

A lot of musicals are through-composed by people with a background in Western art music, who understand and draw on music as an art form, even if the end product is somewhat corny or folksy to today's ears. Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers, and Stephen Sondheim all fall into this category pretty decisively, and have all had some of their work put on in concert halls, opera houses, etc. Others are less clearly "art", even if they're very entertaining and solid enough from a musical standpoint (Fiddler, Guys and Dolls?), and others still defy attempts to be classified as fine art, either because they use a more explicitly popular music idiom such as rock or because they're based on existing pop cultural phenomena such as Disney movies or pre-existing popular songs (Hair, Rent, Next to Normal, The Lion King, Mamma Mia).

When doing a rough sort, I'd immediately assume that musicals with a pop or rock music style ought to fall under the pop culture header, just to err on the side of caution. (This doesn't preclude anyone from believing that the rock-musical in question has plenty of artistic merit, as I do about many of them.) Then I'd continue to be very conservative: I'd hesitate even to put clearly artistically-composed or choreographed Broadway shows into fine arts unless I could convincingly defend the view that the specific show in question deserves to be there for being especially aesthetically ground-breaking within the broader sweep of music/performance history. Precious few shows clear this hurdle for me, even among shows I really like.When judging whether a question ought to be in fine arts or pop culture, the best thing to do is probably to err on the side of caution and put it in the pop culture distribution unless you are an EXPERIENCED editor with a solid, defensiblereason for not doing so (beyond "I like it; therefore it's art"). And try to use self-consciously artsy clues beyond just lyrics and character/plot description if you do, including music clues if you can write 'em.

I'm glad to keep hearing musical theater questions at the same frequency that I have been hearing them throughout my career: on the order of 0 to 3 mentions per tournament, put largely within the pop culture distribution but on occasion within fine arts in exceptionally defensible circumstances. I don't think we need to carve out much more space than that, and I won't be too upset if a tournament does have 0 questions on musical theater (though I'd obviously prefer some nonzero number).

I agree with Dave Madden that we could afford to have more historically-groundbreaking and culturally-significant popular culture questions. I do not think that they ought to occupy academic categories (i.e. The Beatles, often mentioned in other threads, are distinctly pop culture in my view), but I think the pop culture category could do more to accommodate questions that aren't on groan-inducing or super-current pop phenomena. Not all trash questions have to be self-consciously "trashy"! One can believe that the proper place for all Broadway shows is the trash distribution and still write an artistically-informed West Side Story tossup there. I'd be interested to see more "elevated" or "historic" pop culture appear more within that distribution at all difficulty levels, especially in college tournaments where trash questions of any sort are pretty endangered and are having a harder time defending their right to exist.

[Sniper, No Sniping!]

Into the Woods was a tossup at the 2012 HSNCT, and it was refreshing.

[Lawrence Simon]

Actually, come to think of it there was an Elphaba tossup at HSNCT 2013.

[vinteuil]

Actually, come to think of it there was an Elphaba tossup at HSNCT 2013.

What was the conversion rate on this, Jeff?

[Important Bird Area]

38/21/23 in 79 rooms. (Looks like we should have been a bit more stingy with the power mark?)

[Lawrence Simon]

I just happened to have been listening to "I'm Not That Girl" right before the match, which happened to be the first clue in the tossup. The coincidence astounded me, the fact that I powered a Wicked questions astounded everyone else in the room.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Actually, come to think of it there was an Elphaba tossup at HSNCT 2013.

38/21/23 in 79 rooms

Yeah, I think this just goes to show that there's no conspiracy keeping musical theater questions out of quizbowl, and there's no reason you won't hear at least 5-10 more of them before you graduate high school.

[Lawrence Simon]

I wasn't as much accusing anyone of conspiracy as I was just trying to open the subject up for debate, sorry if I seemed belligerent to that degree.