Like women for Captain Grimes, musicals are an enigma to me. When I wrote a column admitting I couldn’t bear them, good or bad, the responses included death threats and accusations of anti-Semitism. What particularly enraged these musical fans was a suggestion that they wanted to be pumped up with emotion, lacking much interior life of their own.
Joshua Oppenheimer is the writer, director and producer of The End – a musical set 20 years after environmental apocalypse, in a lavishly appointed bunker hidden in a salt mine. He has a more complicated relationship to musicals: he loves them as well as loathes them. As Oppenheimer explained to the Guardian: “As a kid, there was a divorce in my family. My world was shattered apart and so I used to spend time with my grandfather and we’d take the train to New York. He loved musicals and we’d always go and sing along. As an eight-year-old, I loved it. The music was this little, safe bubble for me. But then later you realise that this sentimentality is fundamentally escapist and that the consequence of all this escapism is catastrophe.” For him, now, musicals are about delusion.
Content from our partners
