TDF Stages

How four eclectic shows Off Broadway are expanding the possibilities of musical theatre

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On a quartet of small Manhattan stages divorced from the spotlight of Broadway, four new musicals are bucking the form's conventions with fresh sounds. Yet ask the shows' creators about their storytelling influences and they all name-check the old masters. When it comes to building a musical narrative, the classic ways still work.

"In its sound, our show is far from traditional musical theatre," says Michael Thurber, whose score for Goddess, an epic romance inspired by the myth of Marimba running at The Public Theater from April 29 to June 8, draws on Afro-jazz and Afrobeat. "But when it comes to structure, the way the storytelling happens, I'm extremely traditional."

For Keen Company's All the World's a Stage, a 1990s-set musical about a closeted high school teacher playing at Theatre Row through May 10, songwriter Adam Gwon's multiple influences included John Kander and Fred Ebb, the duo behind the once-groundbreaking musicals Chicago and Cabaret. "I was always beginning from that more traditional foundation and then going crazy from there," says Gwon, whose previous musicals include Ordinary Days and the Macbeth-inspired Scotland, PA.

The New Group's pop romp The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse, a tale of Gen Z internet sleuths from Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley running at The Pershing Square Signature Center through June 1, is an intriguing combo. "We're going for Britney Spears' Blackout meets Finishing the Hat," says director Rory Pelsue, citing the Princess of Pop and Stephen Sondheim's exhaustive chronicle of his creative process in the same breath.

And songwriter Leegrid Stevens, whose The Trojans is playing at the cell through April 26, chose a particularly obscure style for his show. "Synthwave takes aspects of '80s music and exaggerates it, amplifying everything that people find nostalgic about that time," he explains. Since his musical, presented by Loading Dock Theatre, centers on a group of dead-end warehouse workers reenacting a local high school fable that echoes elements of Homer's epic poem The Iliad, the genre enhances their wistfulness for the past. "Synthwave is doing what the characters are doing themselves—eliminating anything that gets in the way of how they want to remember a better time in their lives," he says. "Tapping into myth gives these random people in Carlton, Texas an outsized persona that makes it matter, and makes it huge."

Gwon aims for a similar mix of old and new with All the World's a Stage, which centers on Ricky (Matt Rodin), a gay teacher in rural Pennsylvania who is outed by a student while coaching her for the 1996 State Thespian Competition. "I knew that I didn't want it to sound like a pastiche 1990s piece," he says. "I wanted the music to be a bridge to today." Gwon ends up leaning into rootsy folk to evoke small-town America both then and now, but at times he pivots to old-school show tunes. For a sequence where Ricky performs various versions of himself—Gwon dubs it the "code-switching montage"—he composed a splashy, musical comedy number to communicate the character's inner turmoil. "Music can be a really beautiful delivery mechanism for the things we want to say, but simply cannot speak aloud," Gwon notes.

When shaping his richly varied score for Goddess, which features a book and direction by Saheem Ali, Thurber also focused on character. "In our story, love is the thing," he says about the show, which explores the unexpected attraction between Nadira (Lempicka Tony nominee Amber Iman), an enthralling singer, and Omari (Austin Scott), an aspiring politician in Kenya. "Love can unlock you and really show you who you are. We're all finding our way through all these obstacles that are holding us back and preventing us from truly seeing ourselves."

That journey of self-discovery takes different musical forms for each leading character. For Ahmed (Nick Rashad Burroughs), the emcee of club Moto Moto in Mombasa, Thurber uses a vintage Afrobeat sound, intended as a "straight-up nod" to Fela Kuti, the legendary Nigerian multi-instrumentalist who pioneered that fusion of West African music with American jazz. For Omari, who comes from a traditional Muslim family, Thurber drew on Taarab, an East African sound that utilizes violin, accordion, oud, percussion and an operatic singing style. For Nadira, the human avatar taken by Marimba, the African goddess of music, the score shifts to jazz ballads. Goddess also features two spiritual sequences, "divinations" with a singular sound that Thurber discovered by combining the score's many influences into one "unique amalgamation."

"I've made my best attempt at writing a love letter to the music of the African diaspora," he says. "From song to song, it goes to all sorts of places." That said, Thurber and his collaborators looked to musical theatre greats like Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein to tie so many disparate musical genres together narratively because "they came up with formulas that really work. Musicals have to be clear and 100 percent character driven. Where we bring something new to the table is the sound."

Breslin and Foley seek that same alchemy with The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse. Though set mostly within the internet world, the show is a departure for the team whose high-tech stage-screen hybrid Circle Jerk was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. For Bimbo, they're taking a more traditional approach with musical theatre trappings juxtaposed against the show's contemporary pop sound. "The music is a mash-up of the early 2000s and the Gen Z moment right now," says Breslin. "We have our early 2000s influences—Britney, Paris Hilton, Ashlee Simpson and that pop-rock-punk sound that was big at that time. Now with Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish, those sounds are back in a fun way. Both the present and 20 years ago feel very exciting to us musically. The music is a meeting of those two periods."

Co-conceived and directed by Pelsue and inspired by a bitchy 2006 New York Post cover dubbing Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears "bimbos," the show follows three Gen Zers who go on an internet deep dive to find a fourth unnamed woman in the photo. In crafting this 21st-century narrative fueled by fervid online communities and the power of social media, the creative team looked to 20th-century musicals.

"We're using influences from the pop world musically and somewhat lyrically, but there's also a real rigorous attempt at keeping to the classic musical theatre lyrical rules," explains Pelsue. "Even though it's a very modern musical in its setting and subject matter, it feels like we're doing something very old-fashioned."

Musical theatre is a constantly evolving form, expanding and shifting as adventurous artists upend expectations. But the creators of these four shows know their history, and they're blazing the path forward while retaining the structural wisdom of the past.

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TDF MEMBERS: At press time, discount tickets were available for All the World's a Stage and The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse. Go here to browse our latest discounts for dance, theatre and concerts.