This is not a list. This is not even a proper essay. This is just something I’ve been thinking about. It probably started the other night when I went to go see Les Mis; as some of you may remember from my review of the touring cast production I saw a while back, I have… a really, really hard time with Les Mis. There will be more about this on Saturday. But I remembered my “oh my gosh but Jean Valjean and Nathan Wallace should be overprotective dad besties” thought, and started thinking about it, and it somehow led me here.
Here being: wow, but it is almost impossible to find musicals that do not contain significant romantic lines. Because honestly, that’s a lot of my Les Mis difficulty, the romance lines; most of this is that I do not do “love at first sight” tropes well. But then because Jean Valjean and Nathan Wallace should be overprotective dad besties, I started thinking about Repo! itself, which… is a strange case in terms of romance.
The actual entire plot of this movie (and I guess the stage show it came from, though I know nothing about the stage show except that Tracy McDowell, who was also in the closing cast of Rent as Arm Warmer Girl, was in the chorus) is spurred on by a big giant love triangle that happened seventeen years ago. Were it not for this love triangle, the plot would not exist. Period. Furthermore, I know for a fact that you can find people on the internet who ship every possible combination of the characters in this movie and have varying ways to back up their claims (and most of it either sketches me out or makes me cranky, though I… will admit to having a weird soft spot for Nathan/Mag sometimes). But in the actual canonical material of the present day part of the story, there… isn’t actually really a romantic plot? Unless you count Amber and Graverobber, I guess, but they’re less of a romance and more of a sex relationship, and only really relevant to a couple of scenes, one of which is deleted, so it only sort of counts. It’s actually mostly about two dude rivals, some sibling rivals, and the relationships between a drug dealer and his customers, a doctor/assassin and his daughter, an opera singer and her goddaughter, some people who want to manipulate each other, and all of these people having inner conflict or something. And maybe this is just because everyone who isn’t dead by now is so scarred by what happened seventeen years ago or just doesn’t give a damn about romance, but it’s still actually fairly platonic between the main characters, at least in the actual canonical material and despite all of the sexual innuendo.
So this got me thinking. Repo! is halfway sans romance, since you can only sort of count the great Rotti/Marni/Nathan love triangle as per it’s in the past and only really seen in cartoon intertitle screens, but are there any musical pieces that are entirely sans romance? Not because romance is bad, but because platonic relationships are also good and worth singing about. In my humble opinion. And yes, you can have plays with romantic subplots that are secondary to the platonic ones (like Wicked, because especially in the stage show, despite the fact that Elphaba/Fiyero/Glinda is technically also a love triangle, and ultimately Fiyero/Glinda and Elphaba/Fiyero are both things, the Elphaba and Glinda relationship is actually the main point, and some could and have argued it as being just as / as the other two sides of that triangle) but the fact remains that romance is still very much present. A lot. Romance matters, but so do platonic relationships.
I mean, you have shows like The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which is about little children, and even that has a romantic plot. Even Spamalot, which is basically a Broadway buddy comedy, has romantic lines with Arthur and the Lady of the Lake who is really Guinevere. “Go down the list of comedies, I bet a lot of those don’t have romantic subplots,” one of my people said before suggesting looking into The Book of Mormon. I have yet to see that, but it even apparently contains “tender moments” between characters.
Then I remembered my saving grace of platonic musical theatre: [title of show]. An entire musical (not as long as some perhaps, and more culty than mainstream perhaps, but nonetheless existing) which contains absolutely no romance, but instead focuses on the collaboration between four people and their simultaneously growing friendships. And for that I say to Hunter and Jeff and Susan and Heidi: thank you.
–your fangirl heroine.
partlydrawn 