Contemporary Classics Has a Winning Month of New Musical Theatre

Alright, so generally speaking, I’m not much of a musical person. I did the entire song-and-dance-number back in high school (the last time I sang and danced in front of an audience, it was “I Sing the Body Electric” from Fame, and frankly, I’d rather hoped to forget the entire experience), but as a writer, musicals just aren’t my bailiwick.

That said, it’d be a tragedy if I let July close without calling out Contemporary Classics, who’ve rocked the month of July with three shows (one co-produced) back-to-back-to-back: Zanna Don’t, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (currently running in Ballard), and The Yellow Wood (at the Center House Theatre). Plus next week, their semi-annual revue of songs from new and in-development musicals, New Voices, returns to ACT Theatre, where it’s played to sold-out houses in the past.

This is all pretty damn good news for a company whose website wasn’t even working the last time I briefly previewed New Voices. That’s not an insult, mind you, but a sign they’re going good places. They were recently profiled in The Stranger, where Brendan Kiley managed only to take issue with how the company’s musicals remain in the traditional mode of upbeat Broadway standards.

For my money, that’s half the fun of musicals: for all the buzz of fringe-to-mainstream hits like Urinetown or Hedwig, or the much ballyhooed Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which sold out the Public in New York this spring and is supposedly headed to Broadway in the near future, I’ve never been convinced that these shows offer an actual new model for moving forward. Like classical musicals, those all borrow from popular musical styles and incorporate them into a more traditional story. Real innovation in musical theatre has stagnated since Sondheim.

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But that said, they’re a hell of a lot of fun, and Contemporary Classics, whose tickets are affordable to the non-Broadway ticket-buying crowd are bringing awesome evenings of entertainment to broader audiences. So take advantage of the closing weekend of The Yellow Wood, or the next two weeks of Putnam, and definitely grab your tix to New Voices next week, which is a serious audience fave, and experience musical theatre outside your weekly installment of Glee.