Half a Dozen Great Animated Broadway (or Broadway-style) Musicals

Oh, Streetcar—The Springfield Community Players. I’m one of those Simpsons fans who’s only conversant in the show’s first six or seven seasons. If they’ve ever done a better multi-part Broadway musical parody than this stellar takedown of A Streetcar Named Desire, I need to know about it. Runners-up (also from early seasons): The Planet of the Apes musical starring Troy McClure, and the abrupt Music Man tribute in “A Streetcar Named Marge” (not to be confused with “Oh, Streetcar!”)

Snoopy! The Musical. There’s an animated version of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, but it pales next to the Off Broadway original, having cut half the songs so as to fit a one-hour TV broadcast slot and keeping with the Peanuts TV cartoon tradition of having the characters sound like real kids reading their lines off the page. (A few of the cast members here also appeared in the weekly Charlie Brown & Snoopy Show, during the most prolific period of Peanuts cartoons.) The singing is weak, the performances not as lively as in the classic Clark Gesner-scored stage version with its brilliantly modular set design.
Snoopy! The Musical, on the other hand, only benefits from trims and a consistent style. This long-gestating mutt of a sequel (the Annie Warbucks of its time) had its world premiere in San Francisco in 1975 but didn’t make it to Off Broadway until 1982, with a completely different cast. I saw a Boston try-out of that Off Broadway version, starring David Garrison as Snoopy and Vicki Lewis as Peppermint Patty—both far better than the material they were given to work with. (Lewis, years away from NewsRadio and other glories, was replaced by Lorna Luft shortly after the show went to New York. Some indignity, if that the biggest “name star” they could swing.) The TV rendition succeeds as a brisk, harmless installment in the long, uneven annals of animated Peanuts—more unwieldy than It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown, perhaps, but not nearly as far-gone as the Spike-starring It’s the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown.

Mayhem of the Music Meister! The final episode of the first season of Batman: The Brave and the Bold rated festival rated festival screenings and the release of its eight-song soundtrack, and was nominated for an Emmy. Neil Patrick Harris, still jut entering his mainstream acceptance as a Broadway belter (he’d done Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but had only just begun hosting all those awards shows). NPH accesses his old Cabaret and Assassins characterizations for a supervillain who mesmerizes the members of the Justice Leagure of America into doing kicklines against their will. The songs are super-catchy, from the style-parody “He Drives Us Bats” (sung by inmates of Arkham Asylum) to “Death Trap,” a suspense song which would work in just about any actual Frank Wildhorn musical.

Cats! It never actually got made (Really Useful Productions ultimately took the easy straight-to-video filmed-stage-show route instead), but the concept of turning Andrew Lloyd Webber’s leg-warmer into a ful-length animated feature was so appealing that it worked its way into the dialogue of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation. Which almost made it real.

Shinbone Alley. This is the cat cartoon musical which did get made, against all odds, nearly 15 years after the stage musical on which it’s based had a short run on Broadway, and some 65 years after its lead characters had first been introduced as part of humorist Don Marquis’ daily column in the New York Sun. The film cleverly updates the urban squalor of the original archy & mehitabel newspaper adventures and the 1957 nusical to include the civil unrest and war-consciousness of the early 1970s, which connected it squarely to the Ralph Bakshi adult cartoon features Heavy Traffic and Coonskin released in that same enlightened era. (Bakshi referenced archy & mehitabel as slumdwelling urbanites in one of his films.)

South Park The Movie. Structured just like a real musical. The Book of Mormon’s success was inevitable.