When and how did musical theater lose its hold on the general American psyche?
It was the advent of rock music—and I was just the right age to witness it happening. I remember when I was 7 or 8, the number-one songs in the country were from My Fair Lady or Camelot and West Side Story. It literally ended when the Beatles happened. I have this vivid memory, I would have been 14 or 15 at the time, when Meet the Beatles! sort of swept through the country and my life. The whole British invasion consolidated the whole rock and roll takeover of American pop culture. That was the end of Broadway musicals as being the pop music of the country, and it’s never been the same since. Why wasn’t Broadway ever able to digest and regurgitate rock and roll like it had done so many other forms before? It’s so interesting—my own theory is that it was an incredibly shortsighted industry. You would think the obvious thing to do would have been for a producer to go to Laura Nyro, Simon and Garfunkel, Lennon and McCartney, whomever, and say, “Write a score, write a musical!” No one did
