Stage struck

Gotta sing, gotta dance, gotta shock, says PETER CRAWLEY

WHICH OF these delightful subjects has found its way into the rousing overtures and cosy verses of a mainstream musical: serial killers, cannibalism, prostitution, corporate fraud, gang violence, teen suicide, Aids, female circumcision? Answer: all of ’em.

The critic George J Nathan, surveying the breathless escapism of Broadway musicals, from Oh, Kay!to Oklahoma!(and long before Oliver!and Mamma Mia!), sounded note perfect. "The moment anyone gets hold of an exclamation mark these days, he promptly sits down and writes a musical around it." Recently, though, you'd be forgiven for thinking that musicals had drastically changed their tune.

If you followed the disbelieving hubbub around a certain Royal National Theatre play that deals with the murders of five Ipswich prostitutes and sets interviews with the killer's neighbours to music, or if you took in the predictable fluster before South Park's Matt Stone and Trey Parker unleashed their profane musical about Mormon missionaries, you might have thought their titles should be punctuated as London Road??and The Book of Mormon?!?

Before it opened, London Roadwas deemed "unacceptable", a work delivered "too soon", with "no due consideration". But the underlying concern was with its aesthetic: was this making a song and dance about something gravely serious? To judge from responses, the play has much loftier ambitions: the verbatim text of a diverse community – its fear, sympathy, dissent and recovery – comes in starkly new shape. You prick up your ears and listen differently.

If anything, The Book of Mormonsounds more like a dud note. It set out to be provocative, but reverts to the feel-good factor of Broadway boilerplate. Among all the joyful write-ups for the hottest ticket in New York, surely the most damning for a satire was the hearty endorsement of the Salt Lake City Weekly: "half of this musical is so cute, it could have been written by Mormons, for Mormons."

The truth is that musicals, far from the carefree entertainments we often take them for, are naturally subversive creatures. This isn't because they seek to court controversy (although they do that pretty well) but because the form demands friction. My Fair Ladywouldn't be quite so "loverly" without its troubling Shavian subtext of class collision, cruel indifference and a young woman "bought" from her father for £5. Nor would the hills of The Sound of Musicfeel so alive if they were not also overrun with Nazis.

That contemporary musicals now make Spinal Tap's Saucy Jackseem creepily prescient suggests we might have over-learned this lesson. But musicals, no less than music, exist to make order out of chaos, to make harmony out of the incongruous. The norm, in other words, has always been abnormal.

We will, one day, run out of taboos to get worked up about. But these days, to paraphrase another musical philosopher, there’s nothing you can say that can’t be sung.