So my favorite streaming app is Shudder. Cuz yeah, I like horror stuffs. But what Shudder shows is that within what is generally thought of as a single genre there are multitudes. And that's what I want for musical theatre.

Musicals period deserve to be able to exist across multiple genres and platforms. To be more than 41 buildings in midtown. To not be this thing or that thing but many things and more. Because that's what the musical theatre writers are writing.

On Shudder you can see brand new original films that are miles beyond the direct to video movies of the 80s. You can see classics from every era. And every era has a variety of subgenres of classics. From ghosts to slashers to documentary films to documentary series...

Why is it that all these other arts (film, TV, music, books) can - even with their own internal gatekeeping and other issues - still be more far reaching and varied and diverse than stories told with music and lyric?

You can argue: Well Musical is a genre of a thing in itself.

But so is horror. Which is why Shudder is analogous.

I fully believe theatre/musical theatre needs to be decentralized. I have no doubt that Broadway can/will continue to churn out expensive confections that occasionally happen to be of deeper value. There's room for Invisible Man and Host.

And maybe that's the greater point: There's room. There's room for the Musical to be anything. There are people out there for all the permutations. There are people out there to write them. They don't need to be 100 mins or 2.5 hours with an intermission.

Musicals shouldn't need to have won the approval of a handful of millionaires to exist.

Musicals shouldn't need to have endured the homogenization of tedious, too-many-cooks development to be seen.

I don't care how many movies or pop albums get adapted, I don't care how many pop stars or SNL personalities decide writing a musical sounds like a lark. So long as there is room for the Fun Home, We Are the Tigers, Amour, Tamar of the River, American Morning and so on.

The musical deserves more. The musical HAS more. We exist. Who hasn't found a random movie on Hulu or Netflix or an album on Apple music that you fell in love with, that you never would have found if "the algorithm" had its way. Those musicals exist, too.

*this is by no means an endorsement of the monolithic and troubling reach of streaming but simply a comment on accessibility*

Anyway. Decentralize American theatre. Decentralize the musical. Sing your feelings. Not everything has to be diatonic.