Literally Anything Goes: 14 Great Oddball Musicals And What Makes Them Tick

by Scott Miller

Times haven’t changed as much as we think.Scott Miller’s fifth book of deep-dive musical theatre analysis is a surprising and entertaining exploration into fourteen quirky but fascinating musicals spanning the history of the art form, some shows you know and some you don’t. This wonderful crazy quilt of musical theatre proves that there have always been oddball musicals and oddball musical theatre writers eager to crash through the existing conventions to something new and different.

THE THREEPENNY OPERA is the cold-as-ice granddaddy of all satirical musicals, still as unsettling and as disturbingly funny as it was in 1928.

ANYTHING GOES is the old-fashioned family classic that really isn’t any of those things.

THE NERVOUS SET was the first Beat musical, a wild, dark, aggressive theatrical experiment set to 1950s club jazz, chronicling the roots of the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

THE FANTASTICKS is a deceptively complex, Beat-inspired, jazz fable.

ZORBÁ is a gluttonous, misogynistic, moral philosopher and life guide, a Kander & Ebb Obi-Wan Kenobi.

TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA is an early, messy play of Shakespeare’s, transformed into a wild, rowdy musical, set to a hot, 1970s Latin-rock score from the composer of Hair.

THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM is an outrageous and morally questionable sex comedy about rape, greed, and profound stupidity in 1790s America, set to a dazzling bluegrass score.

EVITA is an intimate, passionate, guitar-driven, double love story.

RETURN TO THE FORBIDDEN PLANET is the wildest mashup ever on the musical stage – Shakespeare, 1950s science fiction, and 50s/60s rock and roll.

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN is the least likely story ever to be musicalized, and it’s also Kander & Ebb’s masterpiece. A

NEW BRAIN is a crazy, musical tour through the brain of an artist with a serious brain disorder. And it’s autobiographical.

REEFER MADNESS is wacky satire and anarchy and cheap laughs and great songs and a layer of meta so thick you could cut it with one of Mae’s retorts.

BUKOWSICAL takes the life and work of the great American writer Charles Bukowski, and tells his dark, gritty story in the worst, most inappropriate form possible – an upbeat, high-energy musical comedy. It’s much worse than you can imagine.

LOVE KILLS is a harrowing, emo rock exploration into the hearts and minds of real-life 1950s spree murderers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate.

330 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2018

About the author

Scott Miller is the founder and artistic director of New Line Theatre, an alternative musical theatre company he established in 1991 in St. Louis, at the vanguard of a new wave of nonprofit musical theatre being born across the country during the early 1990s, offering an alternative to the commercial musical theatre of New York and Broadway tours. He has been working in musical theatre since 1978 and has been directing musicals since 1981. He has written the book, music, and lyrics for ten musicals and two plays. His play Head Games has enjoyed runs in St. Louis, Los Angeles, London, and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland; and his musical, Johnny Appleweed, was nominated for four Kevin Kline Awards. He has written more than a dozen books about musical theatre, including The ABCs of Broadway Musicals series. He has also written chapters for several other collections of musical theatre essays, and pieces for several national theatre magazines and websites, and he has composed music for television and radio. For fifteen years, he co-hosted "Break a Leg - Theatre in St. Louis and Beyond," a weekly theatre talk show on KDHX-FM in St. Louis, and now he hosts the theatre podcast Stage Grok, available on iTunes. Miller holds a degree in music and musical theatre from Harvard University, and in 2014, the St. Louis Theater Circle awarded Miller a special award for his body of work in the musical theatre.