Homer Simpson loves legitimate theatre, which is only part of why he’s present and wearing his Sunday best at the world premiere of the multi-million-dollar stage musical Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off![1] He wouldn’t miss opening night of his new celebrity brother-in-law’s big comeback vehicle, a chance for Selma Bouvier’s new love, Troy McClure, to rise above rumors about his “romantic abnormality” (he’s a fish fetishist) and remind the world that he’s the guy who made such films as Give My Remains to Broadway, Get Confident, Stupid, and Mommy, What’s Wrong With That Man’s Face? In this context, the bright lights of live performance are the glue that nurses a faded star back to health.
A significant number of The Simpsons’s 700+ episodes focus on Springfield, USA’s relationship to musical theatre. Whether they’re seeing it, making it, or in-universe parodying it, Springfieldians have access to a truly robust theatre scene that encompasses community, educational, and professional tiers of production. They also have access to the famous Shelbyville Theatre District one town over,[2] where they can choose to patronize modern classics like Equus (that play in which Daniel Radcliffe got naked with horses in the late aughts) featuring TV star and Shakespearean Sideshow Mel, evenings of countercultural, shimmering spectacle like the 3 Dollar Bills in Gay, Gay, Gay!, or tourist traps like the musical revue Song of Shelbyville that depict Springfield residents as dirt-poor hicks.
Song of Shelbyville is clearly a dirty read on Springfieldians (and also Shelbyvillians—consider the boastful lyric “We’re home to Christian, Muslim, and Jew/Although not many of the last two”), but it’s not just the knock on their sophistication that inspires Marge to build a concert hall in town. Evidence shows that even a town of Springfield Billys will show up for the premiere of a new musical, like Stop the Planet of the Apes…, the “King of Cats” medley from the Itchy & Scratchymusical Stab-a-Lot,[3] or a brand new adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire called Oh, Streetcar![4] Even school plays, like Lisa Simpson and Ralph Wiggum’s passionately-acted salute to George and Martha Washington, are well-attended and treated like major community events. Evidence suggests that Ralph may even be a burgeoning stage star—Marge makes a point to share that the eight-year-old boy’s portrayal of Sir Lancelot in a school production of Camelot is her definitive performance.[5]
This is to say nothing of The Simpsons’ in-universe, non-diegetic musical parodies, like the season 15 episode “The President Wore Pearls” that tracks Lisa’s term as class president while playing on the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita. It’s to say nothing of Conan O’Brien’s brilliant send-up of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man in the season 4 episode “Marge vs. the Monorail,” which features a “Ya Got Trouble”-esque group song as Phil Hartman’s Lyle Lanley fleeces the town for all the money it’s got in order to build a dysfunctional public transit system. It’s to say nothing of Mr. Burns breaking into a Disney parody with “See My Vest!” just about a year after Beauty and the Beast premiered on Broadway, or the full-episode love letter to Mary Poppins in “Simpsoncalifragilisticexpialacious,” or Homer’s fantasy about escaping “Under the Sea” (“There’ll be no accusations/Just friendly crustaceans/Under the sea”). It’s even to say nothing of the show’s affection for the music from Hair—when I first saw that show onstage, I couldn’t believe how many songs I knew from the soundtrack because I’d heard them being sung by Leonard Nimoy and others on The Simpsons.
The Simpsons clearly loves musicals. But I’m more interested in what Springfield residents want from an evening at the theatre. We know they show up—so what exactly are they showing up to see?
It seems like an answer is “adaptation of a familiar story into a new, musical medium,” the gold standard of which is the aforementioned Oh, Streetcar! (titled in homage to the stage musical Oh! Calcutta!). This is a community theatre production with costumes, sets, sound, and a fly system that rivals any professional theater’s I’ve ever seen—no expense is spared to represent Blanche DuBois’s “descent into madness.” It’s also a brand new, original musical created by and for community members, with no specific ambition for financial gain or any Waiting for Guffman-like promise of future production. Oh, Streetcar! is what happens when passion is the project.
“A Streetcar Named Marge” opens with the family watching the Miss American Girl pageant on TV, hosted by Planet of the Apes musical star Troy McClure. As the 50 contestants gather onstage, they riff on the opening lines of Janice Ian’s devastating 1970s ballad “At Seventeen”: “We learned the truth at seventeen/That love was meant for beauty queens.”
A pageant is a ludicrous place to use this sad, sad song about feeling like an “ugly duckling girl”—it’s like, for example, turning Blanche DuBois’s crushing last line spoken in Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire (“Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”), into an optimistic, show-stopping closing number. That’s exactly what we’re doing here, though. Setting the expectation for madness so early in the episode sets the mood: we’re about to see a loving, funny, intentionally misguided attempt to tell a story we all know.
Broadway is saturated with jukebox musicals (four currently running), musicals based on movies (five currently running), and other shows that take familiar narratives and add music. The thing about “A Streetcar Named Marge” is, it’s better than all of them. On top of ludicrously telling the story of A Streetcar Named Desire through an in-universe musical, The Simpsons covertly, effectively, and respectfully explores many themes of the play (emotional distance, abusive masculinity, anger, loneliness) in the narrative of the rest of the episode. When Marge is cast as Blanche (“I thought my life would be a Mardi Gras/A never-ending party/Ha!”), Homer, in his childishness, selfishness, and brutishness, ultimately learns to see her and love her for who she is, and not just for what she can do for him.
“Streetcar” has this beautiful moment where Marge, performing, looks out on the audience to find Homer staring at his shoes. She worries that Homer, who’s been loud and rude about not understanding her hobbies, has lost sight of their marriage and connection. But when they reunite after the show, Homer displays a moment of deep self-awareness, sparked, simply, by his new understanding of the play. He sees himself in Stanley and he doesn’t like it. Would Homer have even paid attention to a dramatic, straight version of the play, or did the digestible musical narrative and snappy lyrics (my favorites are “If you wanna go to Hell, you should take a trip/To the Sodom and Gomorrah on the Mississipp’” and “Will this bewitching floozy/Seduce this humble newsie?”) help Homer come to terms with himself?
We know Springfield has an opera,[6] a ballet[7] (when Marge is surprised Homer agreed to take her to the ballet, Homer says “Marjorie, please, I enjoy all the meats of our cultural stew,” believing the ballet is a circus event where a bear drives a tiny car), a concert hall, a symphony orchestra, and more. They’re not at a loss for culture, and their professional theatre industry looks just like ours. The “King of Cats” medley parodies the Broadway production of The Lion King, down to the animals in the aisles and the avant-garde female director (Julie Taymor in Lion King terms; Melanie Upfoot, played by Frances McDormand, in “King of Cats”terms). There’s not much meat to it, and, other than an oddly placed parody of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar, it’s pretty cut and dried, just commenting on that juggernaut of a commercial production that is The Lion King on Broadway.
In the controversial episode “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson,”[8] the family goes to see their first Broadway musical (“You know, when I was a little girl, I always dreamed of being in a Broadway audience!,” Marge exclaims). It’s called Kickin’ It: A Musical Journey through the Betty Ford Center.
During the opening number, a young actor sits in court and hears a patter-sung list of his various crimes. Then, the judge breaks the mold with “I should put you away where you can’t kill or maim us/But this is L.A., and you’re rich and famous!” The lights change, the sets change, and all of a sudden we are “checkin’ in” to the Betty Ford Center, where young, celebrity addicts go to rehabilitate their lives. This fake Broadway musical serves as a commercial for public rehab and image maintenance, giving credence to the idea that, real or simulated, that is what audiences are looking for when they leave their homes to take in a musical. Kickin’ It also situates real, legitimate fame and fortune in Los Angeles—it’s strange to set this fake Broadway musical outside of New York’s entertainment industry, if not to say that stage actors are often small potatoes compared to big, shiny movie stars. Even outside of Springfield, it seems like Springfieldians are looking for a redemption arc in their stage actors.
Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off! is sillier than Oh, Streetcar!, but more substantive than “King of Cats.” Like Oh, Streetcar!, it is both parody and transformative work[9] that loves its source material. It also, for some reason, loves “Rock Me Amadeus.” The narrative function of “King of Cats”is dubious, leading into a storyline about boys and girls and math ability that has not aged particularly well. We know from the start that the Planet of the Apes musical is the one chance for a character we love to get back on his feet—so, it may be ridiculous, but the stakes are markedly higher.
And Troy McClure shines in Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off! That episode is probably the best work the late, great Phil Hartman ever did in his dozens of appearances on The Simpsons, grounding the story with his innate ability to dignify the very, very silly (the same talent that made him the all-time greatest fake game show host on Saturday Night Live). Returning to the entertainment industry as a musical theatre actor helps performers and artists prove they (1) can show up to work every day, eight shows a week, (2) have the talent and stamina to perform live every night, and (3) can be relied on to not be embroiled in sexual scandal. As we learned from the Lea Michele Funny Girl Broadway situation, audiences are quick to forgive the very, very talented, no matter what weirdness (or cruelty, in Michele’s case) they get up to in life. Troy McClure could’ve won a Tony for his delivery of “I hate every ape I see/From chimpan-A to chimpan-Z” alone.
At their best, musicals performed for Springfieldians are meaningful to the characters as well as to the TV audiences peeking into their lives. They reflect well on larger storytelling beats and teach characters about themselves. At their worst, they are one-off jokes that are still kind of funny, like Homer’s short-lived role as the landlord, Mr. Stingely, in Rent II: Condo Fever.[10]
Springfield is full of singers, dancers, and actors looking to make their mark onstage; even boozehound Barney Gumble has “five years of modern dance, six years of tap” under his belt. On The Simpsons, live theatre is often goofy and fun and accessible. But, more importantly, live theatre represents the redemptive, collective experience of putting together something out of nothing.
[1] A Fish Called Selma, 7×19
[2] The Seven Beer Snitch, 16×14
[3] Girls Just Want to Have Sums, 17×19
[4] A Streetcar Named Marge, 4×02
[5] Marge vs. Singles, Seniors, Childless Couples and Teens and Gays, 15×08
[6] Homer of Seville, 19×02
[7] Marge on the Lam 5×06
[8] One time I was on a plane, and there were five Simpsons episodes to choose from, and this was one of them, which was so weird for so many reasons.
[9] A transformative use is one that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning, or message.
[10] Behind the Laughter, 11×11
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