Broadway Chatter

Over the weekend, Shaina Taub named Lynn Ahrens as "our greatest living Broadway lyricist." This is wrong. Here are better choices: Lisa Kron, Lin-Manuel Miranda, David Lindsay-Abaire, Tony Kushner, Steven Sater.

Lynn Ahrens is clearly competent, but great lyrics should be surprising, grounded in character, poetic (without turning purple), and showing evidence of a sense of humor. Ahrens's characters tend to sound as if they were declaiming from a series of Hallmark cards, and this is not a compliment.

By contrast, I think one of the smartest Broadway songs in recent history is "My Junk," by Steven Sater. Here, several teens sing about masturbating.

You'll have to excuse me--

I know it's so off...

I love when you do stuff

That's rude and so wrong...

I go up to my room, turn the stereo on...

Shoot up some you--and the you is some song.

Sater brings people to life in very few syllables. A teen tries to address her crush, and she seems to be speaking for every person in the audience, everyone who has made it past the age of fifteen:

It's like I'm your lover, or more like your ghost.

I spend the day wondering what you do, where you go.

I try and just kick it--but then what can I do?

We've all got our junk, and my junk is you.

Nothing in "Ragtime" comes anywhere close to this. An ambitious plan is not a foolproof guarantee of great writing. It's useful to recognize the difference.

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