Liars and Saints

 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 f...

 For a long while, Broadway has been a Disney theme park, and many new musicals are half-hearted exhumations of Hollywood hits. Sondheim was complaining about this in the 1990s. So it's strange that a "punk rock" play from the 1800s made it into the 2006 season. Tom Hulce and Michael Mayer were sitting together, and Mayer described a German schoolboy, in a little vest, in a pre-Weimar era. Suddenly, the boy removes a mic from his pocket and starts screaming, in rhythm. Hulce called this a "genius theatrical idea" -- and he was right. We feel the same things that German kids felt on pre-industrial hillsides. There is such a thing as universal human experience -- and the mic/lederhosen combo could help to make that point. Elsewhere, Steven Sater was thinking about Columbine; he was thinking about the pain and alienation kids feel, and about the gulf between teens and adults. (Imagine being Dylan Klebold's parent, missing signs, or telling yourself you've m...