The Problem With Broadway ‘Commodity Musicals’

Aladdin. Bullets Over Broadway. 9 to 5. Young Frankenstein. The Little Mermaid. Beauty and the Beast. And so on. “The most distinctive feature of these musicals is that they usually treat their source material not as a springboard for fresh, creative endeavor but as an exploitable economic commodity that can be ‘repurposed’ for further profit.”