Meaning and the Sincerest Form of Flattery

When I was in eleventh grade, my Writer’s Craft teacher referred to Cats as a “McMusical.” By this, she meant that it relied for its entire appeal on the work done by someone else — T. S. Eliot and his Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

At the time, my artistic sensibilities were outraged. I loved Cats — the feline characters, the sweeping tones of the music, the dignified gymnastics of the fully grown performers prowling around on all fours pretending to meow… OK, maybe I didn’t love all of Cats, but I did listen to the soundtrack over and over on my Discman.

These days, I think less of the work Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and more of that of Stephen Sondheim or John Kander and Fred Ebb. But even as I come to agree with my former teacher’s assessment of Cats, the less cookie-cutter and more original it seems to me in comparison to other shows I’ve seen.

Several weeks ago, I watched You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown at the Stratford Festival, and more recently, I saw Ring of Fire: the Music of Johnny Cash with my parents in Charlottetown, PEI. And although the performers in both productions were clearly talented, the shows themselves, particularly the latter, left me with the same hot feeling of annoyance as marking essays where every other paragraph is a block quote.

I didn’t fully enjoy the shows for the same reason that I usually don’t give those papers great grades: what I’m looking for in both academia and theatre is something new and interesting, not quotes from another great artist or intellect, no matter how well cited. In other words, I’m not sure what there is to get out of artists — even talented ones — doing straight-up covers of Cash classics with no added ideas. If I wanted to listen to “A Boy Named Sue,” I’d call it up on my Android.

Likewise, although I’m not a huge fan of Peanuts, I’m not sure why the musical merely reiterates a bunch of the strips but performed by live, adult performers. At least it adds some original songs (well, it was originally a CD).

But while I was sitting in Ring of Fire, I considered: it’s not just lack of originality that makes me squirm during adaptations like these. For example, I’m fine with movies translated to books or vice versa, in which the adapters try to stick to the spirit of the original as carefully as possible. I find creative adaptations more interesting, whether I enjoy them as exciting (House, M.D.) or deplore them as failures (The Seeker), but I also enjoy run-of-the-mill translations between media like the Harry Potter series or The Hunger Games.

In fact, although I find theatrical adaptations like The Lion King musical, based heavily on existing movies to the point where the script is almost verbatim, to be unimaginative, they usually don’t make me feel like the producers are “cheating” at theatre.

So what’s the special sauce? What is it that makes one kind of adaptation feel cheap and dishonest while another feels like it breaks new ground?

To answer that, I found myself turning to a genre where artists use other people’s work, verbatim: mash-ups. Admittedly, I’m new to mash-ups; I haven’t listened to many so far. But recently, for example, I decided that I like the mash-up of Third Eye Blind’s Semi-Charmed Life and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe like woah — or much better than I like those two songs on their own, anyway.

So I went looking for other mash-ups that could be cool. And while I’m still exploring, it occurs to me that the originality I’m looking for in a new song, musical, play, book, movie, etc. isn’t originality of content. All plots are derivative (to the point where saying “all plots are derivative” is itself derivative). Characters? Enh, you’ve seen a version of them somewhere before. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution can be original, but what really makes a work of art new and exciting and daring is new meaning.

Meaning is a scary idea. It’s a lot harder to define and predict than any kind of content. It doesn’t follow logical laws, because it always depends on context. Meaning is personal, specific to a particular time and location, like culture, not universal, like gravity. It’s not contradictory to say something has new meaning now but didn’t before; it’s perfectly reasonable to say it has meaning for one person and not for another. Great works of art and not-so-great ones alike keep generating new meanings to new generations who approach them differently.

That’s scary because then how can we make judgments about the originality of a piece? How can we argue about it, not just for fun with each other but in places where it matters, like copyright courts? How can we decide which meanings are reasonably the responsibility of the artist and which he or she shouldn’t take the blame for?

There are no algorithms or easy answers — listen, negotiate, use context-dependent judgment is not an easy answer. But for any worthwhile yardstick to hold up to art, we’re going to need to courage to make and defend our own rulings.

Returning to Ring of Fire, no, I don’t think all theatre requires coherent narrative (although to be fair, I like it better when it does. Mea culpa). However, performing Johnny Cash songs one after the other while interspersing quotes from the singer’s life suggests an attempt to construct a flimsy narrative in order to characterize the performance as a musical, not a revue  or cover band. There’s no new meaning — not for me, anyway. In fact, my experience was that the new production robs my old favourites of some of the intrinsic meaning they had for me.

If your opinion differs, there’s no objective measure against which I can hold this musical to prove you’re wrong. But I can marshal my opinions and present them in an accessible way.

And, well, maybe that’s meaningful.