Tesori avoided the compositional agility she brought to Caroline, or Change when it comes to 2013 Fun house, which was triumphantly staged by the Sydney Theater Company in May. Perhaps that’s because the book and Lisa Kron’s lyrics represented such an upheaval in storytelling – as well as a quiet revolution in Broadway sex politics by having a lesbian protagonist. Turning Alison Bechdel’s captivating graphic novel into a musical required taming the zigzagging timelines of the story, in which a Bechdel in the present examines her life: particularly the period when she embraced her sexuality and dated. his parents.

Kron’s solution was to create “Small Alison,” “Medium Alison,” and “Alison Bechdel,” the latter of which commented, narrated and ultimately got into the action.

Add in the suicide of his father Bruce, and it’s not at all the makings of conventional musicals, but Kron completely mixes Bruce’s tragedy with Alison’s sexual awakening, and Tesori’s score offers enough orchestrations. original.

Another musical with unlikely sources was contemporary: American psychopath. Bret Easton Ellis’ widely misunderstood novel predicted that, if left unchecked, the greed, sexism, hedonism, and narcissism of rampant capitalism would breed mutants incapable of empathy. Well waddya know ?! Ellis lodged his satire in the darkest room of our imagination and, after a startling 2000 film, came an innovative musical by Roberto Aguirre-Sarcasa (book) and Duncan Sheik (music and lyrics).

The protagonist Patrick Bateman makes Sweeney Todd look sweet, as he tortures his victims before killing and gnawing at them – apparently bringing him some peace in the brutal world of mergers and acquisitions.

The show has no answer to the novel’s extraordinary tangle of first-person storytelling, and is forced to pretend to say Bateman’s excruciating musical taste. But once you see it, you will never forget it.

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Come from afar is another example of the set “a boy meets a girl; loses a daughter; gets a girl “cliché being discarded. The creators, Irene Sankoff and David Hein, completely shake the rules of musical theater – without a protagonist and without people being nice to each other – but come up with a winner, as they tell that 38 passenger jets were forced to land in Little Gander, Newfoundland immediately after September 11.

Twelve actors play multiple roles against a simple set, with the choreography of chairs defining spaces, and short, rapid-fire scenes rolled into one act supporting the urgency as city dwellers grapple with this avalanche of unexpected guests. The music, meanwhile, draws on Newfoundland’s Celtic heritage.

It’s normal that Hamilton, with its Revolutionary War backdrop, is the ultimate musical revolution, with Miranda now having perfected the hip hop musical. The words whistle past your ears like musket balls, and the rhymes are so dazzling they’re in the league of Byron or Pope – the perfect shorthand to characterize the protagonist, a true polymath eager for his greatness to be recognized. If Miranda had written a conventional musical, it would have had to drastically cut down a story that spans roughly 30 years of Hamilton’s life.

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Maximizing the show’s momentum is the dialogue-free mix of rap and songs, the latter – including My hit, The commandments of the duel and The room where it happened – being the strongest of all those musicals. In addition to sparkling with energy, Hamilton grips our hearts from the perspective of multiple characters, with Miranda’s narrative ingenuity establishing Aaron Burr as the ever-intersecting antagonist from the start, culminating in their equally insane and tragic duel.

Hamilton, Sydney Lyric; Come from afar, Capitol Theater; In the heights in cinemas.

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