In the first episode of Hawkeye, there’s both humor and emotion to be mined from Clint taking his kids to see Rogers the Musical, the awesomely-terrible new Broadway hit about Captain America. Within the context of the TV show, it’s used effectively, but while it does a good job skewering the idea of a huge Broadway cash grab, it falls short when it comes to conveying what a real Rogers the Musical might actually look like.
We’ll start with the musical’s function within the show. Clint is on vacation with his kids in New York, and during their night out at the theatre, we see his reaction to the lives of him and his close friends being turned into shallow entertainment. The Act I finale, depicting the Chiutari invasion of New York, is big and loud and dumb, milking Steve’s “I can do this all day” line for all it’s worth. It’s utterly tacky, and Clint is annoyed enough that he turns off his hearing aid so he doesn’t have to listen to it. Seeing the actress who’s playing Natasha, though, he’s overcome with the memory of the best friend who sacrificed herself to save the universe, dying in his place, and he and his kids wind up leaving at intermission.
All that is fitting for the story. It’s very within character for the discreet, even-keeled Clint to be turned off by such a tactless display, and of course Natasha’s death is still very much on his mind. And I have complete faith that some Broadway producer would cash in on rushing a musical about Steve’s life to the stage, that it’d be a smash hit but very lazy. It’s relying on Steve’s name, not the show’s quality, to put butts in seats.
So I absolutely believe that Rogers the Musical would be terrible and tasteless. That’s well within reason. What I do not believe, is that it would be cheap. We live in a world where Galinda floats down in a giant bubble in Wicked, where the actual stage in Titanic tilted to match the steep incline of the ship as it went down. We have Disney on Broadway now, where Aladdin and Jasmine fly over the audience on a magic carpet and Olaf the snowman is a well-operated puppet who looks just like his animated counterpart.
In light of all that, there is no way in hell that the Hulk would just be a guy in a green hoodie while Tony flies jerkily on obvious wires. Rogers the Musical wouldn’t be good, but it would be a certified spectacle. It would be the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child of the MCU. As a theatrical experience, it would be legitimately impressive, even if the show itself was trash. This is just a fact of Broadway.
On
a final note, I’m very curious about Adam Pascal as “Lead New Yorker #1,” who
probably has the most lines in that Act I finale. While I’m of course always
pleased to see Adam Pascal, it doesn’t jive that would you end the first act on
a song primarily led by a member of the ensemble (who, by the way, sings better
than any of the actors playing the Avengers.) I don’t know whether this actor
in Rogers the Musical is meant to be
someone of Adam Pascal’s actual caliber/fame or if he’s just a chorus member
who happens to sing like a Broadway rock veteran—shades of Glee, which purports that characters who sing like Matthew
Morrison, Idina Menzel, and Kristin Chenoweth couldn’t make it on Broadway.
Either way, the only way I can make sense of this guy’s prominence in the
number is if he’s a sort of Lead Player for the show, a quasi-narrator who
leads us through the major events of Steve’s life while assuming the roles of
everyone from WWII soldiers to Hydra moles in S.H.I.E.L.D. to a baggage handler
at that airport the Avengers wrecked in Civil
War. He never plays anyone important, but he always stands outside the
action as our window into it. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.
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