background and analysis by Scott Miller

– The Tempest (Act III, Scene ii)

When it came to New York, Theatre Week wrote, "Return to the Forbidden Planet is either a desecration, recreation, or consecration, depending on whom you ask." Like its forebear The Rocky Horror Show, some fell in love with it, some were angered by it, and some were baffled by it. This was a show that combined three elements seemingly least likely to meld: classic rock and roll, early science fiction movies, and Shakespeare’s masterful final play, The Tempest. Yet somehow it all worked. Theatre critic Judith Newmark wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the show works on three levels: literary, pop-cultural, and psychological. But like Rocky Horror, the American critics didn’t get it, and a lengthy London run was followed by an aborted run off Broadway, cut short by needlessly negative reviews.

Yes, the show is wacky and chaotic on the surface, but it is also really smart, retaining the serious themes of its earlier versions, Just like the film and the Shakespeare play, Return to the Forbidden Planet is still about the idea of expanding human consciousness with technology (or Jedi-like magic in the original play), unknowingly releasing the dangerous power of the human id, and thereby butting up against that timeless and universal truth, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Today, more than ever in our past, we are developing many new technologies that literally expand the boundaries and power of human consciousness, through the internet (and its various applications, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, and so many others), the iPhone, the Blackberry, and more devices coming every day. Prospero’s use of telegenesis is a clear and unambiguous metaphor for the creation of blogs, viral videos, discussion groups, etc. Not only does human consciousness now extend beyond our physical selves, it extends across the globe. A blogger’s voice, his thoughts and ideas, are instantly materialized in every corner of the planet, and we’re getting closer and closer to those ideas being instantly translated into any language, so that even language is no longer a barrier. We’ve only begun to understand what this revolution means. It will change the world as much as electricity and television have. Moore’s Law says that the microchip doubles in capacity every eighteen months (this pattern has held since 1958). With that in mind, imagine what technology will look like in twenty-five years, and Prospero’s Id Monster suddenly seems a bit less ridiculous.

And there’s an even deeper connection here. Every new communications technology is used early on – usually before it becomes mainstream – for pornography, the ultimate modern expression of the human Id. The printing press was used early on for pornographic images and text, and early experiments with photography, film and videotape all included pornography. One of the first uses for the internet was what is now commonly called cyber-sex on communal "bulletin boards" that predated the web. Anyone who has tried to prevent new technologies from being used for sexual purposes has failed. One theory for the victory of VHS videotape over the Beta format is that the creators of Beta refused to let their format be used for pornography. And some experts believe that AOL triumphed over Prodigy early on because of Prodigy's refusal to allow sexually oriented chat rooms. Today, pornography is the biggest business on the internet. Perhaps this is the real Id Monster.

But this musical also trades in the sly, self-referential humor that musical theatre came to embrace in the 1990s and still today. In hindsight we can see that Return to the Forbidden Planet fits in quite nicely next to other quirky shows that came after it, like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Urinetown, and Spelling Bee, but also reaches back to the largely subliminal social commentary of Rocky Horror, Grease, and the original Star Trek. This was a show that spoke to its times, the end of the Cold War, but it speaks to us again today in this new era of a "War on Terror." The show’s creator Bob Carlton seems to believe in a philosophy once articulated by the editors of Mother Jones magazine in an anniversary issue: "Better to give us thanks for knowing the importance of being un-earnest, of taking undignified chances, for having the courage to risk all, risk being wrong, risk looking foolish. If there is in fact any secret at all to our amazing longevity, that's surely near the heart of it: knowing how to act the fool like the future depends on it."

The translation from Shakespeare to sci-fi (first by the film, then by Carlton) is surprisingly smart (and in fact, all three versions take place pretty much in real time). Both versions have as their background their period’s final frontier: the New World in The Tempest (Shakespeare wrote this just as the first accounts of the New World were being published in England) and Outer Space in Forbidden Planet. They are adventure stories as much as anything else, adventures in the physical world that reveal adventures in the psychological world. Like many of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Tempest uses the metaphor of a storm to represent the upheaval and sweeping changes the real world was suffering – just as early rock and roll did. Storms have a been literary device as far back as human storytelling, throughout the Christian Bible and other religious texts. This metaphor was transformed for a 1950s sci-fi audience (the U.S. Civil Defense Administration of the 1950s produced an endless stream of scare films to terrify Americans into conformity), and now it is transformed again, into a comic sci-fi meteor storm (far more dangerous than a storm at sea), for a more cynical, postmodern, 21^st century musical theatre audience. Surprisingly, the rock musical returns Shakespeare’s story to its meta-theatrical roots, commenting on itself and its creators just as Shakespeare’s play did.

Just as the film Forbidden Planet was released in the thick of the Cold War, Return to the Forbidden Planet opened right at the end of the Cold War, allowing us to laugh at our earlier paranoia but also to see new dangers lurking down the road. Back then we were afraid of the Commies; today we’re scared of everyone.

But why impose rock and roll on Shakespeare’s classic story? Because early rock and roll is the language of teenage emotion and sex; it is the expression of pure id, pure primal instinct. Not only does the story deal explicitly with the id (in the original, as the less-than-human Caliban; in the sci-fi versions, as the non-human Id Monster), but it also deals with Miranda’s sexual, emotional, and romantic awakening. Miranda is only fifteen – she is exactly the age that rock and roll targeted in the 1950s, the age at which she "becomes a woman" in many ways. Rock and roll was the first art form to honestly articulate the feelings, fears, and pain of being a teenager. Rock and roll took teenagers seriously. Since a major part of this story is a teenager discovering love and sex for the first time, rock and roll seems particularly appropriate. Miranda is ready for self-realization (both emotional and sexual), but she needs her Other Half (Capt. Tempest) in order to do that; she can’t do it with only her father and a robot. And unlike her father, she does not have to go through an ordeal in order to achieve this awakening because she has not sinned. And we can’t forget that The Tempest seems to be uniquely suited for musical adaptation. According to The Friendly Shakespeare, there are thirty operas based on the play.

The musical works because the surprisingly artful fake Shakespearean dialogue (the Fakespeare) that Bob Carlton created and the rock lyrics he chose are both forms of poetry that can be very crude (even obscene) and populist but they can also be very poetic and emotional and subtle, and both forms were consciously designed to appeal to the masses. Likewise the inherent artificiality of Shakespeare’s language nicely matches the inherent artificiality of the act of breaking into song in a musical; both forms are exaggerated and idealized kinds of storytelling. Shakespeare was writing for mainstream audiences as much as Brian Wilson or the great musical comedy writers were, and linking these forms was Carlton’s way of giving us an unexpected glimpse into what Shakespeare’s work was to his time. Shakespeare never meant his plays to be only for the educated and cultured; they were for everybody, exactly like rock and roll and musical comedy.

In discussing the Shakespeare play, Loreto Todd writes in The Tempest: York Notes Advanced:

And that "under-meaning" in Shakespeare is similarly found in early rock and roll, an art form almost entirely about sex, but unable in the 1950s and early 1960s to say so outright. "The Shoop Shoop Song" is about the difference between idealized romantic love and physical, carnal love; that it talks around that subject rather than addressing it head-on is an artifact of a more repressed time. But that also marries it beautifully to The Tempest, a story that works almost entirely on a subtextual, psychological level.

St. Louis critic Paul Friswold, of The Riverfront Times, wrote about New Line Theatre’s 2009 production, making particular note of...

Notice that Carlton didn’t choose A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It for his rock and roll musical. He chose Shakespeare’s last solo work, one of the Will’s darkest works, and one of his most abstract, emotional stories. Carlton knew that rock and roll is not frivolous; it is the sound of rebellion, sexuality, and power. Like other art forms, it tells our stories, records our cultural history and our evolution and, unlike most other forms, it speaks for millions of young people who otherwise feel voiceless – people, perhaps, like Miranda. For famous rock and roll classics to take backseat to story – as any musical score must – that story has to be strong. So Carlton chose Shakespeare, one of the world’s greatest writers, at the peak of his powers.

Film director James Cameron said in a behind-the-scenes Forbidden Planet featurette that science fiction has always been about the Great Mysteries: Who are we? Are we alone? Why are we here? He sees the theme of Forbidden Planet this way: "We are the monsters. We go to the alien reaches of the universe and we confront ourselves." This is a theme explored in the Star Wars films, most notably in Luke Skywalker’s training by Yoda on Dagobah.

In 1957, a year after the film Forbidden Planet was released, a defining moment in the Cold War captivated Americans, an event that helped re-energize the science fiction genre. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made Earth satellite. At first, people celebrated the human achievement of it. But soon the news media was pointing out an unfortunate side issue, that if the Soviets had the technology to do this, that meant they also had the technology to build a long-range rocket to deliver a missile to the United States. Access to space meant access to us! And the science-run-amok genre of sci-fi films was born. Before that, science fiction was primarily a genre that discussed important contemporary issues through metaphor, a way to confront our most difficult problems in a non-threatening way. By the late 1960s, that kind of science fiction returned with Star Trek, a show set in the far future that still grappled with race, war, imperialism, and many other political and social themes of the 1960s. Star Trek even gave us television’s first inter-racial kiss. But Cold War science fiction was more primitive, more about fear, more directed at the id. Forbidden Planet straddled both those worlds and its rock musical does the same. The Id Monster made concrete the idea of technology as an extension of human consciousness, as discussed in Marshall McLuhan’s groundbreaking and hugely influential 1964 book Understanding Media (which in turn inspired David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome). The Id Monster stood in, both in 1956 and 1989 – for the threat of nuclear proliferation, man’s darkest imagination becoming real through technology.

It’s also important to remember that music was important in the film too. Bebe and Louis Barron’s a ground-breaking film score changed film soundtracks forever, offering up an abstract, almost avant-garde electronic soundscape that contributed mightily to the film’s mood and success. And of course, the play is one of Shakespeare’s most musical, with several songs in it. Because this story is about primal emotions, it requires music. The meteor shower, which we later discover was a physical manifestation of Prospero’s anger, is a fundamentally emotional event and is therefore dramatized in the stage musical by an instrumental piece, Wipe Out. This piece takes on extra resonance (and maybe laughs) for the majority of the audience who know the song’s title already and will connect the title to the fact that the ship is crash landing, even though the title is never mentioned. In every incarnation of this story, music is an elemental piece of the puzzle.

But there are differences in the various versions as well. The Tempest is in the category of Fantasy because the source of power is supernatural, but Return to the Forbidden Planet (and its film source) is Science Fiction because the source of power in this story is explained in scientific terms. Fantasy and Science Fiction are related (just see how they are grouped together in bookstores) because both deal in imagined worlds, and that’s why The Tempest is so easily adapted into Forbidden Planet, but at their core the two forms are separated by their core assumptions. In The Tempest, Prospero’s power comes from magic; in Return to the Forbidden Planet, Prospero’s power comes from his scientific experiments. And perhaps that difference says more about the times and the two shows’ audiences than it does about the material itself. The play’s title character, the storm at sea, becomes a meteor shower in space in both later versions, though all with the same source. Prospero’s sidekick is supernatural in the play but he’s a highly advanced robot in the film and something even closer to an android in the musical; significantly, all three versions are non-human. The uncharted island in the play becomes an uncharted planet in the film, and then changes again in the musical into the spaceship, the ultimate remote island. Again, the symbols change with the times; today, space is the final frontier, no longer the New World of Shakespeare’s time. We’ve explored all of Earth, so the story has to be set in space because it requires an unknown, untamed location in which to take place, so that our fantasies and fears have free reign to define for ourselves this undefined place.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest was probably written about 1610. It was his last play, though there is some speculation that he wrote one or two other plays with other writers after The Tempest, and one of his greatest plays. It was also one of his most musical plays and apparently his most personal, planting metaphors all over the show for his own creation process, his art, his stage magic, his actors, and even his retirement. Historians believe the play was loosely based on contemporary accounts of shipwrecks in The New World and also on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. There were many stage adaptations over the years and then in 1956, MGM released the first big-budget, studio, science fiction film, Forbidden Planet, based in large part on The Tempest. With an experimental film score (dubbed "electronic tonalities" in the credits) and state-of-the-art special effects (with animation help from the Disney Studio), it was a turning point in filmed science fiction. In 1982, filmmakers Paul Mazursky and John Cassavetes made the beautiful and surprisingly faithful adaption, Tempest, resetting the story on a modern day Greek island where an architect has run away from a midlife crisis.

The musical Return to the Forbidden Planet was first seen at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry and at the Bubble Theatre, making its premiere in 1983 as a late jam session featuring cast members from the Bubble Theatre. The show opened as a London fringe production in December 1984 for a limited run, then toured the UK. Part of the show’s production crew were from Rhythm Method Productions, a production company set up by the cast members both from Return to the Forbidden Planet and Bob Carlton’s other rock and roll Shakespeare musical From a Jack to a King. After the tour, the show returned to London’s West End in September 1989 for a run of 1,516 performances, becoming that theatre’s longest running show ever and winning the Olivier Award for Best Musical, beating out Miss Saigon. After that, productions opened in Australia, Norway, and then off Broadway at the Variety Arts Theatre (formerly one of Manhattan’s largest gay porn movie houses) in September 1991 where it ran only 243 performances before closing. Like other Broadway and off Broadway shows at that time, it was a victim of the Recession. Meanwhile, it has become a cult favorite, continually produced by colleges, high schools, and community groups around the world. Most recently, the show was a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland in 2008, having also played the Festival in the 1980s.

Both The Tempest and Return to the Forbidden Planet dabble in meta-theatrical elements. Meta-theatre is a term tossed about with some frequency by theatre writers and yet there seems to be no real consensus on what it means. The Greek prefix meta means a level above or beyond, so for our purposes, meta-theatre means theatre that goes beyond the normal conventions of theatre – not just outside those conventions, as many shows do, but beyond them to another level of truth or reality. It is theatre that goes beyond the usual fourth-wall artifice and tells a higher truth, theatre in which surface action and meaning take a backseat to deeper, less explicit content. Meta-theatre admits its own artifice, it admits the existence of the audience, and in its more sophisticated form it uses text or images that carry one "literal" meaning within the story and another parallel "commentary" meaning outside the story, often commenting on the show or the performance itself. In this increasingly self-referential world where art is becoming more and more aware of itself as art (think Urinetown or The Colbert Report), it seems the perfect time to re-explore both these shows.

One example to illustrate the idea of meta-theatricality is the Kit Kat Klub numbers in Cabaret, which are both entertainments inside the reality of the story and also commentary that stands outside the narrative and comments on it. In a different way, the stage version of 42^nd Street is also meta-theatre, not just telling a story but also commenting on the form and style of the storytelling in the 1933 film, commenting on the original’s naïveté and earnestness – and in an unexpected parallel with the film, also commenting on director Gower Champion’s death before the opening, which mirrored the serious (even mortal?) health problems of the fictional director Julian Marsh in the film.

Another example would be a common performance device used for the musical The Cradle Will Rock. For complicated reasons (which you can read about in my book Rebels with Applause), on opening night of the show in 1937 the actors were forbidden by their union to appear onstage and so they performed the show from the audience. Some theatre companies today present the show as a recreation of that famous opening night, with actors playing the show in the seats and in the aisles. By playing two levels of reality at once – the audience is now playing the audience in 1937 – and by commenting on the circumstances of performance, The Cradle Will Rock becomes textbook meta-theatre.

Both stage versions of the Tempest/Forbidden Planet story are meta-theatre as well. In The Tempest, the dialogue is full of barely veiled references to Shakespeare and his theatre. Prospero’s magic, his ability to affect people’s lives, move and materialize objects, to make people believe in non-reality, all sound a lot like the job of a playwright. The Tempest also contains several songs and a performance within the play. But it’s even more explicit in Act IV, Scene 1, when Prospero says:

Prospero is telling Ferdinand not to worry because the various illusions and deceptions are coming to an end. Just as he has been using his island as a giant outdoor stage on which to play out his various psycho-dramas, Prospero now admits to us that his island really is only a bare stage (and an outdoor one at that). As he reassures Ferdinand, he’s also telling the audience that he’s about to wrap up this story. But he’s also saying something much bigger, that no matter how high the stakes may seem, our little lives are just a blip in the great pageant of history. Kings and queens, heroes and villains, none of them last forever. He even seems to admit that his Globe Theatre, where The Tempest played, is as mortal and finite as the audience who sits in it. The idea here is not that life is pointless, but exactly the opposite, that it is all the more beautiful and precious because of its transience.

The Tempest is also the play in which Shakespeare publicly retired, and like Prospero, then returned to his place of birth. In Act V, Scene 1, Prospero says:

If we hear this passage on both levels, then Shakespeare is humbly underrating his own work as "rough magic," art that is unrefined, not yet fully formed. This was Shakespeare’s last play (at least, by himself), and The Tempest was his curtain call. Norrie Epstein writes in The Friendly Shakespeare (an excellent book):

The self-referential irony and meta-theatrical devices in The Tempest find modern counterparts in the American musicals of the 1990s. Shows like Bat Boy, Urinetown, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Spring Awakening, and [title of show] escaped the conventions of the old-fashioned Rodgers and Hammerstein model by exposing it, showing the audience everything that was once hidden, admitting artifice, admitting illusion, and openly celebrating the bald honesty of it all. (Composer Stephen Sondheim and director Hal Prince explored this territory back in the 1970s, with Company and Follies, as did director-choreographer Bob Fosse, with Chicago and Pippin.) In Hedwig and Spelling Bee, the audience actually becomes part of the show, just as it did in Return to the Forbidden Planet. If theatre is about telling the truth, then doesn’t it make sense to tell the truth about the storytelling itself?

But Return to the Forbidden Planet did it before all those shows in the 1990s. It finds its roots most obviously in the wild meta-theatricality of The Rocky Horror Show and Hair, but because Forbidden Planet took Shakespeare at his most sophisticated as its source, and blended it with the incredible emotional and cultural power of rock and roll, it was its own creature.

But even beyond that, the musical uses meta-theatrical devices. There are several moments in the show in which actors talk directly to the address, most extensively when they teach the audience the emergency drill before the show, then require them to perform it at the show’s climax. When it played off Broadway, they even had a video recording of James Doohan, who played Lt. Scott on Star Trek, supplying the opening and closing monologues, implicitly naming one of the show’s influences.

Less obviously, there’s the use of so many famous rock and roll songs, some of which are less famous now then when they were first released, but many of which are still universally known rock anthems: "Good Vibrations," "Great Balls of Fire," Shake, Rattle, and Roll," and others. As with Mamma Mia many years later, the use of these famous songs comments both on the story and on Return to the Forbidden Planet itself. But the songs also somehow fold into the narrative quite organically, and the audience immediately registers – and is repeatedly amused by – just how well these pre-existing song seem almost written for this show. This is in stark contrast to later catalog musicals like Mamma Mia, All Shook Up, or Lennon, who collapsed under the lack of organic integration of the songs. The short-lived Elvis Presley catalog musical, All Shook Up, even set its story in the 1950s and borrowed its plot from Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it didn’t help. The one other exception is the brilliant Jersey Boys.

In the original production of Return to the Forbidden Planet, the meta-theatricality of using existing rock songs was even more pronounced since much of the show was staged more like a rock concert than a narrative stage show, the set looking much more like a glam rock bandstand than a spaceship’s bridge. Many critics were surprised at how emotionally engaged they still were in the story, despite the lack of traditional stage conventions. Other later productions staged the show more as a narrative theatre piece and it works both ways.