The Broadway Villain

OK, so I've been thinking about Broadway a lot lately, and the things that make it up. For people who don't know a lot about musical theater, I have a little secret to tell you, musical theater is an incredibly depressing medium. No really! We just distract you with splashy production numbers, and love ballads and tap dancing and sequins. Those classic musicals that you make fun of? Really, really dark.

And as in other iconic genre based forms of story telling, the villains are often the most interesting characters. Comic book villains are always the exciting part of waiting for the next part. (We know Batman is going to be there, but who's he going to fight?) And the dark and scary bad guys of the Disney universes have their own armies of fans. My male cousins all spent large chunks of their childhood pretending to be Captain Hook, and my little sister thought that Scar and hyenas were the best part of The Lion King. (She would be wrong, because the best part of The Lion King is the obvious political statement they were making by having a gay interspecies couple adopt that cute little lion) But this is often especially true in musicals, because villains get these really awesome songs where they explore their inner turmoil or reveal their evil plans or whatever. And sometimes, the villain is the main point of the whole thing, like in The Phantom of The Opera, or Wicked. So, here are 5 of the coolest best musical theater villains, who bring about the neatest plot stuff in their shows.

5. Judd Fry from Oklahoma:

Let me let you in on another musical theater secret, that you might not have picked up on if you've only seen the Hollywood movie versions of these shows. Rodgers and Hammerstein shows are depressing as shit. They start off as perky little romps and then quickly spin into dark twisty messes that deal with horrible themes. Like in The Sound of Music, when Leisel finds out her boyfriend is a Nazi, or Carousel which is about a guy who beats his wife and then dies and feels bad about it from heaven, or South Pacific which is about a racist nurse who's in love with an Imperialist French douchebag. Anyway, this is most obvious in their first show, Oklahoma. People who don't know think that Oklahoma is about cowboys and beautiful mornings. Which it is, except that it's REALLY about this one cocky cowboy and a bitchy farm girl who are in love, and the creepy farm hand who wants to rape her. Even darker, that cocky cowboy tries to convince the farm hand, Judd, to kill himself. Nope, really. (I hate everything about Oklahoma!)



Except that I love Hugh Jackman, so I posted this video.

4. Velma Von Tussle from Hairspray
Hairspray is a fantastic musical comedy on many levels in that it is funny, has great songs and dances, deals with a heavy theme (racism and also being heavy), and it has a kick ass some what ambiguous antagonist is Velma Von Tussle. Just a dethroned beauty queen trying to relive her glory days through her dippy daughter Amber, Velma takes stage mom craziness to a new level, buying a TV station to showcase Amber's "talents" except for that it's really about her. Velma is such an awesome villain that Michelle Pfeiffer plays her in the movie, and her song "The Legend of Miss Baltimore Crabs" is so great that when the movie people wanted to replace it with a new song Pfeiffer threatened to walk.

3. Dr. Orin Scrivella DDS and Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors

There are two villains in Little Shop, the sadistic dentist Dr. Scrivella is one of them, the other is the evil man eating plant, Audrey II is the other. Scrivella beats his girlfriend, Audrey and uses laughing gas to get high before performing oral surgery. Here's Steve Martin playing him in the movie.



Audrey II is a smack talking man eating plant, that manipulates hero Seymour into feeding him blood and then eats everyone he loves. And is awesome.



2. Dr. Frank N Furter from The Rocky Horror Show

The song says it all.



1. Inspector Javert from Les Miserables

Javert is possibly one of the greatest antagonists of all time, and not just in theater also in literature, and on film. What's the best thing about Javert is that he's not evil at all. He's in fact doing his duty. Maybe he's a little mentally unstable, since he's spent his entire career chasing this one guy, but if that one guy was a sanctimonious little snot like Jean Valjean you'd get obsessed too. Javert gets three of the BEST moments in Les Mis:

"The Confrontation" between him and Valjean in the middle of Act I:



Stars towards the end of Act I:



And his suicide in Act II:



He's really, really amazing.

Here some runner ups that I couldn't quite come up with enough on the list for:

Society/"The Man"/The War from Hair, Papa Ge from Once on This Island, and Her Past from Sweet Charity.