Is “Teenage Dream” the jukebox musical’s snake-eating-its-own-tail-crossing-the-rubicon moment?

Last season, the track appeared in & Juliet. And I just saw the jukeboxish musicaly The Choir of Man at London’s Arts Theatre, and guess which song the gents belt!

And the fact that neither show is a (bio)juke about Katy Perry? I foresee further dreaming nightmaring in our theatrical futures…

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On topic:

When a pre-existing song is used in a different context than it was written for originally, the song can become forever associated with this new context.

Case in point:

While the rest of my Choir of Man audience was ostensibly enjoying “You’re the Voice” — have you no sense of decency? — I couldn’t stop laughing, and not because of the musical’s shamelessness; rather, because I couldn’t stop thinking about:

Another example on the West End right now of a song’s retroactive reassociation: Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” in A Little Life; cue the sobbing.

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Remember when I argued that choosing to amplify musicals with microphones need not be the result of a cast’s vocal deficiency, but rather the product of an artistic decision based on what the creators want the show to sound like?

Well, The Choir of Man’s “The Parting Glass” defends my position.

Clearly the boys got the pipes to fill the microscopic Arts Theatre, but auditory technology allows the production to nail the sounds of all the eras and genres the tracklist spans, some of which are aurally defined by digitized crooning.