Notable examples of rock musicals include Next to Normal, Spring Awakening, Rent, Grease, and Hair.
[1] This production featured one rock and roll number, "The Juvenile Delinquent", performed by fifty-year-old Billy De Wolfe.
Styled "The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical," the anti-war free-love hippie-themed, nude-scened Hair premiered in 1967 as the first production staged at The Public Theater.
Jesus Christ Superstar, composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, began as an album musical in 1970.
Except for a few outposts of rock, like Little Shop of Horrors (1982) and Chess (1986), audience tastes turned to shows with European pop scores, like Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera, as well as to more nostalgic fare.
... Rock’s Broadway invasion has been, instead, a lengthy campaign of attrition, via demographics, shifting tastes and musicians’ ambitions.
Every few years another production [was] touted as finally bringing full-fledged rock to musical theater: Rent, Hedwig and the Angry Inch ... Spring Awakening.
In the decorous little jewel boxes that are Broadway’s theaters, raunch seems raunchier, and rock musicals flaunt four-letter words and lascivious simulations.
Broadway’s unbudgingly middle-aged audience is currently a generation that grew up on rock and R&B and generally feels more comfortable taking reserved seats in small theaters than plunging into the scrum of a standing-room club audience, or dealing with a rowdy arena mob.
... Green Day’s members may not be able to act or execute choreography ... but they also hold rock’s wild card: the potential, realized or not, for spontaneity.