MUSICALS are big business. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera” has grossed $5.6 billion at the box office, more than all the “Star Wars” films combined. A musical version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is soon to hit the London stage. All around the world, people are listening to catchy songs strung together by implausible plots (see article). The question is: are world leaders paying attention, too? The evidence suggests that some are.

In proposing a “China dream”, Xi Jinping appears to have taken his cue from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific”: “You got to have a dream/ If you don’t have a dream/ How you gonna have a dream come true?” What kind of vision? “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat” supplies the answer: “Any dream will do.”

The wisdom of crowdpleasers

Advice that rhymes and scans is not always good. European grocers must be kicking themselves that they listened to the innkeeper in “Les Misérables”: “Food beyond compare/ Food beyond belief/ Mix it in a mincer and pretend it’s beef.” Fagin, the pocket-picking villain from “Oliver!”, exerts a malign influence over François Hollande’s fiscal policy: “When I see someone rich/ Both my thumbs start to itch.” He has been advising corporations, too. Google, Starbucks and other tax-minimising firms have been overheard humming: “Why should we break our backs/ Stupidly paying tax?” And Roald Dahl’s “Matilda” offers spectacularly off-key advice for education ministers:

All I know I learned from telly.

The bigger the telly, the smarter the man!

You can tell from my big telly,

Just what a clever feller I am!

For the most part, however, musicals preach solid good sense. The trouble is that our rulers often ignore it. The world might have avoided the recent financial crisis if bankers had only bought tickets to “Mary Poppins”:

A British bank is run with precision

A British home requires nothing less!

Tradition, discipline and rules must be the tools

Without them—disorder! Chaos!

Moral disintegration!

In short, we have a ghastly mess!

Some of Europe’s political leaders struggle with the intricacies of financial regulation. Thank heaven for Lionel Bart. Here is the great lyricist’s take on capital-adequacy ratios: “In this life, one thing counts/ In the bank, large amounts.”

You can judge an organisation by the way it reacts to musical mockery. “The Book of Mormon” is both irreverent (“Tomorrow is a Latter Day”) and obscene (as you would expect from the creators of “South Park”). Yet the Mormon church did not organise riots or burn the authors in effigy. Instead, it put out ads saying: “You’ve seen the play; now read the book.” Not every religion can take a joke so well.

Just occasionally, a libretto may grow stale. In “Utopia, Limited” (1893), Gilbert and Sullivan mocked the newfangled concept of a limited-liability company. The idea that investors should not lose more money than they put in is the foundation of the modern economy, but it struck Gilbert as absurd:

As a Company you’ve come to utter sorrow

But the Liquidators say,

“Never mind you needn’t pay,”

So you start another company to-morrow!

The best musicals, happily, never go out of date. American politicians agonising over immigration reform should listen to “America” from “West Side Story” (1957), which captures both the allure of the American dream (“Free to be anything you choose”) and the hardships that must be overcome to attain it (“Free to wait tables and shine shoes”). The same show also has advice for Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s bellicose young despot: “Boy, boy, crazy boy/ Get cool, boy!/ Got a rocket in your pocket/ Keep coolly cool, boy!” Not much chance of that, alas. Sophisticates may sneer at musicals, but the world would be a better place if leaders heeded the wisdom of crowdpleasers.