Although many industry insiders scoff whenever they hear that a new movie musical is being made (the latest being an adaptation of the international stage hit Mama Mia! starring Meryl Streep), most ordinary movie watchers adore the idea of a classic MGM musical. Seeing Frank Sinatra suddenly burst into song or Gene Kelly whirl his way through those self-choreographed Olympian dance numbers led men across the country to believe they, too, could achieve such suavity. And what woman didn’t dream of floating across the floor like Ginger Rogers in the arms of Fred Astaire?
But those blockbusters were made during Hollywood’s Golden Age (and many would argue America’s, as well). Although Dorothy had discovered the man behind the curtain on film in 1939, it was decades before the Kennedy Assassination, Vietnam, and Watergate, and so we had no way of knowing that such a metaphor applied to our own lives, our own government. It’s not surprising, then, that the cinematography and acting styles of the day reflected the era’s naiveté, that singing and dancing seemed as natural as speech to film audiences of the MGM era, a notion that undoubtedly offended Bertolt Brecht.
“Nothing is more appalling,” said Brecht in his Production Notes for The Threepenny Opera, than when [the actor] behaves as though he hasn’t noticed that he has left the ground of sober speech and is singing.” Brecht, as we know, wanted his audiences to remain firmly aware they were watching a play, and did everything he could to remind them of the fact.
While Brecht’s alienation effect continues to work upon the stage, it is anathema to contemporary cinema, which, generally speaking, seeks to transport audiences out of the theater and into the world crafted for them upon the screen. The most successful contemporary stage-to-screen adaptations have not tried to pretend the leap from speech to song is being made, but instead have found ways to utilize the enormous disparity between the two modes of communication, by making the singing part of an “act” or by having the characters in some way acknowledge that they are singing.
The last banner year for musical films of the old school, when no self-awareness was necessary and characters were still permitted to suddenly and inexplicably burst into song, was arguably 1968, when both Funny Girl and Oliver! vied for the Academy Award for Best Film. Despite the undeniable grittiness and truth found in some of the musical films that followed (Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof, for example), social circumstances had begun to demand authenticity in cinema, making singing on film more and more passé.
With the graphic realism that came in with 1970s cinema, Hollywood became wary of allowing its stars to sing and dance at all. The success of movies like Deliverance, A Clockwork Orange, and The Godfather, which raised the bar for verisimilitude in acting to a level the movie musical could not achieve, all but assured that never again could an actor happily break into song on screen as though it was nothing at all out of the ordinary.
Thus, for the three decades that followed, movie musicals all but disappeared, leading many to believe the genre might never return.
There were exceptions, of course. The film adaptation of Hair (1979), a landmark American stage musical, was heralded for its stark departure from the entrenched models of theme, subject, and plot structure. The same year there appeared All That Jazz, a movie where Bob Fosse’s trademark choreography is embedded not in the context of a linear plot structure but in the mind of a dying, womanizing, narcotic-dependent stage director (played to Oscar-winning perfection by Roy Scheider). Both films, however, are a far cry from Gene Kelly’s euphoric, love-induced, and iconic tap dancing in Singin’ in the Rain, in which the standard boy-meets-girl plot provides the linear dramatic tension. The offbeat structure of Hair and All That Jazz, on the other hand, are shaped not only by the boy-meets-girl theme (which each of them undoubtedly has) but also by drugs, war, protest, infidelity, and even a hint of homosexuality. Perhaps it’s no surprise that there is nary a tap dance in sight.
Except for these and a handful of other films, however, the movie musical did not really return until recently, with Madonna’s Evita (1996) achieving international box office gold and Moulin Rouge (2001) reaching the level of cult classic. With the movie musical once more expanding producers’ profit margins, a host of other specimens quickly followed.
The ease with which characters in Golden-Age movie musicals made the transition from speech to song, however, remains somewhat elusive to contemporary film makers — a goal made difficult by the increased demands for perceived authenticity that were placed upon cinema by the films of the 1970s and ’80s. It seems that we’ve not yet entirely reconciled the apparent paradox of film’s realism and singing’s alienating effect.
In the past seven years, the two most successful film adaptations of musicals, Chicago and Dreamgirls, found a simple way of justifying (with varying degrees of success) their characters’ sudden leap into song.
The solution? Why, put them on a stage, of course.
The film version of Chicago embeds the musical’s vaudeville-style numbers firmly within the fantasies of its lead characters. Whenever it becomes necessary to suddenly sing or dance, director Rob Marshall simply thrusts his stars upon stages-of-the-mind, where they are accompanied by the requisite glitter, boas, and a chorus of scantily clad chorine jailmates who satisfyingly belt out, “He had it coming.”
In the same vein, for the first half hour or so of Dreamgirls, every song takes place as part of an act, a rehearsal, or some sort of performance upon a stage-within-the-film. Under these circumstances, after all, the characters are aware that they are singing, a fact that would have presumably made Brecht happy (assuming anything could).
But when a song suddenly becomes integral to the Dreamgirls plot, there is a palpable awkwardness in this justification for the leap to song. “We are a family,” sings C.C. White, played by Keith Robinson, as he tries to explain to his sister Effie why she cannot be lead singer of the Dreamettes. Why, audiences wonder as they watch, must he sing to her to tell her all of this?
It is, perhaps, an issue best expressed in the words of a stranger sitting next to me at a showing of Evita. “Man,” he said, “I didn’t know they were going to sing, like, the whole time.”
Suddenly, however, just as the song is about to jump into a swelling, hummable chorus, sister Effie, in a fit of rage, runs out onto a stage-within-the-film and her brother, manager, and fellow girl group members follow. And somehow, because they are on a stage singing instead of in the group’s dressing room (where speech is ostensibly the preferred mode of communication), the world is suddenly right and the audience is put at ease.
Even in the show-stopping Act One finale, “And I am Telling You I’m Not Going” — spectacularly performed by Academy Award-nominee Jennifer Hudson, director Bill Condon places the characters upon a stage. How, I wonder, would audiences have handled such unbridled singing had it taken place in Effie’s dressing room, as it does in the stage version (where no one had a problem with it)?
Fortunately, however, there are no signs as of yet that the reemergence of movie musicals is going to cease. It was reported last week that both Rob Marshall, director of the film version of Chicago, and Bill Condon, who helmed Dreamgirls, are each interested in bringing Stephen Sondheim’s Follies to the big screen. The news came just one day after the show was reprised in New York’s Encores! series. And another Sondheim work, Sweeney Todd, starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, is due for release next December. The film will be directed by Tim Burton, who has made a career of creating surrealist worlds where characters act in the most refreshingly unconventional ways.
Naturally, there are bound to be hits and misses as the medium defines itself for a new generation. My only hope, however, is that the still-young regeneration of the form can survive the inevitable fits and starts as it comes to terms with its own limitations and possibilities. But only time will tell if the world is, indeed, truly safe for the modern movie musical.
