Musicalfest 2007: Newsies and Grease 2

I think that I'd better limit these posts to bullet points or something - I know the blog header says "stream of consciousness," but overly verbose ramblings about musicals just make me seem crazy and overinvested. So here goes - these two films have some interesting similarities that struck me as I thought about what I might say about them.

-Neither is directly derived from a stage show, which certainly puts them in a minority among musical films, at least since the 1950s or so.
-Both are directed by choreographers, something that seems to result in a greater number very large dance numbers featuring dozens of people than one sees in those films directed by straight-up directors. Maybe it's a conscious effort to show off their dance-creation prowess. Maybe it's just because it looks cool.
-Both feature early roles by actors who would become much more famous in the future. Grease 2 is often referred to as Michelle Pfieffer's "first starring role," and she mostly pulls it off, considering that the movie is almost entirely ridiculous. The central newsie of Newsies is played by Christian Bale, who is somewhat less successful. Bale is not quite as accomplished at the song & dance element of the musical as fellow singer-dancer-superhero Hugh Jackman (particularly at the dancing - he's rarely at the front of those aforementioned large dance numbers.) Neither is really a film to look at for glimpses of stardom.
-Both have insanely catchy songs, like still-stuck-in-your-head-after-two-weeks catchy. Interestingly, Newsies features songs written by Alan Menken, who served as half of the songwriting teams that brought Disney back into prominence in the late 1980s-early 1990s with the animated musicals (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, etc.) Menken was probably the most familiar composer to children of my generation in their early formative years, though his name doesn't seem to be brought up very frequently. The songs in Grease 2...defy adjectives. Even if I spelled out the entire synopsis of the movie and its songs here, I could not adequately describe the sheer ridiculosity of the songs in Grease 2. The point is, watch it.
-Both are unintentionally hilarious. My sister used to watch Grease 2 with appalling regularity, as in multiple times a week, when she was early-elementary-school-aged (why? We're still not sure), but it wasn't until we dug the movie back out as teens that we realized how over-the-top, so-bad-it's-good the movie is. The movie abounds with double-entendres completely lacking in subtlety - one example is a song set at the bowling alley entitled "Score Tonight." (I wish that I had made that up. It's truly a movie that has to be seen to be believed.) Newsies scrapes by with a bit more credibility than Grease 2, just because some of the characters it depicts were actually real people, even though watching "tough" newsboys of turn-of-the-century New York burst into exuberant song is ridiculous, even within the surreal parameters of musical film.

So much for writing less. I'm not sure whether I should be concerned that I can write this much about musical films. We'll see how the next few posts turn out.