A Classic Film Interlude

Today I put on That's Entertainment to watch while I sorted clothes and folded laundry. I love That's Entertainment for both its collection of clips from MGM musicals and its 1974-set framing narrative. It was made at the perfect time - the studio era was effectively over, as illustrated by the general disrepair of MGM's backlot in the narrator scenes, but that era was still recent enough that stars like Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire were still around to act as the film's tour guides. The numbers chosen for That's Entertainment - Astaire's coatrack dance from Royal Wedding, the cast-of-hundreds numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley, the selections from Esther Williams' water-based musicals - somehow make today's movies feel so flat and unimaginative. Sure, you can create whole worlds with a computer, but the tactile realities of old-school song and dance just feel more impressive to me.

"Good Morning" doesn't appear in That's Entertainment - it's in the sequel - but it still illustrates what to me is so unique and essential about classic musicals. The quality of the dance is simply unmatched today; you can see the hard work involved in making it appear easy. To me, the moment at the end when all three come up and over the couch in perfect unison is transcendent.

Speaking of classic film, a few days ago I made a film-related impulse purchase on Etsy. Definitely excited to share once it arrives...

Valentine's Day Playlist

Around Valentine's Day every year, I get this impulse to comb my music collection and construct a multitude of playlists. Bouncy, poppy love songs, crazy desperate breakup songs - romance is a fruitful topic for musicians and lyricists. This year, I hit on a previously unrealized subgenre that is actually ideal for the holiday: show tunes. Musicals are one place where wearing one's emotions on their sleeve is a necessity, and some fabulous love songs have been created for them. Here are some of my favorites:

A couple of years ago, I watched a documentary on Broadway musicals where they discussed Oscar Hammerstein's skill with what they described as the "speculative love song" - it allows the writers to place a love song for the romantic leads in the first act by talking about it as non-real. (I don't know, I thought it was interesting.) Anyway, here's some of my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein selections.

"If I Loved You" from Carousel

"People Will Say We're in Love" from Oklahoma

"Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?" from Cinderella

"Ten Minutes Ago" from Cinderella

Let's just take a moment to bask in the very concept of a musical created specifically for television. The original version, from the 1950s and starring Julie Andrews, was filmed live. Live! A live original musical on television! When the fairy godmother gives Cinderella her new gown for the ball, they just sort of pushed Julie Andrews out of camera range and changed her clothes super-fast! It just makes Glee seem like they're not really trying very hard, doesn't it? The sixties version (with Leslie Ann Warren, up top) is the one I watched to death as a kid before misplacing the tape, the nineties version (with Brandy) resurrected the show in my mind, and the fifties version is the one for which I have the soundtrack. Really, I love all three because of songs like these.

"Make Believe" from Show Boat

This is actually Jerome Kern, not Richard Rodgers, but it still fits the whole Hammerstein speculative song thing. Oh, Show Boat. So deeply problematic, so academically intruiging.

And from other writers and shows:

"One Boy" from Bye Bye Birdie

Hugo is kind of a lame character (that whole super-chaste kiss sequence in the middle of this scene cracks me up), but I love how Bobby Rydell's voice sounds in this song. It makes early-sixties conformity sound so appealing.

"Someone is Waiting" from Company

Having had groups of close male friends, the whole conceit of wishing to pick and choose everyone's best parts to create someone ideal is so terribly spot-on.

"I Can Hear the Bells" from Hairspray

Hairspray always manages to have just the right amount of edge and humor in its songs, which acts as a buffer against what can be saccharine about them.

"Tonight" from West Side Story

Just so wonderfully swoon-y. I love "Somewhere," too, but this is my favorite.

Mood Music XXVII

For some reason, I feel like Gold Diggers of 2010 is a remake I could get behind.

Best of the 00s: Odds and Ends

Camp is a bit hit-or-miss as a complete film, but its stagings of musical numbers from shows-within-the-show (most, if not all of which are from musicals that hadn't made it to the screen at the time) are fairly spot on. The increasing Oscar buzz around Anna Kendrick makes this as good a time as any to share this clip:

A list that never quite became as fully formed as I liked was "Musicals I Hope Will Be Made into Movies in the 2010s." However, Company is unequivocally at the top of that list. It's a fantastically cynical show, which might change some musical-hating minds, and it's a great ensemble piece. "And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going" played so well in Dreamgirls (talk about your uneven movies), I'm dying to see an actor with pipes to do the same to "Being Alive." It would also be nice to see someone new - that is, outside of the Marshall-Condon-Ortega-Shankman group - offer a different take on the twenty-first century film musical like the eye Tim Burton brought to Sweeney Todd. Maybe Sam Mendes? His films can tend to be terribly self-serious, but the experience from his celebrated stage take on Cabaret plus his affinity for marital angst just might work for Company.

Musicalfest: Adorableosity

To supplement last night's post, I submit the endearingly awkward acceptance speech of the three Billy Elliotts:

Musicalfest: 2009 Tony Awards

Watching the Tonys, I find the dominance of jukebox musicals and shows based on movies kind of disheartening - musicals, it seems, are a medium about which I feel pretty unequivocally snobbish in a preference for original work created specifically for the stage. I will say, however, that this year's opening number, which somehow managed to include Elton John, Dolly Parton, Bret Michaels and Liza Minnelli, as well as a "tonight"-riffing mashup of "Quintet" from West Side Story and "Luck Be a Lady" from Guys and Dolls and culminated in about five casts worth of performers singing "Let the Sunshine In," was everything that Baz Luhrmann's tragic musical medley from this year's Oscars wanted to be.

I'll end with a selection from one of my favorite musicals - this is from the documentary special about the recording of the Company original cast album (a film worth watching if you're into musicals).

Musicalfest: Dreamgirls

The 2007 marathon may be over, but I'd love to resurrect the thread of writing about musicals. Today I caught Dreamgirls on HBO and kept it on while I baked cookies (I like to think it was some kind of "get psyched for the Oscars" thing, since Bill Condon is directing the ceremony and they followed it up with X-Men). I think I've decided what I think is Dreamgirls' fundamental flaw: there's not even half enough ambition among the characters.  Before the movie came out, I'd always had the impression that Deena was supposed to be some sort of uber-Diva, someone who, as Diablo Cody once wrote of her leading lady's namesake, was "super beautiful but really mean, like Diana Ross." Clearly, Beyonce studied some old tape of Ross - she looks like her clone during the group performances, especially the one of the title song. However, the diva rep is nowhere to be found. Deena just sort of floats through the movie - she just seems to be present when things are happening, rather than being an actor in any of the fame-grabbing machinations of Jaime Foxx's Curtis.  He ends up so clearly the villain of the film, I found myself lamenting that his mustache wasn't long enough for him to literally twirl.  Jennifer Hudson's Effie is painted as a bit of an egomaniac at the beginning, but the question of affection versus disdain among her groupmates is never fully explored - it takes less than fifteen minutes of an over-two-hour film to go from the main cast singing about being a family to them kicking her out of the group. It just could have used more backstabbing, I guess. It has great music that skirts the line between the show tune-y and the era-evocative. Dreamgirls should be like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls except somewhat less ridiculous and, you know, without the peyote-fueled massacre at the end. Instead, it's just a bland story wrapped around some decent songs.

Musicalfest 2007: Cabaret and Company

I was having a conversation recently with some friends of mine who insisted that they did not like musicals at all. Now, to me this seems like a simplistic opinion. The world of musicals is so varied that it seems impossible to blanket-statement dislike musicals. The difference between what you get with Rodgers and Hammerstein and, say, Kander and Ebb or Sondheim stylistically and thematically is pretty vast, considering that both fall under the "musical" heading. Jukebox musicals are coming from a completely different place than musicals that start out being developed for the stage, film or TV. There's so much that goes into what a musical is - story, song, dance - that define each show stylistically on what seems to me to be a pretty vast spectrum. The two musicals that this post is about seem to me to be emblematic of the kinds of musicals that don't necessarily come to mind when people condemn them wholesale.

I initially became introduced to the music from Cabaret and Company through the online radio website AccuRadio. I've started to reach a point where my music collection is driving me a little stir-crazy just by existing with the selection of music that it currently contains, so I occasionally have to frantically find some other music resource to tap into. A few days with the 60s and 70s Broadway station convinced me that Cabaret and Company (along with A Chorus Line, the movie of which I hope to watch and write about at some later date) were different from other musicals in a completely fascinating way. I mean, talking about A Chorus Line, a song like "Dance Ten, Looks Three" is worlds apart from "My Favorite Things." Cabaret carries the dark, seductive tones of the work of Kander and Ebb, while the super-adult nature of Company is unexpectedly absorbing.

Due to my new love, Netflix, I was able to watch the movies that grew out of the stage show. For Company, that film is the Pennebaker documentary of the recording of the original cast album. It's really too bad that the film didn't grow into the intended series, because it seems like a fascinating process, the confluence of vocals and instruments necessary to capture forever a song usually performed on stage in an extended series of one-shot deals. The tongue-twister nature of "Getting Married Today" and emotionally draining performance in "Being Alive" are highlighted by the multiple attempts to capture words and emotions and preserve them for posterity.

Cabaret is a totally different animal. Apparently dramatically different from the stage show, the movie, as directed by noted choreographer Bob Fosse, is nonetheless both astounding and chilling. It seems easy to forget, in the American Idol-era of unjustified, over-the-top praising of talent, what it truly means to be a triple threat. One of the things that I love about movie musicals is when they feature someone who really can do it all. Liza (with a Z!) Minnelli is one of those people. Her presence almost becomes shocking as she goes from song to song. Lingering beneath the talent displayed by Minnelli and Joel Grey as the MC is the constant knowledge that the audience has of the potential fate for all of the characters we see. Not to take every comparison back to Rodgers and Hammerstein and The Sound of Music, but I think that it's worth noting that there is even a dramatic difference in tone and style between two musicals that both concern the rise of Nazism in Europe. Even when it's clear that the characters are deceiving themselves into ignoring the way that the world around them (in early 1930s Berlin) is changing, the film never lets the audience forget that they know how the bigger story really ends. The only other film that I can recall seeing in recent years that left me feeling similarly shaken was Capote, where a similar feeling of foreboding about an inevitably bleak future for the people concerned in the film swept over me as the credits rolled.

I keep thinking about writing posts instead of actually writing them, and then they just float around in my mind driving me crazy, so I want to write down other entries that I have in mind so I don't forget them:

-West Side Story, Hairspray and Cats: When dance defines a musical
-Guys and Dolls and My Fair Lady: The non-singing actor as musical star
-High School Musical and High School Musical 2: The modern musical phenomenon

Edited to add: Since watching Cabaret, I've become kind of totally obsessed with this song from the film:



I mean, "Everybody loves a winner, so nobody loved me"? Killer.

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.

Musicalfest 2007: Chicago and Moulin Rouge

Some time ago, my sister and I decided that this summer would be the summer for watching as many musicals as we can. We're off to a somewhat slow start, as she's still got schoolwork, but I wanted to write my thoughts on each one - it's in keeping with my idea of what this blog's general theme is, and it fits with the plan that I always have for writing more frequently. The first two musicals are from earlier this decade: Chicago and Moulin Rouge.

I find myself constantly baffled by the claims that film critics always seem to make about the box office potential of musicals. It would seem that today's filmgoers are simply too practical for musicals, that although they know that the films are not real, the requisite suspension of disbelief involved in watching people burst into song and dance is too much for them. While only a generation or two ago, musicals like West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Grease were hits, apparently a director today has to make the musical structure seem feasible in real life. Maybe I'm missing something. However, it makes these two films an interesting jumping-off point, as both were separately heralded for ushering in a new era for musicals. In Chicago, the strategy is turning the musical numbers into fantasy sequences. My personal feeling is that if the songs are going to be there anyway, why do they need to be "real?" In Moulin Rouge, the issue is diluted by the use of popular songs, written well before the movie, that swirl into Baz Luhrmann's fantasyland. This both works and doesn't - the spirited mash-up of "Lady Marmalade" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" near the beginning of the film makes the scene so unique that it really sells the film, even if you're not sure where it's taking you. However, I still kind of resent Luhrmann for putting Ewan McGregor's voice in my head every time I hear "Your Song."

It's an interesting question: Does the world need a new kind of musical for the twenty-first century? One of the things that I'd like to do with this summer-long marathon is to go back and start in the thirties and forties, watching the musical evolve into what we have today. What are moviegoers looking to see on the screen when they sit down to watch a musical? What are the stories being told through song? Maybe the general populace says the musical is dead, but I'm looking forward to an exciting summer.