Do you trust a singing Hugh Jackman?

I have been thinking about this post for a while and the origin started from listening to a radio show (when you have an at times inane job you develop an entire iPod worth of podcasts to pass the time) featuring several interviews with the cast of a new revival of West Side Story on Broadway. I later heard an interview on Fresh Air with Aurthur Laurents who wrote the original book to the musical and is directing this new revival. So it got me to thinking I had never seen the show or movie so I went to add it to the Netflix queue, which if it's not a new movie is a months long waiting period. But it was a soon-to-be-expiring Watch it Now movie so I turned fired it up. As I was watching it I was brought back to the Oscars and the gaudy musical number with Hugh Jackman proclaiming "The musical is back!" at the end and wondering if indeed he is correct. You were so nice as to write about Once this week, giving me what we in the failed-journalist business call a news peg.

So I have to get right to it as there is a bit of ground to cover: I don't agree with Wolverine (and we will not discuss that movie yet despite, oh I don't know, hypothetically knowing people who hypothetically found a copy somewhere, seeing as how it led to one real blogger being fired and I'm not read to quit yet) because West Side Story could not be a success today if it were even made at all, which I doubt. It seems to me there are two types of musicals that can be made right now: films about the music/entertainment industry where music is not particularly out of place and gaudy spectacles aimed at tweens. I started out thinking this was a big departure from the earlier eras where musicals were quite popular but I did my homework and watched a few more movies only to realize that these two subgenres (I won't go into how this proves my unreliability of genre argument) as one might call them go quite far back. It's just the serious dramas that have been eliminated.

The emergence of the showbiz-type musical goes quite far back to movies like Singin' in the Rain, which AFI selected as the top movie musical. This type of musical seems to me to be evolving into the type of musical where it is more a movie that involves songs. You brought up Once (which I loved and would be on my top 10 if not top 5 of 2006), which certainly fits this category and is an exaggeration of a trend already found in Chicago to a lesser extent. In order to bring the latter musical to the screen, they reimagined it with all of the numbers on a stage like performances. Two of the other recent musicals seen as part of the supposed revival are Moulin Rouge! and Dreamgirls. Both of these movies have singing aside from just the musical numbers but they revolve around the music industry (albeit in completely different ways) and in their own ways the singing off-stage is an extension of their already musical atmosphere. The trend can be found in supposedly non-musical movies as well with Walk the Line and A Prairie Home Companion being two recent movies I've seen to have so much singing in them they could be qualified as musicals. One reason this method was picked up could be because of one of the the films for 20-30 years to be on the AFI list of top musicals: Cabaret, which I rewatched and have also previously seen on Broadway. In that movie, the entire story from the stage show was thrown out and they cut out an entire subplot, created new characters, focused more on the Sally Bowles character (who becomes American), and made the male lead bisexual. Furthermore they cut out every musical number except for those sung on stage, making it literally a movie with songs. What they achieved in that movie is what the creators of this new breed of movies is going for: realism. The movie is much more set in its time and about that era of Berlin than about the overall themes of individuality and repression from the stage musical.

The other type of successful musical is the spectacles aimed at a younger crowd and they are doing quite well. There will be more High School Musical and Mamma Mia! There might be the occasional one that does not look completely unappealing, like Hairspray, which I found to be quite good. For the most part, however, these are aimed at the same kids that saw The Little Mermaid and Aladdin as children and are the most recent incarnation of the teens who dug Grease. I'm sure they are fine movies for their particular audience, but they are really not the kind of movies that will be worth remembering.

What continues to fail are the more serious traditional musicals. One example I would give is Rent. It was a box office smash on Broadway, won a Pulitzer, and was arguably the most significant and influential show of the 1990s. But the movie flopped and I do not think it was just because it was poorly made by Chris Columbus. Sweeney Todd was made by Tim Burton and I thought turned out quite well. But hardly anyone saw it and both of these failures will continue to make it harder for more serious films to be made. It will be interesting to see shows like In the Heights and Spring Awakening ever make it to film. I doubt it. And as much as Jackman proclaimed the musical to be returned, I have yet to see him in a Hollywood musical. If and when that does happen, my guess is it will be more a movie with songs. And more than likely about showbiz.