Are We in Another Golden Age of Musicals?

In early 2017, Variety ran a piece titled “Will Musicals See a ‘La La Land’ Boost?” alongside said movie’s victory lap around the box office and critics at large. Justin Paul, who wrote the music for La La Land alongside his partner, Benj Pasek, was optimistic about the doors his movie was opening: “I have to believe that other studios, other producers, would only be encouraged by the impact of ‘La La Land,’ both critically and at the box office.”

Their agent, Richard Kraft, shared a similar sentiment. “I think people are growing tired of snark and skepticism and pessimism. [La La Land] hit the zeitgeist for smart and unapologetic optimism. Even in times of strife and conflict, people still fall in love and follow dreams.” 

These are the kinds of statements that don’t go unnoticed by a musical nerd who chose to write his semesterly report on Meet Me in St. Louis when all his fellow film students wrote on Woody Allen. Classical musicals had always just been that gateway into cinematic magic for me, and I had long wondered what heavenly splendor would be wrought from contemporary filmmaking actually giving the genre try, and from modern audiences actually paying attention. When The Greatest Showman landed later that year, it seemed like my wish was coming true. 

"Showman" not only overcame mixed reviews and competition from “The Last Jedi” and “Jumanji,” it also showed Avatar/Titanic scale of box office longevity, still performing in the top five movies at the box office two months into its release and ultimately grossing $435 M worldwide. Very respectable for a non-franchise film and very promising for a genre that has striven for relevancy in a post Tarantino/Scorsese film world.

        But I’m actually not here to talk about The Greatest Showman, at least not exclusively. Upon crossing the five-year anniversary of The Greatest Showman, what’s most remarkable is that we haven’t really hit another musical that reached the zeitgeist in the same way. We haven’t even come close.

    It’s not that we haven’t had qualitatively great musicals, but the last five years have just been littered with headlines about musical movies flopping at the box office--which is weird seeing how we have very recent precedent for audiences going crazy for the genre. I don’t think executives were hoping for their follow-ups to reach “Showman” levels of box office dominance. But even with that caveat, and even acknowledging that Hollywood in general is drowning in a post-covid landscape, it’s worth noting that we haven’t had a live-action musical outside of Disney gross the sum of its budget once. 

Is it possible that “Showman” just had something special? Dozens like me have argued “yes!” But “Showman” was also immediately preceded by La La Land, which was also alarmingly successful. Did lightning just strike twice and then never again? 

Did this promised golden age of musicals ever come? Hard to say. Even just five years out from La La La Land and The Greatest Showman, we’ve seen the genre reaching for great heights, but “golden age” implies a threshold of success that these films have not achieved. Even if we are in a golden age now, there’s no guarantee we’ll be here for long. So maybe we should take this moment and reflect on the recent harvest of musicals before, once again, the genre is left out of the conversation.

         I want to use this space to reflect on how Hollywood has responded to this demand and explore some of the reasons why these films haven’t found the success they’ve deserved. It is possible, after all, for something to succeed creatively if not financially. 

  For the intents of keeping this essay focused, I’m defining “musical” as a film in which the songs arise from the narrative spontaneously instead of a strictly performative venue. So, that's a "no" on A Star is Born or Bohemian Rhapsody. I’m also going to skip over discussion about Disney musicals for the most part. This isn’t because Tangled and Encanto are not “real musicals,” but because 1. I already have one essay focusing specifically on the subgenre of Disney musicals, and 2. said musicals have always found a way to thrive independent of whatever else is going on in Hollywood. 

    First, some context.

Musicals vs The Twenty-First Century

         For the intents of this essay, let's say our story begins around the late 90s and early 2000s. This was when, perhaps hoping to ride the tidal wave of success that Disney was finding at the time with their animated musicals, Hollywood actually tried to take the genre out for a spin. This was not an easy sell, the genre hadn't been profitable since the mid-1960s.

    But Moulin Rouge! and Chicago were both megahits for their respective studios, with Chicago even winning Best Picture at the Oscars in 2003. Both films were led by directors with a very strong sensibility for their project and strong creative instincts that matched the high energy demands of the musical format. They were designed in mind for an audience that didn’t readily embrace musical storytelling, yes, but they were creative in their compromise. Thus began the 2000s hunt for the next "Sound of Music."

    The next decade saw a multitude of Broadway hits making the jump to film (see: Phantom of the Opera, RENT, etc), but these adaptations struggled to make the translation and were met with comparatively less acclaim. Arguably the most successful of these was Tom Hooper's 2012 film adaptation of Les Miserables which grossed $442 M worldwide on a budget of about $60 M and gained several Oscar nominations. But Hooper's film was not developed in an ecosystem that played to lovers of the musical as a format and aspires for a different feel from something like Mary Poppins, and it remains one of the most divisive musicals in the fandom (I personally really liked it ...)

It’s not clear what Hollywood thought audiences were responding to with Chicago and Moulin Rouge!, but it apparently didn’t think it was the musicals’ musical-ness. Most of the copies that followed felt compromised. These films were notorious for quirks like converting an exorbitant amount of lyrics to spoken dialogue, often in the middle of a song, as though too much singing might read as excessive in a genre defined by high-volume emotion.

See, musicals have always fought an uphill battle with trying to be seen as worthy of attention. By design, the films demand a suspension of disbelief from the audience by having these folks express their inner most feelings through rhythm, melody, lyric, and always in the moment. This would be a hard sell even if musicals themselves did not almost always present a portrait of humanity that is idyllic or heavenly.

Pulling this all off also requires a very specific skill set, and not just in having the eye for choreography and whatnot. There are all kinds of groundwork the artist has to lay in order for the audience to go along with the charade. You cannot just have a person hop off the couch and start singing Rodgers and Hammerstein. It would take Hollywood a little time to internalize this.

In short, Hollywood didn’t know how to sustain this trend established by Chicago and Moulin Rouge!. It’s no wonder Disney had to step in again to give the genre a boost.

        2013 hits and musical fandom hits the cultural consciousness like a blizzard. Disney’s Frozen becomes the fifth highest grossing film of all time and everybody knows the words to “Let it Go.” Suddenly, this thing called “the musical” goes from an awkward stepchild to Hollywood’s heir apparent. The film industry starts to ask whether musicals have a place at the table, and only a few years later, we started to get the first returns.

        The back-to-back success with La La Land (2016) and The Greatest Showman (2017) made musicals suddenly start to look really, really profitable. La La Land was a critical darling, becoming the third most nominated film of all time at the Oscars (and did win Best Picture for a solid two minutes). The Greatest Showman, meanwhile, did not find the same love among film critics, who were presumably offended by the movie’s (not inaccurate) metatextual commentary on critics and their artificial divide between high and popular art. And yet the film scored almost half a billion worldwide on a budget of $84 M.

  What’s especially remarkable is that both films betrayed the conventional wisdom that the only musicals that audiences would go for were those featuring songs that were already popular—adaptations like Les Miserables or jukebox musicals like Moulin Rouge!. Songwriting team Justin Paul and Benj Pasek provided an entirely new songbook for both films, and audiences went nuts for both of them. Voices in the film conversation started to ask whether we were in fact on the cusp of another musical golden age. In the wake of La La Land, Kraft shared, “Projects that have been simmering for years are now getting taken more seriously. Great producers are seeing the potential in both reimagined stories and brand-new ideas.” To that, Paul added, “Whatever musicals come next will have to be good. That’s the test.”

    As with any cross-section of film, some projects are stronger than others, but I think that history will still remember this as an exciting time for musical projects, however long this period ends up lasting. You saw artists excited not just by the potential profits from musical fans, but by the painting with the canvas of musical storytelling.

The Rundown

Cats

         Musicals are the one space that soothes the tension between the fantastical and the possible. There may have been an artful way to adapt Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical into a theatrical film that made full use of the medium's capacity for splendor while challenging the audience's perception of what the musical could do. But not like this.

         Not like this.

         Watching the film adaptation of Cats you’re not sure whether you want to fall asleep or vomit. There are all sorts of issues that plague this film from pacing to performance (Why are the unholy mice children and the cockroach mutations the same size? What is the reason?), but trying to tally the movie’s many transgressions would somehow distract from the movie’s original sin: someone up top thought that naked human bodies plastered with cat fur was anything but a horrible idea.

         See, film and theater are comparable but distinct artforms. Some things work on stage that do not work in film, and vice-versa. Actors pretending to be literal cats with costuming and make-up works fine on stage: it does not translate onto CGI and film. No one on the board of executives seemed to catch this. And yes, I hold the VFX artists far less responsible for this embarrassment than the producers who looked at the concept art and ignored the still small voice that told them to avert their eyes from the face of the gorgon.

    

    So Hollywood's first follow-up to La La Land and The Greatest Showman was a mess. Hollywood tried to ride the growing hunger for musicals, and the result was a public disaster the likes of which most don't get to see in their lifetime. Not an encouraging start. And yet, let us be grateful that Cats was a harbinger of a future that never came. The disaster of Cats forecasted an infestation of musicals most tasteless, but the musicals that followed in its pawprints were mercifully more thought out.

In the Heights

         If ever there was a time where it felt we were about to experience that promised musical golden age, it was 2021. Three separate hit Broadway shows were seeing theatrical releases. The first of these was In the Heights, a story of a New York district full of dreamers. Where many of the 2000s musicals felt off the shelf, the music of In the Heights takes what is already there and adds fireworks to it, sometimes literally.

    Take the film's approach to capturing its music, as one example. The most common method is to record the soundtrack in advance with the actors lip-synching as they are filmed. This generally offers a cleaner sound recording, but there is a kind of trade off with not letting the actors capture the emotion of the moment in their singing. But director Jon M. Chu knows how to get the most out of his chosen method.

    There’s a sequence, for example, embedded in Vanessa’s big number where she sings about wanting to “ride away” and make it big as a fashion designer. The song culminates in a fantasy sequence in which Vanessa imagines running down an empty New York street as giant clouds of fabric float down to her.

    There are a lot of emotions on display here where Vanessa is being teased by a future that feels like it is slipping away. It's the kind of moment that really has to be underscored by this sustained heavenly note, but how do you say no her ugly-crying while bolting down the street? This is a set-up where capturing the vocals separate from the footage actually works really, really well.

         But there’s variety to Chu's directing as well. The singing for the film’s penultimate number, “Champagne,” was captured live. This moment has Vanessa confessing her love for Usnavi and begging him not to leave for the DR, and the sequence is filmed in a single shot with the camera tracking the two of them as they chase each other across the apartment. This creates a very minimalistic tone that leaves both characters vulnerable without any flashy show and dance to hide behind. Chu shows great creative instincts in anticipating what each story beat needs. 

This is leagues above what we were getting with “Phantom” and “RENT,” and critics seemed to recognize this. Andreas Cabrera of “Geeks of Color,” called the film, 

“A passionate celebration of Latino expression and identity. Filled with music styles of all different nations, Spanish is spoken freely, and unabashed pride in one’s culture that’s been long overlooked. As said in the film, ‘we are powerful’ and it’s about time that we see ourselves up on the big screen where we can freely showcase our talent, voice, and stories.”

Meanwhile, Anthony Lane of “The New Yorker,” described, 

“How you respond to this oddly demure bacchanal will depend on your thirst for celebration; many viewers, no doubt, will take as much as they can get, after months away from the cinema. They will be treated to lyrical fantasy, with Benny and Nina suddenly tilting through ninety degrees and dancing up the side of a building—a scene to make Gene Kelly crack his widest smile. More gravity-bound, but louder and funnier, is the scene in which everyone piles into a swimming pool for what can best be described as an outdoor, hip-hop, Busby Berkeley splashout, and all because somebody bought a winning lottery ticket at the bodega. Who won? Who cares?”

         This film promised to turn the musical film into a summer event in direct competition with the likes of superhero movies, but In the Heights opened to just over $10 M worldwide. This was actually greater than The Greatest Showman’s opening, but that film had miraculous staying power and went on to gross $450 M worldwide. In the Heights barely made a tenth of that--more people saw Cats in theaters than In the Heights. Even when the musical is firing on all cylinders, it still might not be enough to warrant the attention of the masses.

Dear Evan Hansen

         Of all the films we’re discussing, DEH was based on the stage show with perhaps the most social capital. This one had the best chance to leap onto the screen with a big splash, but the film’s RT score didn’t even reach 30%, and its worldwide box office draw (19 M) was somehow even smaller. Wendy Ide of The Observer called out the “crudely manipulative storytelling and honkingly insincere musical numbers.” She further described, “It’s the cinema equivalent of rubbing cut onions in the eyes of the audience: film-making that is cynically and artificially engineered to make the audience weep.”

        The biggest talking point around the film is usually the title character’s decision to capitalize on the suicide of his classmate to boost his own social standing. He is halfway forced into this at the beginning, but before long he is actively feeding the lie, and many viewers were not willing to forgive Evan for this. Most detractors will point to Evan’s manipulation as the film’s major transgression, but I see it as being more complicated than that.

         For context, director Stephen Chbosky’s filmography is bulleted with coming-of-age dramas centered on alienated kids facing the battlefield of school life, most notably The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Wonder. On paper, he’s not a bad fit for this story, but DEH has an added element that the aforementioned films do not: song and dance.

         Chbosky just attempts to film the story like a regular coming of age drama but with characters occasionally breaking out into song. There are many ways to tell a story musically, but you cannot just drop spontaneous singing into a film and expect it to feel natural. And the music in DEH does not feel natural.

       What do I mean by this? I mean the fact that almost all of the musical numbers are performed in the least exciting venue possible, with the characters usually circling a couch at a snail’s pace from start to finish. I mean the fact that we’re thirty minutes into the film before we hear another character besides Evan sing a single note. Music can elevate a story when it doesn’t feel like something the director is just working around.

         Question, if you want, my griping over the movie’s singability when the entire film is premised on such a flawed concept, but I don’t see those issues as being mutually exclusive. The film’s need for a stronger musical direction runs parallel to its need to handle the protagonist’s moral quandary more gracefully.

Gone with the Wind (1939)

   Evan does a dire thing, yes, but movies have always had a way to help you understand and feel for a person even if you recognize that what the character did was “wrong.” Flawed characters can still be illuminating. Musicals are even better equipped to handle this dilemma. Even when it seems like there aren’t words to justify the actions a character has taken, song is a perfect vehicle to deliver emotions that feel like they can’t be expressed in simple conversation. That is, if you know how to pull it off.

         More than any other film on this list, DEH recalls that awkward phase in the 2000s where musicals didn’t really know what they wanted to be. I don’t think it would have taken that much adjustment to salvage the product, but its lack of forethought does reveal, among other things, an appetite for musical attention that isn’t accompanied by curiosity for what makes musicals work. I also don’t think the lesson here is necessarily that musicals should only be attempted by tried-and-true musical filmmakers. Musical storytelling is a specialized aspect of filmmaking and cannot be done casually, but a novice eye can bring a certain authenticity and spontaneity to the final product.

Cyrano

         One recent musical film that has gone somewhat under-discussed, even in musical circles, has been the Joe Wright film adaptation of Cyrano. This film is based on Erica Schmidt's 2018 stage musical of the same name, itself based on the 1897 Edmond Rostand play, Cyrano de Bergerac. The story follows the eloquent and witty Cyrano (Peter Dinklage) who pines after the lively Roxanne (Haley Bennett), but he is too self-conscious about his appearance to pursue her. When the dashing but inarticulate Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) catches her eye, Cyrano agrees to help him woo her using his letters under Christian’s name. 

There are a lot of factors that in theory work against Cyrano’s favor, besides just the fact that it's a musical. It's also a period piece that opts for a more classical sound, contrasting the pop Broadway style of Pasek and Paul or the rap style of Miranda. This is also director Joe Wright's first time helming a musical. But somehow, his sensibility blends very nicely with the demands of the genre and the content of the story he is adapting. You get something that feels distinct from what other filmmakers were offering that's also totally in line with what the musical promises. According to Wright, 

 “What I like about tackling things I’ve never done before, is that I don’t know the rules. And so I can make the rules out for myself. I definitely knew that I wanted the songs to be sung live. So that there was that level of intimacy. And I liked the idea that the voices wouldn’t be perfect, that we’d hear the cracks in their voices.”

Wright describes his feelings in making this movie as one of responsibility, as he was driven to make this film during the pandemic when he felt called to “make something really beautiful.”

“I believe that it’s our humble job as storytellers to help people heal from the kind of trauma that we’ve all been going through globally.” 

“It feels like a return to the childlike place within me, which is a good thing. There’s no irony in the movie. There’s no cynicism in the movie, and I have to be quite brave to do that, because we use cynicism as a defense, I think. It’s my heart out there, trusting that people will respond to it with their hearts. It feels like it’s the kind of movie that I need to be making, especially now.”

Maybe the thing this movie had most working against it was the fact that it came out as MGM was being acquired by Amazon, which possibly contributed to its shuffling release date. (More than any of the other films here, this is the one I had to work hardest to find.) And this ultimately contributed to it flubbing at the box office. By this point we were a handful of offerings into this new “golden age of musicals.” Many of them were indeed golden, but none of them were green. It looked as though maybe the genre would never find success again.

But Cyrano was adapted from less well-known source material. (The stage show on which it is based did not even receive a Broadway run.) Perhaps a musical with a more robust history could crack the code?

West Side Story

        Spielberg’s West Side Story was billed as being not a remake of the 1961 Robert Wise film but rather another film adaptation based on the same 1957 stage show depicting the tragic love story caught in the crossfires of 1950s New York City gang wars.

    This actually isn’t as desperate a ploy as one might think. No musical theater lover thinks, “Well, I already saw ‘Phantom’ at The Capitol fifteen years ago. Guess I’ll never have to see that one again.” I’ve seen something like six or seven live performances of Into the Woods (in addition to the filmed version with Bernadette Peters at least as many times). This doesn’t feel repetitive because each show is a different experience. The actors are different, the set is different, the directing is different. The show is different.

         In theory the same should be true of film. Beloved books can sometimes see multiple adaptations across the decades, but stage shows haven’t enjoyed the same treatment. It’s too soon to tell, but Spielberg’s rendition makes you wish more filmmakers would give it a chance. (I definitely have some suggestions …)

    It’s also in comparing the two adaptations of the same text that you can see most clearly how differently the genre as a whole behaves between the two eras. West Side Story naturally lends itself more to a raw form of storytelling compared to something cozy like White Christmas or resplendent like An American in Paris. Just so, Spielberg’s adaptation favors an even grittier aesthetic and tone than Wise’s take in 1961.

         Compare the staging for “Maria” in either film. In Wise’s film, the environment takes on a dreamlike quality as Tony drifts through a fluid landscape of everchanging color. This is what one might consider a dream sequence in which our character’s emotions are too vivid for our grounded reality, and so he enters a fantasy-like state that can display his feelings properly. Musicals are well-suited and well-known for these sequences.

        But this kind of authenticity demands a lot from its audience, which is why not all filmmakers might be willing to make this jump, especially if they’re already going for a more gritty tone. But Spielberg’s film also showcases the unique ways in which musical bliss can reveal itself even in a desolate world. His staging of “Maria” keeps Tony in the real world, but there’s still a dreamlike tone to the way that the streetlights come to life just as he’s passing them, as though his newly discovered love for Maria is literally bringing light to the streets of New York.

    Where most of the musicals of the 2000s felt at war with themselves tonally, Spielberg actually pulls off this balancing act. He not only reconciles two competing styles, he also finds something new to say about one of the most iconic musicals of all time. As Tasha Robinson of Polygon said, “He’s managed a remake that deviates from the original without losing its heart or its appeal, and that justifies its existence artistically without becoming unrecognizable.”

        Of all the films we’ve discussed so far, West Side Story was the only one recognized at the Oscars that year. (Almost. Cyrano actually did recieve a nod for Best Costuming.) The film received seven nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and one win for Ariana Debose as Anita, repeating Rita Moreno’s feat sixty years earlier. Yet even this film couldn’t crack it at the box office, reaching only $76 M, not even grossing its $100 M budget once. 

In February of 2021, Paramount secured the rights to give Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I the same treatment. If you spare a glance, you’ll actually notice that there are a lot of musical remakes stuck in pre-production. Once upon a time, there may have been hope for some of these to be brought to life, but right now I’d imagine that a lot of studios are looking at West Side Story’s returns and thinking, “If Spielberg can’t get people to show up for a musical, can any of us?”

Artists like Spielberg and Joe Wright prove that even musical neophytes can pull the genre off if they’re willing to do their homework, yet this era’s only real success came from a much more prolific musical storyteller, Lin Manuel-Miranda.

tick, tick … Boom!

         tick, tick … BOOM! is based on the life of real-life Broadway songwriter, Jonathan Larson, who would eventually write RENT before passing away unexpectedly at age 35. Larson essentially wrote a one-man show chronicling his early life as an aspiring artist in New York City (later expanded into a three-person show in the early 2000s), and Miranda basically begged Netflix to please let him it turn into a musical movie.

         As we've discussed, many artists struggle to jump between the two mediums, but Miranda is every bit a musical master behind the camera as he is on the stage. Movies like DEH struggle to bend the needs of musical storytelling with a medium that is not necessarily accustomed to it, but Miranda not only translates the songbook perfectly, he does so in a way that feels distinctly cinematic.

    The “Swimming” number, for example, sees Jonathan have a moment of inspiration where he finally knows how to write the song for his show while swimming, and the film represents this by having the notes for the song literally floating around him in the water. This would have been impossible to pull off literally on stage, and it works really well in film. Watching any of the dance numbers in ttB, you forget film ever struggled to make its music soar on screen. The storytelling is great. 

The story itself is somewhat testing.

         The movie follows Jonathan during those trying first years as an artist in the world trying to make it big. This is a common storyline in musicals, but Jonathan exhibits a lot of entitled behavior in this film which is just excused under the pretense that he is an artist. As one example, the manager for his workshop tells him they can’t provide him a full orchestra and he’ll have to make do with just a piano, and Jonathan throws a temper-tantrum demanding his full orchestra. There's also an episode where Jonathan accepts an opportunity to work in a marketing focus group and then deliberately sabotages it once he decides that he's the smartest person in that room. This is all okay because he’s an artist and his art is just that important …

         The movie attempts to make him seem less narcissistic, usually by having one of Jon’s support systems call out his own egocentrism. This doesn’t amount to much, though. He doesn’t make any meaningful changes in his behavior, and these critiques feel less for Jonathan’s benefit than the audience’s. The story tries to weave Jonathan's story in with the AIDS crisis that was going on at this time in Jonathan’s life, but even his displays of grief only end up feeling like tributes to himself and his ability to make art out of other people's tragedy.

         But despite my own mixed reaction, the movie did find a lot of critical acclaim, with Garfield even netting an Oscar nomination. ttB has some class A musical moments, but there’s a noticeable absence of high-volume ensemble dance pieces (e.g. “America” from West Side Story) that demand a theatrical venue. This is perhaps why the film was slotted as a streaming exclusive. The film did get a limited theatrical release, as is the case for many streaming films with an eye for awards, but it was always intended as a Netflix original film, the only film from this list in this class. The nature of streaming, and the fact that viewers are not paying for a specific film, makes it difficult to measure the fiscal success of such movies, but of all the non-Disney musicals post-"Showman," this is probably the only one we can consider a success.

    Last month’s adaptation of the “Matilda” musical also premiered straight to Netflix, and with Paramount+ bringing Mean Girls: The Musical to the small screen, this appears to be the trend. Julia Delbel of comingsoon.net observed,

“[Musicals] — especially ones based on well-known Broadway shows — are less likely to get people worried about ‘spoilers’ as the major blockbusters, and therefore there’s less pressure for audiences to see them as soon as they come out. Even for a lot of the biggest musical fans, the soundtracks can ‘get them by’ until they can see the movie at a time and place that’s convenient for them.”

        The mainstreaming of musical theater also bears mentioning here in the way that it has been both a blessing and a curse for modern musical films. On the one hand, a larger portion of the masses is predisposed to appreciate musical storytelling. On the other hand, the growing accessibility of musical theater has diverted audiences from musical films. Broadway tickets themselves still cost a kidney and a half, but there are multiple ways to consume musical theater content (e.g. listening to the cast recording over and over) without actually viewing said musical. Indeed, musical theater lovers are almost conditioned to not actually view the item of their worship until their fandom is several years matured. There are also a growing number of filmed live performances available for viewing, inevitably on streaming services.

             I suppose musicals finding their renaissance through streaming would be a net positive, but anyone who’s really felt all that musicals can offer can tell you that the genre has every bit a claim to the theatrical experience as your superhero epic. It’s one thing to sing along to “Shallow” on the radio, but being in the auditorium and seeing Allie perform the number for the first time (in-universe) and feeling the unrelenting strumming of the guitar in surround sound tops anything I’ve seen from Spiderman.  

Something Wicked This Way Comes

       The immediate future of the musical genre doesn’t extend much further than the next year or so. This fall we’ve got the film adaptation of The Color Purple and the “Willy Wonka” prequel with Timothee Chalamet. Our most consistent supplier of musicals, Disney, has announced a few projects that fit the bill. From their animated lineup, we have Wish, commemorating the company’s 100th anniversary. Meanwhile, their live-action department is closing in on the last of the studio’s candidates for live-action translation. This year’s The Little Mermaid and next year’s Snow White stand as arguably the last profitable remakes on deck. (Their “Peter Pan” remake is also slated for streaming sometime this year, but it’s not yet clear what part music will play in the film.) 

With next year’s prequel to The Lion King (2019), and the long-teased sequel to Aladdin (2019), the possibility of Disney franchising their musical remakes remains on the table. But it’s worth noting that every time Disney has tried following up on any of their remakes (see: Maleficent - Mistress of Evil (2019) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016)), they have come up short. We may be about to find out soon whether musicals can survive without The Mouse.

         Then there’s the big ticket item, the film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, Wicked.

         Hollywood has been trying to figure out the best way to mine this property for profit basically since it started blowing up the streets of Broadway in 2003. For several years, the project rested with Stephen Daldry, director of films like “The Reader” and “Billy Elliot,” but he left the project in Fall of 2020. He was succeeded shortly thereafter by Jon M. Chu, who’s proven his musical mastery with In the Heights. And it appears that Universal recognizes what’s at stake for the genre. Despite the paltry returns the genre has offered these last five years, they seem to be treating it like an event, or rather, like events. The stage show is being adapted into two separate films, each premiering Christmas day Thanksgiving weekend 2024 and 2025.

         Will any of these films land with audiences?

         The lesson Hollywood seems to have taken is that what separates the “Greatest Showmans” from the “West Side Stories” is star power. Maybe audiences will turn out for music, even untested music, when it accompanies the illustrious tones of Zac Efron, Zendaya, and especially Hugh Jackman, whose investment in The Greatest Showman basically sold the film. Most of the films we’ve talked about thus far have tried to capitalize on this principle, but none have mastered it.

    In the case of DEH, the star casting actually ended up being a detriment as 27-year-old Ben Platt playing a 17-year-old became a punchline surrounding the film’s marketing. Cats was actually overflowing with A-listers, but seeing Taylor Swift’s face plastered onto a furry flesh puppet wasn’t the draw Universal thought it would be. The biggest star with In the Heights was arguably Anthony Ramos. Yes, he was a principal cast member in the original run of Hamilton, but this was his first lead role in a major film. And when that’s your biggest star player, you’re asking the marketing around the film itself to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

         Meanwhile, the cast for the “Wicked” movies is being led by Oscar-nominated and Tony-winning actress Cynthia Erivo and pop star Ariana Grande, with the supporting cast being filled out by the likes of Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey and 90s icon Jeff Goldblum. Universal really wants this to work, almost as much as the rest of us do.

         All I can say is, if Wicked flops, I honestly don’t know if we’ll see movie musicals again for a long time. The musical as a genre never really got back on its feet in the 21st century. Everything since Moulin Rouge! has been one giant experiment, one that has only been kept alive this long because the data has been just vague enough to convince Hollywood to replicate the process one more time. But if the results continue to come back negative, then heaven knows when they’ll be willing to try again.

 

Who Cares?

         The current musical era might be better compared to the brief resurgence in Westerns we saw in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. By this time, westerns had been floundering for some 20-30 years, but there was an effort to revive the genre. Yet outside of Clint Eastwood (his last western was 1992’s Unforgiven), successes were sparse. For every Dances with Wolves or Tombstone, you had Quigley Down Under or Silverado. Efforts eventually petered out, and the genre eventually returned to its grave. I fear a similar fate awaits musicals unless another one sets off fireworks at the box office in the near future.

    And I suppose this all just begs the question: does anyone actually want a musical revival (anyone besides theater kids), or is this just another one of those things that Hollywood keeps trying to force on us?

Follow the Fleet (1936)

    Well, I think one of the best things about good movies is that you find them you whether you were looking for them or not. Musicals especially always have that way of finding the words you didn't know how to say and putting them on the screen paired with sound and movement in such a way that you wonder how you didn't see it before.

Genres naturally adapt to mirror the times. Some genres have a lot of fluidity and can take almost any shape and arise under almost any condition. But musicals as a technique require filmmakers, studios, and audiences to invest a lot up front–you can’t make a budget musical the way you can make a budget horror film. I can’t even begin to imagine what the musical equivalent of The Blair Witch Project would look like.

At the same time, musicals are the ultimate universal genre. They’re just as suited for times of elation as times of despair. Study and scholarship enrich their appeal, certainly, but we understand them on an intuitive level. The battle they face today is no different than what they've faced over the last century, and they've always found their way back to us. We will always need the musical.

       As golden ages go, this one has been somewhat quiet, so if you haven't gotten around to most of these films, don't feel bad, but do feel free to give them a glance when you can, even the more mixed products who still offer us some things to learn. Whatever the future of the genre, there is cause to be grateful for the efforts we’ve seen thus far. How many films from the 2000s, musical or otherwise, captured the public consciousness like The Greatest Showman? Was Schumacher’s “Phantom” anywhere near as vibrant as Chu’s In the Heights?

         I want to sign off with a passage from Richard Barrios’ book, Dangerous Rhythms: Why Movie Musicals Matter, perhaps the defining work on the genre. This book was published in 2014, so I don’t know what Barrios thinks about La La Land or Dear Evan Hansen or whether he’s expecting this current surge of musical movies to last. But before the possibility of another musical golden age was even brought up, he had this to say about the musical’s legacy:

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

One of the beauties of a work like Singin’ in the Rain is that it makes it possible to think past that rueful attitude of ‘They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.’ No, they don’t, and can’t, and won’t. Yet, as long as they can be seen and loved, they can be learned from. They can indicate opportunities and paths. The surroundings and contexts change, as do the people on both sides of the screen, and even with all that, some fundamental and everlasting truths remain.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

There will always be diversion, there will always be music, and there will always be a need to express and live beyond the ordinary confines of mundane communication. This is where musicals come in, at least when they are doing their job. When people of wisdom and talent know how to deploy everything they’ve received from them, musicals can still be great and precious.

The Sound of Music (1965)

In the meantime, their loony, magnificent cornucopia bounty remains to entice and beguile and stimulate. Nor can cynicism deflate them, not even when it seems, once again, that they’re the tree falling in the forest that no one hears. They are still heard, and they’re still here, passing along ‘Isn’t it Romantic?’ through the countryside or dancing to ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ despite that downpour or mocking the razzle-dazzle of the judicial system or blaming Canada. Plus all the other things they can do.

 

Footlight Parade (1933)

They’ve had their times in the sun and out of it, and they keep surviving. Their absence is always temporary, their heritage is everlasting, and they do it without making it look hard, even in heels. They transform themselves without losing their identities, they bless and sustain without losing their sense of humor, they find ways to thrill and annoy and captivate, often all at the same time. In their past and in our present, they’ve given more than can be comprehended, and the esteem they have earned is at points beyond measure. To repay them with simple heartfelt gratitude is not nearly enough, but let it serve for the moment.

 

Thanks for the memory.

Funny Girl (1968)

            --The Professor