Once Hollywood’s most profitable product, the musical’s reputation has since soured. But in the age of phony authenticity, this cultural relic has something important to offer; sincerity.
It was a Wednesday afternoon and the topic of conversation had turned to musicals. “I don’t really like musicals very much,” responded my friend, herself a singer and songwriter. After some soft prodding that was, in reality, probably experienced as a military-like defence, she admitted to not having watched very many. “I don’t know what it is, I’m just not into them.” And my friend isn’t alone. The consensus among younger demographics seems to be that musicals are dated, evidenced by their general underperformance at the box office. Studios even market these movies as though they were something else altogether, releasing trailers that contain zero singing and dancing in a bid to lure in unsuspecting movie-goers (see Wonka for a prime example).
However, this was not always the case. In the early 20th century, musicals were often Hollywood’s most bankable product. Think Singin’ in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz or All That Jazz; big feats of ingenuity rarely evinced by contemporary big budget movies. “In many ways, when a dozen musicals came out each year, they were dependent on the studio system with a studio’s contracted performers, choreographers, directors, writers, composers,” says Steven Cohan, Professor Emeritus of Film and Screen Studies at Syracuse University. According to Cohan, who has published a number of books on the subject, from the Routledge film guidebook on Hollywood musicals to an “opinionated guide” on Audrey Hepburn, musicals were once at the centre of popular music, with their songs boasting major radio play. The studios also groomed stars and imported talent from Broadway, building films around these burgeoning stars. “None of that is happening today, the infrastructure doesn’t allow for it, and musicals never made a successful adjustment to changes in popular music, beginning with rock in the 50s and 60s.”
Even after the musical’s decline in the 50s, hits like The Sound of Music, Grease and West Side Story prevailed. To this day The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the longest running theatre show in history. Scorsese even took a punt at the genre in 1977, producing New York, New York, a reportedly tumultuous shoot fueled by adultery and cocaine. The film’s star, Liza Minelli, was also a fixture at the iconic Studio 54 alongside the likes of Andy Warhol and Cher.
Perhaps the most palatable iteration of the musical is the quasi-musical; musicals where singing and dancing occur, but they are written into the script. In Bob Fosse’s 1972 classic Cabaret, arguably the best example, all songs are performed on stage at an underground club amidst the fascist rumblings of inter-war Berlin. Barbara Streisand’s Funny Girl semi-fits into this category, though not completely, and all A Star is Born films from Garland to Lady Gaga belong here (the 1937 original was not a musical).
As the constraints of the Hollywood studio system became too much, realism became a powerful artistic influence in film. But while realism is inarguably significant in the history of cinema, and was even favoured by actors like Ingrid Bergman for the creative flexibility it enabled, it is not beyond critique. The late academic Mark Fisher, perhaps the representative thinker of our time, argued that realism, rather than posing a threat to the status-quo, is now automatically reduced to the markets, to a product. The earlier revolts of punk rockers no longer challenge society; on the contrary they are incredibly profitable. “Cobain knew he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; he knew that his every move was a cliché written in advance, knew that even realising it was cliché.”
In this suffocating environment, the elements of realism that have been subsumed by big studios — darker, “grittier” lighting most notably — give it an air of seriousness that even pervades the recent Wicked movie. When discussing the choice to forgo with the 1939 classic’s colour palette in favour of cooler tones, it is noteworthy that director Jon M. Chu said that this was done to make Oz more real: “I think what we wanted to do was immerse people into Oz, to make it a real place. Because if it was a fake place, if it was a dream in someone’s mind, then the real relationships and the stakes that these two girls are going through wouldn’t feel real.” Apart from denigrating his own artistic ability to create empathetic ties between an audience and the characters on screen, this statement suggests a discomfort with the medium of film itself. In order for it to be taken seriously, for it to be respectable, one must, to an extent, strip the art form of its sentimentality and theatrics. But this doesn’t leave much room for exploration and innovation within mainstream cinema.
To be generous to dissenters, musicals in the current age are, broadly speaking, not particularly good. The recent update of West Side Story forgoes the complexities of the original for the ease of identity politics, La La Land, despite the praise of critics, is essentially two hours of singing and dancing by people who can neither sing nor dance (apparently mediocrity within a genre characterised by theatrical prowess is revolutionary), and Emilia Peréz has managed to garner ridicule from basically every demographic. Under these circumstances, it’s no surprise that the musical is so disregarded.
For a generation that have been raised alongside a very different style of entertainment, the characteristic breaking into song of most musicals is so strange that disbelief cannot be suspended. Above all, the consensus seems to be that musicals are corny, that their overt theatricality is staged and thus unreal. But isn’t this true of many art forms? “Today, action films have ‘numbers’ as musicals did but now the numbers are big action scenes with stunts and spectacular special effects,” says Cohan, tracing a lineage between the blockbusters of yore and those of Marvel. “So I have always argued that in action films we find comparable values — spectacle, the actors’ physical grace and expertise, larger than life emotions, though of a different kind than expressed in songs — formerly associated with musicals.”
However, even artistic forms underpinned by reputation and the expectation of realism are to a large degree spectacle. To use a comparison from a music genre, many drill rappers admit (under anonymity of course) that their personas are largely performative, that the crimes they rap about are often fabricated and the guns they pose alongside borrowed. As law enforcement increasingly treat lyrical output as evidence of criminality, drillers have started opening their music videos with disclaimers. Philly driller, HopOutBlick, who was recently charged with murder, took to Instagram last May to insist his account was “strictly for entertainment purposes only.” This is not to say that the lyrical content is entirely false, with places like O Block gaining international infamy, however the music and its accompanying videos are not necessarily more real than the musical, and the same can be said for your favourite bare-faced influencer whose ‘authenticity’ is often highly managed and packaged out.
Underneath the perceived corniness of the musical seems to be a preoccupation with image. The musical is not cool, it is sincere. The musical does not pretend to be real, it uses the fabric of film and theatre to express the inner life of its protagonists. “What I like about musicals is that they give the actor an opportunity to sing if they have nothing else left to say,” says Glasgow-based actor, Hannah Jarrett-Scott, “through singing, you open up another layer of vulnerability to the character.” By playing with the medium, the musical accepts its form and is able to use this to expand the character and go beyond one’s present limitations. We see this most clearly in the spontaneous bursts into song and dance. Realism, once revolutionary, thinks it can escape the medium, all the while restricting artists to an affirmation of reality rather than challenging it.
In that unforgettable scene from A Star is Born, in which Esther, backstage, removes her star persona to reveal a wife in utter turmoil, I find myself tearing up in a very recurrent manner. “Love isn’t enough,” she grieves, and I grieve with her because I know that the alcoholic husband she is mourning is really Judy herself. And then a second time, when she is called back to set and, within an instant of her cue, switches off and becomes that sublime freak of nature that both dazzles and dooms. “Don’t give into a frown, turn that frown upside down,” she croons. The dark undercurrent of Hollywood stardom is punctured into every golly line. We never needed a ‘realistic’, Zellweger-led biopic; it’s all already there in the musical. Love and suffering and death and destruction, they are all already there.
