A New Musical
By: Jessica Taghap
Tags: Movies, Culture, Features, Film, Musicals

A New Musical

The Past, Present, & Future of Musicals on Film.

“This is our vibrant theatrical present as much as it is our storied past […] Indeed, in its human scale, and place-and-time-bound specificity, theatre is the art form most likely to seem always on the verge of falling apart, yet also the one most build to last. It is always in need of reinvention by a new group or generation of fired-up artists and audiences; it is also always capable of such a resuscitation.” — Rob Weinert-Kendt, American Theatre.

From from the staged spectacles of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies and the mesmerizing moving pictures of Busby Berkeley, to the artful experimentation of the French New Wave and 1970s New Hollywood, continuing into the popular “dance-sicals” of the 1980s and 1990s, the seductive appeal of the musical has never lost its lustre and keeps adapting to the changing times.

This New Millennium is no different, evolving the musical format in ways never before seen, while still maintaining its familiar razzle-dazzle. One of the last true American art forms, the movie-musical continues to find new life through the lens of those beyond US borders. And as we head into a new decade, it’s interesting to see what those new perspectives have to show us.

At the height of the genre’s Golden Age (1930s to the early-1960s), many films of its ilk were typically big-budget, large-scale productions. However, with the collapse of the Hollywood studio system (from the mid-1960s into the 1970s), came a more experimental and artful approach to storytelling on film. As a result, a new wave of filmmakers emerged.

Many of these filmmakers weren’t part of Old Hollywood’s established infrastructure of highly “learned” professionals, extensively trained in the art of song and dance — which included legends such as Gene Kelly (who co-directed Singin’ in the Rain along with Stanley Donen) and Judy Garland (who had roots performing in vaudeville and honed her skills whilst training as a young teenager at MGM).

Instead, this band of “outsiders” often came from adjacent artistic fields (criticism, dance, music composition, etc.), all of which would ultimately lend to their own unique take to the modern movie-musical. One of the first glimpses of this change was the handful of off-beat musicals released under the French New Wave movement. Consisting of film-critics-turned-filmmakers, theirs was a homemade, almost abstract aesthetic―one which was certainly reflected in the few musicals they made.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: Credit TMBd.

Offerings such as Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman is a Woman (1961) and both Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) also featured untrained actors―such as Anna Karina and Catherine Deneuve―singing and dancing along to rhythms unconventionally found in a typical musical format. Here, characters didn’t suddenly break into song, as in a traditional musical; they were either naturally spurred from conflict or setting, as in Femme, or were one with the dialogue, as in the sung-through jazz operetta Cherbourg. Even the mere use of jazz in Cherbourg, composed by the great Michel Legrand, was seen as a subversive move for a movie-musical.

As the 1960s carried over into the 1970s, this experimentation with musical styles soon took on a more “pop” influence, becoming part of a wider trend of chart-topping crossover artists under the movie-musical spotlight. Hugely successful pop act The Beatles released A Hard Day’s Night (1963) and the animated Yellow Submarine later (1968). 1972 saw Diana Ross earn a ‘Best Actress’ Academy Award nomination for her performance as Billie Holliday in Lady Sings the Blues. Moving away from the big-budget productions of the early ’60s, which were seen as outmoded by that point, megastar Barbra Streisand starred opposite Kris Kristofferson in the 1976 remake of A Star is Born. That same year, the ‘Starman’ himself, David Bowie, became known as The Man Who Fell to Earth.

All that Jazz. Credit: TMDb.

Bookending the latter decade, however, would be perhaps the most thrillingly innovative blend of the pop and musical theatre worlds — in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972) and All That Jazz (1979). As Hilton Als beautifully described in an essay for the Criterion Collection’s The Current:

“By centering on the body, Fosse has such amazing source material — the drama was in a step, a look, a gesture. His cinema grew out of that; the films he made before All That Jazz were like no others, but it’s the film, a kind of moral-minded, autobiographical phantasmagoria, that Fosse learned to make the camera dance too.”

Under Fosse’s style came a push-and-pull between the pared-down, simple effortlessness of his choreography, with the Brechtian exposure of his effortful direction. This, along with his use of both show tunes and pop music, made for a powerful combo. From a haunting montage that juxtaposed a slapstick nightclub routine against a streetside altercation with Nazis in Weimar-era Berlin, to an anxiety-inducing triptych in which a struggling dancer’s pushed beyond her abilities in the studio, to the director’s on-screen alter-ego’s lifeless form being zipped up in a black body bag (to the opening strains of Ethel Merman’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business”), the effect of Fosse’s singular vision was such that it resulted in what he called the “Razzle Dazzle” side of the musical. The dark underbelly behind the glitz and glamour of stage life.

Though Fosse’s sleek and nuanced style certainly tapped a bit into the more appealing pop sensibilities of the musical (Jazz did feature a penultimate sequence of Roy Scheider and Ben Vereen performing a rather morbid version of The Everly Brothers’ “Bye, Bye Love”, after all), it would be a long while the level of professionalism seen here would find itself in the mainstream movie-musical.