This is
something that started rattling around in my head a while back, when news was
first coming out about a movie adaptation of Cats. I found the casting
news – Taylor Swift, James Corden, and Jennifer Hudson, among others – to be
mostly meh or perplexing, and additionally, I couldn’t shake the sense of,
“Why?” To be fair, Cats has never been one of my favorites, but it’s also very
inherently theatrical, and I’m not sure how that would work in a film. For me, its strongest aspect is the feline
quality of the choreography, but I can’t picture a Hollywood movie these days
doing makeup-and-costume cats rather than CGI cats, so what’s the point?
But I
digress. These were the thoughts that
got me started, but a larger question came out of that: namely, why do I keep placing hope on movie
musicals? If I’m being honest, there
have been plenty that I’ve enjoyed, but when we’re talking modern movie
musicals, that enjoyment usually comes with major caveats.
At this
point, I ought to know what to expect from a movie musical. Generally, that means a bevy of stars whose
singing ranges from sort-of-passable to pretty-good, with a few exceptions at
both extreme ends of the spectrum.
Another option you see sometimes is pop/rock stars who can tear up the
singing but whose acting falls more into that sort-of-passable-to-pretty-good
range. So it’s hard to get the whole
package in a movie musical. While you’ll
occasionally see legit Broadway actors pop up in roles large (Jeremy Jordan as
Jamie in The Last Five Years) or
small (Laura Michelle Kelly as the Beggar Woman in Sweeney Todd,) these aren’t the norm. Which I understand – movies are expensive to
make, and producers want star power, but you can’t just put Hugh Jackman in
everything. It means, though, lots of film
casts that can’t deliver the way a stage cast can.
But there’s
another issue of translating musicals for the screen, and the cast can’t help
much with that. (RENT featured most of the original Broadway cast, but that didn’t
make it a good movie.) Adapting well is
incredibly tricky – great songs get cut, the pacing feels awkward when there’s
a big finish but no expectation of applause, and the overall effect seems to
fall in a weird in-between place that’s not fully cinematic or theatrical. Even something transposed pretty directly
from the stage to screen winds up feeling stilted, not like a show anymore but
also not enough like a movie (see, The
Producers.)
And yeah,
often enough, it basically works, but
if you take a step back and look at the musical it came from, it’s clear that
the movie is just getting by. I’ve seen
quite a few movie musicals made in about the last 20 years, and other than
animated musicals like Disney stuff (which seem largely exempt from these
problems,) I’m hard-pressed to come up with many that feel on par with the show
but in a way that’s fitting for a movie.
Honestly, Hedwig and the Angry
Inch might be the only one. Being an
indie movie probably helped, because no one was trying to earn $100 million,
but that movie keeps key members of its original off-Broadway cast and makes
narrative and stylistic changes to better suit the film medium while still
feeling true to the spirit of the musical.
But
sadly, Hedwig is the exception, not
the rule. Obviously, the experience of
live theatre can’t truly be replicated onscreen, but when it comes to musicals
and movies these days, I find that the best bet is almost invariably a stage
show that was filmed for distribution (like Newsies,
Falsettos, or the old-school Sondheim
recordings from the ‘80s) – I’d kill for more of these.
I’m still
left with the big question, though. If
the overwhelming majority of movie musicals pale in comparison to the “real
thing,” why do I keep looking forward to them?
Is it a hope-springs-eternal situation where I keep waiting for someone
to get it right? A morbid curiosity to
see what movie stars’ singing voices are like?
Am I just so hard up that I’ll take it anyway? I’m not sure what the answer is.
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