Some Thoughts on Movie Musicals

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.