Renaissance of musicals
Beauty And The Beast, La La Land herald the comeback of musicals.
SO, perhaps you’ve heard: La La Land didn’t win Best Picture at the Oscars.
But if every cloud has a silver lining, this one might be called golden: The Emma Stone-Ryan Gosling musical, which did win six Oscars, has been racking up box office numbers remarkable for a musical – nearly US$417mil (RM1.8bil) globally so far, according to comScore – and even more for an original one with no previously known songs or story.
Damien Chazelle’s eye-popping, toe-tapping creation ranks third in all live-action film musicals, behind the 2008 Mamma Mia! and the 2012 Les Miserables, neither of them original.
“That’s big-time money,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at comScore. “At times, the musical genre has been marginalised or not taken seriously. But this is serious business.”
It’s enough to make a musical fan break into sudden, joyful song – and as musical fans know, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that! – perhaps on the way to the multiplex, where Emma Watson’s Beauty And The Beast has proven to be a box office success worldwide.
And if a Disney tale featuring a Harry Potter-calibre array of top British actors isn’t your thing, you need only wait; there’s a slew of other live-action musicals in the works, a combination of originals, sequels and remakes.
This Christmas, we’ll have Hugh Jackman as P.T. Barnum in The Greatest Showman, with music by La La Land lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and a year later the high-profile Mary Poppins Returns with Emily Blunt, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Meryl Streep, among others.
Also reportedly on tap: a Will Ferrell-Kristen Wiig original musical about the little-known world of corporate musicals, and a Josh Gad musical with songs by Broadway luminaries Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. A musical version of the Broadway megahit Wicked is also coming down the pike.
And there’s more yet to come. “Good movies beget other good movies,” says Marc Platt, a producer of La La Land, not to mention the upcoming Mary Poppins Returns and Wicked films.
“So when a movie captures the imagination and hearts of people around the world, it’s going to have a positive influence on similar genres getting made.”
In a broader cultural sense, is the musical undergoing a renaissance, or at least a major moment? Or is it all just a happy coincidence? Certainly, it’s been a great time for musicals on Broadway, where Miranda’s Hamilton has been breaking all kinds of records (and bringing with it a hugely enthusias- tic, youthful audience) since it opened in July 2015.
And on TV, there’s been the trend of live musicals like Grease, Peter Pan and Hairspray.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” says Mandy Moore, the choreographer of La La Land, who’s also worked extensively in television. “I think it went away for a while, that style of storytelling, and that style of music, and it’s like anything – bellbottoms were cool, and then they were not cool, and then they were cool again.
“People throw it away for a while and then come back to it and remember, oh, that was really cool, and why don’t we reinvent it?”
To Menken, who composed the music for Beauty And The Beast (and many other musicals), the moment for musicals has been happening “for quite a while.”
“Look at the box office,” he said in a recent interview, listing Hamilton and a slew of other Broadway shows, by him and others. “It’s just an explosion of musicals. And this new generation coming up who were sort of weaned on our influence, and they’re kicking butt.”
Beauty And The Beast director Bill Condon credits animated musical films with getting audiences comfortable with the simple act of a character breaking into song.
“And then if you let it happen, it turns out that the audience actually loves that,” Condon says.
“There’s a wider audience for it, for just the joy of breaking out into song. It feels like the audience has caught up again.”
They may have caught up, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy for future screen musicals to capture the La La Land magic, says Dergarabedian of comScore.
“It’s not going to happen every year,” he says. “That was lightning in a bottle.”