'You should get one with your Covid jab': can musicals save cinema?
In 2020, all bets were off. When spring came and screen after screen shut its doors, a chorus line of studios scrambled to postpone prize properties until a time when it might be viable for cinema audiences to see them.
But one big film did the opposite, the studio bringing forward its planned cinema release of October 2021 a full 17 months, to 3 July 2020, for a Disney+ premiere. Hamilton, LinManuel Miranda’s revisionist rap-musical about the founding fathers, was already a mould-breaker. Now, its lightly styled film version can also claim to be the most-streamed movie in a year in which people did little but stream movies.
Hamilton was prime lockdown fodder for obvious reasons. Even when we were able to leave the house it was a hot ticket; the simulation of a top night out during a very bleak period was irresistible. Four days before its release, Broadway’s closure was extended until January 2021; in October that was pushed to June.
Hamilton’s healthy precedent will continue to buoy cinemas through the new year. This will be a bumper season for fans of the counterpoint duet, with multiple stage shows finding their way on screen, as well as original movie musicals and song-driven animation.
James Corden’s all-singing take on Cinderella, with Billy Porter as a genderqueer fairy godmother and Frozen’s Idina Menzel as the wicked stepmother, opens in early February. In the same month comes Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, based on the West End hit about a teen drag queen and featuring a stilettoed turn from Richard E Grant.
Later in the year, film versions of Broadway staples such as Wicked and West Side Story (directed by Steven Spielberg, scripted by Tony Kushner) will strut their stuff, as will two more projects from Miranda: an adaptation of his first stage show, In the Heights, and a new animation, Vivo.
Even the arthouse is getting in on the act. Originally destined for Cannes 2020 (and now, probably, Cannes 2021) Annette is a rock opera from Leos Carax, starring Adam Driver and Marion
Cotillard, and featuring new music from Sparks. Given Carax’s form – he coaxed gold from Kylie Minogue in Holy Motors – and the fact Driver’s impromptu holler of Sondheim’s Being Alive was the most indelible scene in Marriage Story, expectations are high.
Film historian Neil Brand, who made the BBC4 series The Sound of Movie Musicals, points to the pivotal role played 90-odd years ago by the films of Busby Berkeley and Rogers and Astaire in leading “the fightback against the Depression. People needed such things and I really think we do now.”
The more solipsistic likes of La La Land won’t fit the bill, he thinks. Movie musicals in 2021 will need to be loud, upbeat and densely populated. “Musicals are always communal: loads of people on screen, having a joyful experience in a crowd, which is usually moving as one.”
Watching mass happiness, ideally with others, will sate a key craving. Brand believes such films can act as a gateway drug for those slipping back into society: a reawakening to the kind of participation to which we have become unaccustomed. “If you think about how people watch Rocky Horror Show: they’re almost in it.”
For Robin Baker, head curator of the British Film Institute’s National Archive, who programmed its 2019 musicals season, “the best musicals offer far more than simple escapism. The cathartic powers of musicals enable us to amplify unspoken emotions and take us singing and dancing into a brighter, more optimistic, Technicolor future. Right now they should be prescribed along with the second dose of your Pfizer jab.”
And this perhaps is the key reason musicals are likely to thrive as the pandemic, hopefully, reaches its final act. Audiences are likely to be in the mood for either extreme realism, which reflects back at them all we have been through, or absolute escapism, which does not.
While many films shot before the pandemic and delayed until 2021 are likely to jar, as they exist in an unhappy halfway house of appearing to be of the world yet not addressing the events which have shaken it, musicals operate in an entirely different realm.
Yet emotionally, they may chime with a rare force. As people emerge from quasi-hibernation, some singing in the rain or dancing in the streets or trilling at the Technicolor beauty of the everyday, is only to be expected.
Jukebox musicals – of which there are plenty next year, about Elvis, David Bowie, Aretha Franklin – are therefore unlikely to strike the same chord. Says Brand: “I want a story in which when a character breaks into song it’s completely understandable. Words have failed them and music has to take over.” After an unspeakable year, song may once more be cinema’s salvation.
Musicals are always communal – loads of people having a joyful experience in a crowd that is usually moving as one