GIVE THEM A HAND! MUSICALS STAGE A COMEBACK
Once maligned, this pop culture staple is all the rage on the big and small screens
All you show-tune skeptics, you who snicker at the spectacle of unison-dancing cats or roll your eyes at the first chords of Don’t Rain on My Parade: Who’s getting the last laugh now? Because suddenly, being in and grooving on and talking about musicals is the hippest thing going.
Across the pop culture spectrum — from Jennifer Lopez (cast in a Bye Bye Birdie Live! that she pitched for TV next year), to the sexy young ensemble of Fox’s Grease: Live, to Ariana Grande, appearing in the most recent Hairspray Live! — celebrities who never focused their careers on this genre before are getting in line to sing out, like Gypsy’s Louise.
In Hollywood, one of the most talked-about award-season contenders is director Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, an original movie musical with a score by Justin Hurwitz and the Dear Evan Hansen team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, that lovingly recalls tuneful films of yore, such as An American in Paris. Its stars could not, in fact, feel more of the moment: Emma Stone and, soft-shoeing and crooning along with her, that scruffy, soulful heartbreaker Ryan Gosling.
On the CW television network, meanwhile, Crazy ExGirlfriend rolls along in its second season, telling the story of co-writer/co-creator Rachel Bloom’s desperately needy Rebecca Bunch, a woman capable at any moment of segueing with the rest of a satirically gifted cast into a parody music video, a torch song or even a production number modelled on Les Miserables.
And back in its natural habitat — Broadway — where musical theatre has long been king, it’s now also queen, crown prince and virtually all the other royals. This season, original musicals are popping up at a near-modern-record pace, with 12 of them opening, by some accountings the highest number since the 1978-79 season, when 13 musicals debuted. A new crop of old musicals is being sewn, too, starring the likes of Bette Midler and Glenn Close.
The resurgent enthusiasm seems in part a recognition of the extraordinary adaptability of this quintessential American form; its ability to absorb new melodic styles remains a fitting metaphor for a nation of ever-evolving makeup and character. Maintaining its legacy and, at the same time, pushing the form forward, is a challenge being taken up anew by older nostalgists and a younger generation alike.
“What I loved about it, when Damien pitched it to me,” says La La Land producer Marc Platt, “is that it sounded as if it accomplished its singing in a non-cynical way, which is also contemporary. I’m always looking to find ways to keep the musical form alive and relevant in the world, because I love it so.”
All of this is not even to mention the national dinner-table debate that has been ignited by the most acclaimed musical of our time, Hamilton, a show that has been embraced by the Obama White House and has even made musicals safe for hip
hop fans.
Important songwriters have continued to come to the fore, as musicals have always retained a cadre of passionate adherents. But it has taken longer for the nation’s entertainment machinery to find ways to integrate musical theatre back into the mainstream consumer’s diet. “It took on a little bit of a stench,” musicals producer Neil Meron says. By which he means that outside theatre circles, a mustiness had crept into the show business zeitgeist, a sense of the musical becoming uncool, out of step.
On TV, series such as Fox’s Glee, in which actors playing high school kids covered songs ranging from hits by ’60s rock bands to the score of Wicked, and NBC’s Smash, a dramatic series about the making of a musical, gave musical theatre opportunities to carve deeper inroads back into the American consciousness. Artistically successful movie versions of Broadway shows, such as director Rob Marshall’s Oscarwinning Chicago, have done their part, too, to foster a broader appeal. As Meron puts it, “‘Musicals’ is not the dirty little word anymore when it comes to film and TV.” Crazy Ex- Girlfriend, which tells of Rebecca’s move from Manhattan, where she was a high- powered lawyer, to West Covina, Calif., on a quixotic quest to win back the heart of a former boyfriend (played by Vincent Rodriguez III), typically weaves two or three songs into each episode. The overarching concept, Bloom said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where she was filming the final episodes of the show’s second season, is that the songs form a loose narrative chain over the course of the series.
“I kind of see the show as one giant musical,” she says, noting that the songs are primarily written by her and two others, Adam Schlesinger and Jack Dolgen.
Like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, La La Land and even the live TV presentations use novel techniques to reinvigorate the way we watch musicals. Platt, who this year produced Grease: Live (he is also a producer of Broadway’s Wicked, and his son Ben is the star of the soon-to-open Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen) says the Grease team sought to combine the styles of filmmaking and live television to create a unique experience of the show. And he’s on the lookout for more such opportunities.
“You always want to find new ways to stretch the genre,” he says. “It’s about finding a new grammar for a form we love.”