Why we’re all making a song and dance about musicals
As movie soundtracks dominate the album charts...
This week it was revealed that musical soundtracks dominated the album chart of 2018 – with three making the Top 10.
The Greatest Showman, featuring Keala Settle’s brilliant This Is Me, was the best selling of the whole year.
And the soundtracks for Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and Lady Gaga’s A Star Is Born were also massive.
Why the sudden surge in feelgood musicals? It’s all down to the difficult times we’re living through ... and it has happened many times before.
The Great Depression of the 1930s went hand in hand with the Busby Berkeley extravaganzas, which offered lines of high-kicking dancers forming dazzling kaleidoscopic routines that are still breathtaking.
And in the austere 1940s and 1950s an unbeatable fusion of toetapping tunes, massive budgets, and glamorous star actors and actresses ensured musicals were the real blockbusters.
So in these anxiety-filled and Brexit-dominated years, it is perhaps no surprise that we find modern audiences flocking to the cinema to embrace the likes of La La Land and The Greatest Showman.
And as this amazing year ahead is about to unfold, we have Mary Poppins Returns to hopefully brighten the gloom – along with the sing-along version of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, which will arrive in our cinemas from next Friday.
Hard times have dictated how we brighten our lives with these musicals.
So now we are back in love with them, here is my alltime Top 10 to cheer your day. Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’connor send up 1920s Hollywood in this gloriously entertaining and sensational musical which also just happens to be the greatest film ever made. No list of musicals is complete without acknowledging the incredible choreography Busby Berkeley, whose dance routines set a benchmark in ambition and scale yet to bettered. This backstage Broadway drama features the tunes of Harry Warren and Al Dubin and sees Ginger Rogers in a minor role as Ann “Anytime Annie” Lowell. Howard Keel and Jane Powell star in this rousing and unapologetically un-pc story about a family of backwoodsmen who kidnap local girls in order to marry them.
(May 24) An Elton John biopic starring Taron Egerton and Richard Madden.
(May 24) Director Guy Ritchie’s live-action version of the Disney fave. Will Smith is the genie while Mena Massoud plays Aladdin. Russ Tamblyn plays Keel’s youngest brother and also appears in West Side Story. The winner of eight Oscars including best film, director and leading man, though Audrey Hepburn was not even nominated for her spirited turn as the lovable Cockney flower girl who was taught how to “talk proper” by Rex Harrison’s badtempered professor. It was in this year that Julie Andrews won the best
(July 19) Computer animated remake of another Disney hit with Donald Glover as Simba and Beyonce as Nala.
(Nov 22) Not a remake but much-anticipated sequel to the 2013 hit that delighted youngsters. Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born actress Oscar for her role as Mary Poppins.
Natalie Wood starred in Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein’s re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet, partially filmed on location in New York. The movie used innovative colour techniques and walked off with 10 of the
Oscars for which it was nominated. Legends Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are in truly tiptop form dancing cheek to cheek in this fabulous screwball musical comedy film, which proved to be their biggest hit. A remake of 1940s The Philadelphia Story sees Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby hit all the right notes as they compete to romance Hollywood queen Grace Kelly in her last film role before becoming a real life princess.
Dance supremo Bob Fosse’s dark musical sees Hollywood royalty Liza Minnelli at her formidable best as showgirl Sally Bowles. It co-stars Joel Grey whose daughter Jennifer starred as Baby in 1987’s
Dirty Dancing. Julie Andrews is practically perfect in every way as the world’s favourite nanny, playing alongside Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney chimney sweep in this magical family fantasy.
John Travolta and Olivia Newtonjohn were the ones everyone wanted in this electrifying rock ’n’ roll homage to the high school years of the 1950’s.
(Dec 20) The Lloyd-webber stage hit becomes a movie with the fantasy felines played by Jennifer Hudson and Taylor Swift, along with James Corden, Ian Mckellen and Idris Elba – plus Dame Judi Dench as Old Deuteronomy.