Let’s get musical
How do you solve a problem like musicals? You either ignore the question, because musical theatre is the highest of all the performing arts. Or you gleefully set fire to the entire, godforsaken genre. Theatre geek Carly Gooch and cool kid Michael Wright discuss ... Hopelessly devoted: Carly Gooch
Love them or hate them, there’s no getting away from knowing a show tune or two – like dormant volcanoes, waiting to explode out of you when you least expect it. How can you resist wanting to step to the ri-i-i-i-i-ight when Time Warp plays (you just sang that in your head, didn’t you), or follow up “doe” with “a deer, a female deer”. I’m sure Mike can hold himself back, and probably the majority of the population might be able to as well, but there will be some out there like me who just can’t help themselves.
I thought I was a fence-sitter on musicals (jazz hands and singing instead of just talking is cringe), but I’ve been Reviewing the Situation, as Oliver Twist’s Fagin would sing. Of course I love musicals, they’re like a concert with a storyline, and my year so far has been booked out with stadium gigs.
When I went to a local production of Grease last year, I couldn’t help tapping my foot and bobbing my head. I looked around the packed theatre and there were only a few others like me; the rest sat stony-faced, completely stationary. I just about need a straitjacket to stop myself from standing in the aisles and dancing along with the cast.
Come to think of it, there should be seated and standing tickets for musical shows so punters can stand up the front in the mosh pit and really make the most of every song.
There’s a real feel-good factor to watching a live show, which is probably why New York’s Broadway has been entertaining the crowds for centuries, since the first theatre opened there in the mid-1700s.
My first foray into watching musicals was in high school when a close friend danced and acted her way through many shows held on the school stage and at the Town Hall in Christchurch.
One moment haunts me, though. Unwilling to accept I couldn’t sing, she encouraged me to audition for the Avonside Girls-Shirley Boys production of The Sound of Music.
I had to sing scales in a small studio while other wannabes lined up outside. It was bad, I was mortified and I told said friend I’d leave the theatrics to her.
It’s amazing how many show tunes out there are disguised as regular songs getting radio air time. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or just hate music like a former newsroom colleague, then you’ll already know some highlights of the musicals.
One Night in Bangkok, Aquarius, and the sad tones of Memory are all from shows (Chess, Hair and Cats) and they don’t have that wretched shiny, happy people vibe to them, unlike Food Glorious Food or Super ca l if ragi list ic ex pi ali docio us( run that through the spell check!). Of the people who say they don’t like musicals, I bet half of them would enjoy a matinee of The Lion King or a night at Cabaret – what we don’t want is to be blind-sided by something we’re not expecting to have singing in (cringe).
One of my (least) favourite things: Michael Wright
There’s a school of thought that men of a certain demographic are biased against musical theatre but would watch paint dry and declare it a masterpiece if Scorsese was directing. This is, I fear, an accurate stereotype, so let me try to dispel it: It’s possible to dislike musicals solely because they aren’t very good.
I speak from experience. When I was a kid our family dutifully showed up at the St James theatre every winter to watch the local repertory put on one of about four musicals. All of them starred Julie Andrews in the film version and were so deeply uncool even I pitied them. At high school I was once, based on no discernible talent, asked to audition for the role of Oliver in the stage show of that story about the greedy kid who ate all the leftovers.
The try-out required me to sing an abomination of a song called Where Is Love. I didn’t know it, and if you don’t already, good for you. Don’t Google it.
So what exactly is the problem with musicals, aside from a surfeit of crap music? Well, here I need to rejoin the rest of my knuckle-dragging demographic: I just can’t get my head around people bursting into song for no reason.
I know enjoying any fictional story requires at least some suspension of disbelief, but my imagination only stretches so far. If you’re out riding your horse through a cornfield and you think, what a beautiful mornin’ ... just say so. Better yet, use the moment to think of something better to talk about than the weather.
But if you insist on subjecting yourself, go to the theatre rather than the cinema. Even we philistines agree that’s where musicals work best. For one, the proscenium arch is a handy reminder that this is all staged, which makes Bert the chimney sweep marginally less punchable.
Mostly, though, there’s an ephemeral joy to be had in all those moving parts coming together – singing, dancing, orchestra, lights. It all feels a bit more vital than another The Sound of Music rerun at Christmas.
Still, this has its limits. I once saw Mamma Mia in London and it was excellent in every respect except that I didn’t really enjoy it. It’s probably not a great example. Retrofitting even the most formidable pop oeuvre into a narrative and expecting a non-tedious result is asking a bit much. But since learning Rodgers and Hammerstein were dead and Andrew Lloyd Webber was using roller skates to mix things up, Broadway and the West End and the rest of them seem intenton nostalgia-fyingthe genre. Even good music can’t make musicals good.
Of course, there is an exception. Singing’ in the Rain (the film, at least) is a triumph. Starring Gene Kelly – the OG song and dance man – and what Wikipedia informs me was the much, much, much, oh my god so much younger than him Debbie Reynolds, it found an ingenious solution to the problem of people bursting into song for no reason by setting itself in Hollywood at the birth of the talkie. The one place people might actually burst into song for no reason.
A recent re-watch confirmed only two of its songs suck – a phenomenal strike rate which buoyed me to watch another musical’s film adaptation with a revisionist eye.
Alas. I just didn’t care. And if I’m going to watch something and not care I’d rather it was Clint Eastwood calling everybody ‘punk’ and then shooting some guys than some overblown Shakespeare knock-off.
And so I banished musicals back to the farthest outpost of my brain where they belong, to be called upon only for their true purpose: pub quiz answers and getting Simpsons references. Monorail, monorail …