TCM’s Alicia Malone is ‘Mad About Musicals’ throughout June

Many musicals have class ... and throughout June on Turner Classic Movies, they actually will be a class.

Beginning June 5, the channel will devote each Tuesday and Thursday during the month to “Mad About Musicals,” not only an on-air programming event but also an online course in association with Ball State University. Students from that school helped to design the lessons, marking the fourth time TCM has participated in conducting such a program.

Channel staple Ben Mankiewicz handles the first week’s primetime introductions, continuing after that with the Thursday lineups. Starting with the second week, new TCM co-host Alicia Malone presents the Tuesday-evening attractions, ranging from “Cabin in the Sky” and “Singin’ in the Rain” to “My Fair Lady” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” The pleasant Malone notes that in her youth in her native Australia, she became a major fan of many of the titles featured.

“I grew up watching classic movies,” she confirms, “and one of the first was ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ For a while because I was so young, I was convinced that it was a movie actually made in the ’20s, because that’s when it’s set! It taught me a lot about the Hollywood system, how rough it was sometimes to transition from silent films to talkies. I also used to watch Marilyn Monroe movies, so I loved ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ – and I went through a whole Gene Kelly phase, so I also loved seeing him in ‘An American in Paris.’

“I watch every single film I do an introduction for,” adds Malone, also a host on the TCM-related streaming service FilmStruck, “so this has been like my own little course. To put these in the context of history and start right at the beginning – with the big Busby Berkeley-type production numbers of the ’30s and ’40s, then through the heyday of the ’50s MGM musicals and the change that happened in the ’60s – you see that this has been a Hollywood staple since the birth of the talkies. It’s fun to see it grow and evolve with the times.”

A veteran of Fandango (as is fellow TCM full-time newcomer Dave Karger), Malone cites the Oscar-winning “La La Land” as evidence that the movie musical endures. She’s very much in favor of the genre’s history being presented in the form of an educational course, for those who choose to pursue that, as well as the pure entertainment TCM is known for.

“I remember there was a Hitchcock course and a comedy course,” Malone reflects. “There’s so much to learn about classic films, and there’s so much that still can be enjoyed about them by people of all ages, so I love the fact that TCM does this.”