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This stylization, this bending of reality that's inherent in musicals more perhaps than in almost any other genre, is a leap that many audiences may not want to take. As a result, it is easier for them to accept a full-scale invasion of the planet by a race of lobstermen than to buy somebody breaking into song while cooking breakfast. Yet, love it or loath it, the musical is making a comeback now. A couple of years ago, the huge popular success of Moulin Rouge! hinted that audiences weren't completely cold to the possibility of a modern musical. The suspicion was confirmed with the more recent hit Chicago, a knockout with both viewers and critics. All of a sudden, everyone is talking about future projects getting off the ground. Just ten years ago, insiders were betting that Disney's disastrous Newsies would be the death knell to the entire genre. Now, wunderkind Steven Soderbergh says he wants to make a movie with people singing and dancing on the streets, and nobody is laughing. The musical has come a long way since its origins with, appropriately enough, the coming of sound. In fact, the first "talkie," 1927's The Jazz Singer, is actually a silent film with snippets of vaudeville patter and songs occasionally woven in to galvanize audiences. People were more transfixed by the novelty of sound than by the idea of a musical. After all, the plot of The Jazz Singer followed a cantor's son interested in modern music, so the notion of him breaking into song was hardly groundbreaking by itself. It wasn't until the Hollywood arrival German master Ernst Lubitsch in the late 1920s and early 1930s that the musical started expanding its boundaries. Suddenly, princesses and paupers were declaring their love for each other through song, as choruses swelled and orchestras thundered behind them. Of course, this kind of scenario did not sit too well with '30s audiences, no matter how scintillatingly inventive it looks today. People then were much more comfortable with the dizzying gyrations of Busby Berkeley (42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933), whose musical numbers, no matter how extravagant, were always placed within the real world, with the dirt and grime of the Depression just outside the theater door. At the other side of the spectrum from Berkeley's plebeian, frenzied rhythms were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the '30s. The cinematic Scotch-tape in between their numbers is flimsy at best, but when Astaire and Rogers come together on the dance floor, everything else vanishes. In The Gay Divorcee or Swing Time, their flowing, inhumanly graceful movements turn dancing into stylized seduction and, as a result, stylized lovemaking. It is this kind of sensuality of movement that also characterizes the greatest of all directors of musicals, Vincente Minnelli. In a career spanning over three decades and a dozen musicals, Minnelli understood and respected the appeal of the genre. In Cabin in the Sky, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris and The Band Wagon, among others, he brilliantly employed studio artifice (lighting, décor, movement) to create moments in which a scene turns into a Technicolor musical number feel like the natural expression of the characters' repressed feelings. This kind of assurance is exactly what has been missing from musicals in the past 40 years. The Sound of Music and Funny Girl, the most popular musicals of the 1960s, were heavy, elephantine entertainments that helped sow the seeds of the genre's decline. Cabaret tried to revitalize the musical with 1970s despairing cynicism and garish energy, but most other attempts have been dismal. Ironically, the best musicals during this time came from Jacques Demy, a French director whose films (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort) are lush, heartfelt valentines to the Hollywood musicals he loved and which, at times, come close to outdoing their models in romanticism and full- bodied illusionism. Despite the rare genre stab (Pennies From Heaven, Evita, Everyone Says I Love You), the musical has been flatlining for the past few decades. For a time, it seemed as though audiences would only accept musical numbers if they were cartoonized, peopled by the likes of singing teapots and dancing chandeliers. I happen to love musicals. Still, I am more excited by the renewed interest in musicals than by the new movies themselves. Moulin Rouge! attempted to funnel everything musical down into a passionate frenzy, but to me it was more like having my head inside a pinball machine for two hours. If Chicago is more bearable, it's because it calms down a bit and lets you see the performers perform, instead of creating a mess of sound and fury by cutting, cutting, cutting.
Will musicals regain their past glory, or will they harden again into circumscribed academicism? It's too early to tell,
but it should make for an interesting wait.
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