movie musical project – The Discerning Lyricist

Posted on February 23, 2020 by A. Stefan Melnyk

Movie Musical Project: “The Sound of Music”

Julie Andrews in "Sound Of Music" - 20th Century Fox - Released March 2, 1965

The Movie Musical Project is a roughly bi-weekly essay series exploring the best and worst of movie musical filmmaking, with an eye to deriving principles from them that can be applied to a new wave of movie musicals. Join us. We brought wine.

The Sound of Music marked the end of an era both on stage and screen, albeit in markedly different ways. Famously, it was the last show that the legendary Oscar Hammerstein II wrote before his death, but more than that it was a callback to and a doubling-down on the style he made famous. Hammerstein had already written more dramatically complex shows and more stridently political shows by that point, as well as far more sophisticated lyrics, but The Sound of Music represents perhaps the simplest but also the most archetypal version of his tendencies as a writer – unabashedly sentimental, overtly socially-minded, and achingly human. Some have framed it as an artistic step back, but that would only be accurate in the sense that it served as something akin to a Greatest Hits record for Hammerstein’s signature aesthetic.

The movie adaptation, for its part, was the last of the major Hollywood Rodgers & Hammerstein adaptations to be produced. By that point, its style could be justifiably seen as passe – after all, it had been four years since West Side Story had given the movie musical a (for its time) highly contemporary shot in the arm, and within seven years the most successful and acclaimed movie musical of the year would be Fosse’s Cabaret, a production that would owe a huge historical debt to Hammerstein’s oeuvre while being seemingly as stylistically distinct from it as possible. 1965 might have been the last year that The Sound of Music could have been as big a hit as it was on the big screen.

Posted on January 20, 2020January 20, 2020 by A. Stefan Melnyk

Movie Musical Project: “Rocketman”

rocketman

I should preface all of this by saying that in my opinion, Rocketman is one of the flat-out best musicals of the 2010s, as well as a deceptively brilliant execution of the movie musical as a format.

Which is odd, because at first glance it feels like it shouldn’t be. After all, this is yet another rock musician biopic that hits effectively all the story beats of the musician biopic formula, and was not just consulted on but in fact produced by its subject through his personal studio, Rocket Pictures. What this initial impression largely fails to account for, however, is that Elton John has always had an uncanny eye for collaborators.

Posted on January 5, 2020January 5, 2020 by A. Stefan Melnyk

Movie Musical Project: “Evita”

evita

The musical Evita is arguably the most accomplished show that either of its writers ever managed to produce. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s previous shows had often evinced a charmingly enthusiastic sloppiness that sometimes mars one’s enjoyment of them, while their work post-Evita (and, tellingly, post-each other) gradually slips into an apathetic funk with only a handful of bright spots creatively. Evita, then, sits at a singular and rarified point where the artists involved had acquired enough discipline and craft to tackle something ambitious, but were still young and hungry enough that they gave their all to these ambitions, sense occasionally be damned.

Posted on January 1, 2020 by A. Stefan Melnyk

Movie Musical Project: Introduction

The idea of song in storytelling is a fundamental absurdity. That’s not intended as an insult, to be sure – a life without that sort of extravagant absurdity would be a life scarcely worth living – but it does point us toward a fundamental challenge of musical theater writing: making the absurd feel palpably true.

It helps that this is just the sort of deception that people dearly want to buy into. We want our feelings to have the grand sweep of a song, and that want can – under the right circumstances – persuade our knowledge to stand slightly aside for a while.

But how can we, as artists, deliberately induce this? Here, fortunately, we have an indispensable ally in the form of the theatre format. We can talk endlessly about how much more visceral and present live theatre feels, but maybe its greatest creative asset is precisely the distance it creates as its initial affordance.