Prologue
At a crucial moment in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), our hero(ine), Hedwig, is abandoned by Sgt Luther Robinson and left to fend for him/herself in an isolated trailer park in Junction City, Kansas – a long, long way from his/her East Berlin home. Images of the Berlin Wall being torn down play on the TV and a few piano chords are heard off-screen as the TV reporter comments: ‘The Germans are a patient people and good things come to those who wait.’ With this indirect reminder of what might have been had Hedwig stayed at home, the camera pans from an anniversary present (a ‘Wig in a Box’) across the interior of the trailer, and we catch a glimpse through the window of a lone immigrant musician outside playing a toy-like keyboard slung around his neck before Hedwig is revealed lying disconsolately on the couch. Though all appears to be lost, Hedwig begins to sing about the healing power of performance. The second verse adds guitar and drums to the accompaniment, and the camera again pans to the window to reveal a guitarist outside. After the second chorus, a band of itinerant, Eastern European immigrant musicians (whom Hedwig will later call the ‘ambassadors of Eastern Bloc Rock’) file joyously through the door of the trailer brandishing guitars (though none is plugged in) and an impossibly small portable drum set and continue accompanying this song of recovery and rejuvenation. Last to enter is Yitzhak (Hedwig’s future husband) carrying a fabulous new blond wig on a tray – much as one might present a lobster or flaming pancakes. The recipe: music + costume = a transformative serenade that provides the vehicle for Hedwig’s rebirth as a drag performer of incredible potency. At the end of the third chorus, the side wall of the trailer suddenly bursts open and descends to reveal bright footlights as the music shifts briefly to an angry rock sound. For the fourth chorus, all six performers jostle into the frame of the trailer window to encourage some audience participation with the aid of a bouncing wig marking the lyrics. The camera then pans up and back for the lively rock coda, as if to accommodate Hedwig’s phoenix-like rebirth, as the trailer-as-stage brims over with enough charisma to fill a football stadium.
An implausible transition? Possibly. An excuse for a song? Perhaps. Although unquestionably entertaining, bursting into song on screen is both the delight and difficulty of the screen musical genre. Yet surely therein lies the essence of the most popular (mis)conception of the movie musical – the spontaneous outpouring of the human spirit in song and (almost as frequently) dance in unlikely locations and for reasons which, if apparent at all, are mostly paper thin at best. What is it about that moment when song takes over from speech that when treated with skill and finesse can seem like the most natural thing in the world, yet when carelessly done is jarring and comic in the extreme? Indeed, such is the ubiquity of this musical cliché that comedians ranging from the Monty Python team to Mel Brooks, and on television, the makers of The Simpsons, South Park, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Family Guy have made an art of parodying this essential element of movie musicals.1 We could only find these comic renditions amusing if we accepted, at least in part, the artificiality of someone breaking into song in the ultimate medium of documentary realism: film.
Even at this early stage in our inquiry, questions arise. Can film musicals be studied as a unique medium? Or should they be considered part of a larger repertory including musicals for the stage? Stage and screen musicals are indisputably and intimately connected in terms of their history, content and style and must be considered as such if a full picture of either genre is to emerge. Certainly, one advantage movie musicals have over stage shows is the benefit of a relatively permanent record that can be infinitely repeated and studied. Stage musicals, in contrast, truly exist only in live performance.2 Yet the similarities and differences between screen and stage do require us to consider the specific qualities that make film musicals special, and the music in film musicals distinct from the live music in the theatre.
Introduction
Three discrete areas of investigation immediately present themselves as a means of examining the movie musical: (1) technology, (2) genre and (3) style. Although there is a good deal of overlap between these areas, they can serve as a useful matrix for preliminary analysis, and will be considered in turn in the sections that follow.
Under technology the principal areas of focus are advances in sound and colour, the mobility of the camera, and the way in which such changes affect the way musicals look and sound. Questions of genre explore the difference between stage transfers (those based on a pre-existing stage show) and original movie musicals (those with no stage musical precedents), different versions of a show or movie and the sources of the music. Also important is the sub-genre of biopics, movies about the life and work of actual show-business personalities. Issues of style subdivide into three areas: musical, visual and dance. Musical style includes the notion of diegesis – that is, the extent to which music featured on the soundtrack could plausibly emanate from a source within the visual frame or from the narrative as a performance, a rehearsal, or some other likely musical activity. Visual style focuses on contrasts of realism, abstraction and fantasy, the comparison of spectacles that are either stage influenced or movie specific, and recurring iconographical symbols. Dance style considers an array of dance types – ballet, jazz, tap, folk, ballroom and so on; the use of genres such as the waltz or tango; and the scope of the performance from solos and duets to large-scale ensembles.
One notion in particular permeates all aspects of the movie musical: self-reflexivity. This term refers to those aspects of a musical that quote or allude to their own history – the history of musical theatre, the entertainment industry, or the process of making musicals. This might occur through plot (movies about putting on a show or making a movie), songs (including those filmed as performances or rehearsals, those with lyrics that refer to singing or other aspects of performance and/or those that quote elements of an existing song or earlier musical style), or star personae who have a prior relationship with the genre or the entertainment industry. Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is the archetypal self-reflexive musical. The movie concerns the making of early movie musicals, shows songs in rehearsal and performance, has songs about performance and the entertainment industry (‘Singin’ in the Rain’ and ‘Make ‘Em Laugh’) and features an established star with a prior history in stage and screen musicals (Gene Kelly).
Allusions to other works are also not uncommon. Both Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Moulin Rouge! (2001) make multiple references to The Sound of Music (though to quite different effect) to make important narrative points about their central characters. In Moulin Rouge! it is to prove Christian’s legitimacy as a inspirational scriptwriter; in Dancer in the Dark it is to mark Selma’s increasing disconnection from the society around her.
The creative teams involved in musical production – studios, producers, directors, songwriters, actors, singers and dancers – were central to realising these visions, to formulating the combination of sights and sounds that filled the screens. Many of them frequently tapped into their experience with stage musicals and transferred, transformed or otherwise adapted the theatrical aspects of their craft to fit the film medium.
Technology
Once sound could be coordinated and then synchronised with film, the creative possibilities of the film musical genre expanded exponentially. The early successful examples of Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer (1927) and Disney’s animated Steamboat Willie (1928) demonstrated to audiences and, more importantly, to other film studios what was possible when sight and sound were combined with precision.
The next technological advance in sound concerned the way in which musical numbers were recorded. Early musicals required huge sound stages where music, singing and choreography were recorded simultaneously. The noisy camera needed to be encased in a soundproof booth, severely restricting its flexibility. Later, the sound for musical numbers was recorded separately then played back during the filming with singers lip-synching. This freed the camera from its relative immobility and soon, as Fehr and Vogel describe, ‘Cameras began moving more sure-footedly than ever and blending wide- and mid-angle shots with pans or dollying into close-ups at will. Film editors sped up the pace of musical films while adding variety to the visual menu.’3 These changes challenged both silent movie actors, who had to learn to use their voices as well as a new way of acting, and technicians, who had to rapidly master new equipment. But the manifold gains, both artistic and financial, were soon clear.
Concurrent with advances in sound was the development of colour film. In order to compete with the live spectacle of Broadway, the major studios began to use a two-strip Technicolor™ process, at first just in select musical sequences, but later in entire movies. Technical problems prompted continued experimentation until a three-colour process was developed in the 1930s, and from the end of the decade entire musicals in colour would become increasingly common. Unfortunately, film using the two-colour process was highly susceptible to damage and fading, and many movies degraded irreversibly, some only a few years after being made. From the last decades of the twentieth century, advances in digital recording and editing have dramatically enhanced the quality of movies as well as the flexibility and control directors and technicians have over the look and sound of their projects. Computer-generated imagery (CGI), first used in movies in the 1970s, has also reached such a level of sophistication that images appear simultaneously more real and more fantastical.
Genre
The first task for any genre-based study of musical films is to distinguish them from those that are ‘non-musical’. Many movies have theme songs, more have musical numbers, but not all of them qualify as true musicals. It is not so much a question of the quantity of music or the number of songs, but rather one of approach. Gerald Mast states it most succinctly: ‘A play or film is a musical if its primary entertainment value and investment lie in the musical numbers themselves.’4
Once separated from the body of ‘non-musical’ films, movie musicals may then be viewed along a spectrum. At one end are the stage-to-screen transfers that recreate, to varying degrees, elements of a prior stage production. (See Chapter 20 for more on screen adaptations of stage musicals.5) At the other end are movies originally conceived for the screen with plots based on short stories, novels, fairy tales and so forth, or on newly invented narratives, but specifically not on stage musicals. Examples span the whole history of the genre from The Jazz Singer to Walk the Line (2005). Some of the more outstanding examples include 42nd Street (1933), Top Hat (1935), Snow White (1938), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Meet Me in St Louis (1944), Easter Parade (1948), An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain, Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994), Dancer in the Dark, Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Moulin Rouge! And while the influence of theatrical conventions, styles, plots and performers is frequently felt, what distinguishes these works is the way in which they employ the medium of film.
With these generic categories now in place, the study of movie musicals should then take into account the origins of the score. Is it a newly composed set of songs written specifically for a film by a single songwriting team, or a combination of old and new songs by a variety of composers and lyricists? The songs for Dancer in the Dark, for example, were all written specifically for the movie by Björk and Sjón Sigurdsson. The score for Easter Parade contains sixteen songs, all by Irving Berlin, some newly composed, some interpolated from prior contexts. All eight of the songs for An American in Paris are by George and Ira Gershwin, but were assembled for the movie long after George’s death. More recently, the score for Moulin Rouge!, in addition to including period pieces by Offenbach that reflect the late nineteenth-century Parisian setting, also includes a freewheeling array of pop songs from the 1950s to the 1990s including numbers associated with pop culture icons Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, The Beatles, David Bowie, Elton John, U2 and Sting as well as original music composed for the film by David Baerwald.
Adaptations from stage to screen might contain songs from the original stage production, new songs or a combination of the two. This seemingly arbitrary phenomenon must be understood in the context of the working methods of the studio system. Once studios realised the economic rewards to be gained from movie musicals, production increased rapidly, causing a sudden need for songs. The larger studios bought up New York publishing houses as a way of feeding their new children. Having made such an investment, the studios were subsequently reluctant to pay royalties for the use of songs they did not own. Instead, they either had staff writers in their employ compose new songs to be added to an existing score, or interpolated one or more of the many songs whose copyright they already owned. This often resulted in scores with more than half a dozen different songwriters, as is the case in the movie version of Babes in Arms (1939). The musical and narrative effects of such composite scores have yet to be fully explored. For example, can older songs be used to evoke an earlier time period in a specific narrative framework? These and similar questions about the narrative function of songs remain to be answered.
An important subgroup of film musicals is biopics – movies about show business personalities. Singers and songwriters are the typical subjects of biopics, but bandleaders, impresarios, dancers and choreographers are also occasionally featured. The biopic provides ample occasion for musical numbers as the careers of stars unfold, and also incorporates features of the backstage or ‘show’ musical. De-Lovely (2004), the second, and much more successful, screen homage to Cole Porter, contains a series of delightfully staged musical numbers and a more honest portrayal of the songwriter’s personal life.6 Kevin Kline (as Porter) sings many of the songs himself, while others are presented by an astonishing array of vocal stylists – including Robbie Williams, Sheryl Crow, Natalie Cole, Diana Krall, Alanis Morissette, and, for us older viewers, Elvis Costello. Like Porter himself, the movie is subtle and occasionally enigmatic in its style, but it uses the full range of self-reflexive techniques developed over decades of backstage movie musicals. In one charming example, Porter coaches Jack – a male singer in rehearsal having difficulty with the tessitura of ‘Night and Day’. ‘I wrote it with you in mind,’ Porter says. ‘Think about the words … it’s about obsession … just sing it with me’ – and they begin. A rehearsal piano accompanies the verse, but as Jack reaches the chorus orchestral colours swell to reflect his growing confidence. The camera begins to circle around the duo revealing drops being flown in, off-stage business and the empty seats of the theatre. At the second chorus, Porter asks for a key change and the camera begins its second circle with off-stage rehearsal activities once again in plain view. This time, however, as Porter turns to Monty to acknowledge Jack’s grasp of the song, the camera leaves the duo behind on stage. When the stage-left proscenium wall is passed for the second time, the smartly dressed opening night audience is revealed – including Porter himself plus the pit orchestra and conductor. By the time we circle back to the stage, Jack is singing in the fully staged opening-night performance. Not only is this a seamless transition from rehearsal to performance, but it is also a narrative set up for Cole’s liaison with Jack later that night. Throughout the movie, each song is judiciously chosen so that in addition to its place in the surface narrative as, for example, a song that is part of Porter’s latest show, its lyrics and performance style also subtly comment on the surrounding action. Other successful screen biopic subjects include Ray Charles in Ray (2004) and Johnny Cash in Walk the Line.
A further spin on this sub-genre is movies featuring charismatic performers playing characters not far removed from their stage personae in quasi-biographical scenarios. Notable examples include Elvis Presley – beginning with Love Me Tender (1956) – and The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965). The best more recent example is 8 Mile (2002) which stars Eminem (Marshall Mathers III) playing Jimmy (‘Rabbit’) – a fictional Detroit rapper whose life resonates to some extent with his own. Gus Van Sant’s lyrical homage to Kurt Cobain, Last Days (2005), also draws on elements of this sub-genre.
Biopics and other musicals provide opportunities for a particular manifestation of self-reflexivity: the foregrounding of the technology of the industry. Here, images of cameras, projectors, microphones and recording studios fill the frame, to which are frequently added audiences that observe both stage and screen performances and rehearsals. Singin’ in the Rain has many such scenes, but there are countless other musicals that employ this device as a way of letting us in on a secret only to hide it from us at another level – we are, after all, still watching a movie.
The opening sequence of the movie version of Evita (1996) is an example of how deftly these self-reflexive relationships can be juggled. Over the opening black screen, the names of the creators and stars of our movie appear along with sound effects and Spanish conversation. Abruptly, the screen is filled with black-and-white images – a shock since we surely expected colour. Next follows a shot of the internal audience viewing what we now realise to be the movie within our movie. For a brief moment, both external and internal audiences watch the same movie unaware of the other’s presence, but when we see them, that aspect of the illusion is broken. The next shot, however, shows us both the movie screen and the projector – the source of the on-screen illusion and also the source of our movie. Such masterly blurring of the boundaries between on- and off-screen audiences also mirrors the blurring between the lives and personae of the two charismatic female subjects of the movie: Evita and Madonna. The stage production of Evita (1978) also opens inside a movie theatre, but cannot refer to itself visually in quite the same way as the movie version.
Any analysis of musical theatre and film should take into account the central importance of race and culture both in the creative process and in the final product. This area is not without its difficulties since modern audiences will continue to find the ethnic stereotyping in many older musicals distasteful, particularly the practice of ‘blacking up’ by both white and black actors in early musicals from The Jazz Singer to Holiday Inn (1942). Spike Lee deals head on with this issue in Bamboozled (2000) in which a disillusioned TV executive tries to get himself fired by developing the most racially offensive programme he can imagine – a modern minstrel show. Ironically, the show is a hit: problems ensue. Provocative connections, however, between Yiddish theatre, minstrelsy, blacking up, Tin Pan Alley and the music of the Broadway theatre have already been noted in the literature. Surely, therefore, a consideration of the influence and impact of both Jewish and African American culture should be an important part of the analytical and critical enterprise of musical film studies.7
Issues of gender and sexuality also surface regularly in this genre, to varying degrees, from the in-your-face transgender complexity of the title role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, to the less challenging cross-dressing that occurs in Victor/Victoria (1982) and Yentl (1983). Also, a camp sensibility in visual and performance styles permeates the genre to such an extent that an expression of interest in musicals can be virtually synonymous with coming out as gay (at least in American culture).8 The reception of Judy Garland as an icon for gay men has already been convincingly explored.9 Gerald Mast has also posited a close connection between Jewish culture and gay culture as two marginalised groups that were drawn to the entertainment industry because it was a safe professional haven where they could express themselves with less fear of discrimination.10 Our willingness to address and deal sensitively with these issues must surely be one of the priorities of future research on musical film specifically and musical theatre in general.
Visual Style
The silver screen contains a fundamental dualism between realism and fantasy: realism because movies and TV report the news, war, natural disasters, sport and events that have actually occurred; fantasy because that same medium, through acting, mise-en-scène, creative camerawork, editing and special effects, can create entire new worlds that do not exist anywhere but on that same screen. This tension is not nearly so pronounced in the stage musical because theatre audiences have learned, over centuries, to suspend their disbelief in the illusion of reality that they observe. For movie audiences, although they can be transported to much more complete and detailed worlds of fantasy than stage audiences, the memories of wreckage from the latest plane crash or blood-soaked bodies from a terrorist shooting are never far away. For film musicals this has always presented the central problem of how to effect a smooth and convincing transition from speech into song. This dualism affects visual style in a number of ways, most obviously in the contrast between ‘realism’ and ‘fantasy’, such as Dorothy’s black-and-white Kansas versus the Technicolor™ Oz, or the grainy textures of East Berlin compared to the garish American colour palette of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, or the hand-held, documentary style of the spoken scenes of Dancer in the Dark as opposed to the bright colours and MTV slickness of its musical numbers. But there is also a tension of visual style created by the contrast of realism and abstraction. The camerawork of Busby Berkeley is one example.
Berkeley was the dance director for three Warner Brothers productions in 1933: 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade. His now infamous and much-quoted style in these and later movies is characterised by a much more imaginative use of the camera than had ever been observed in musicals. Having choreographed the large-scale production numbers, Berkeley’s camera then becomes a roving eye that reduces the multiple body parts of chorines into geometric shapes seen from all possible angles. In a sense, he caught the mood of the times by suggesting the dehumanising of his dancers as cogs in a larger visual machine while making them the voyeuristic subject of a visual spectacle – but a spectacle governed by a distinctly filmic sensibility. As Fehr and Vogel have noted, Berkeley ‘elevated the movements of a chorus line to the highest imaginative level. In fact, no other artist of the period was more responsible for establishing the format of the 1930s big-budget production numbers than he … [Berkeley also] refused to accept the movie set as a West Coast proscenium. The camera was free to roam at will.’11
Animated musicals demonstrate the spectrum of visual styles from illusory to realistic particularly well, and it may be that the role of the Disney studio has been underestimated in the history and generic development of the film musical. The opening sequence of Dumbo (1941), for example, shows a sky full of parachuting baby animals that bears a striking resemblance to World War II newsreel footage. Disturbing, too, are the harrowing scenes of the circus train journey through the rain that conjure up even more disquieting war-related images. Yet against this realistic background, Disney creates a striking visual contrast. When Dumbo accidentally drinks some beer, the three-dimensional depth, natural tones and realistic detail of the visual frame (talking animals and birds notwithstanding) is replaced by a flat, black background, against which surreal, garish colours play amidst logistically improbable animal mutations and abstract transformations. The pink elephant sequence is rendered all the more fantastic because its style of animation is so completely counter to the surrounding elements of the movie. The combination of highly abstract and stylised visuals and sinister minor-key music strengthens the impact of the sequence, which becomes, in effect, the show’s big production number. Macabre and menacing, yet plausible because of Dumbo’s alcohol-enhanced state, the sequence is also crucial to the narrative because for the first time Dumbo is able to visualise the impossible and actually fly himself – the next morning he wakes up high in a tree with a hangover as a little piece of fantasy spills over into the real world.
Dumbo’s drunken vision is related to the dream sequences that occur in many stage musicals such as Betsy (1926) and Babes in Arms (1937). Dream sequences or dream ballets, as they sometimes were, transferred to some of the screen adaptations such as Laurey’s dream ballet from Oklahoma! (1955), Frenchy’s ‘Beauty School Drop Out’ from Grease (1978), and Leo Bloom’s ‘I Want to Be a Producer’ from The Producers (2005) and also occur in original movie musicals such as The Wizard of Oz, Yolanda and the Thief (1945), The Pirate (1948), An American in Paris and Dancer in the Dark. Most often these sequences play out the psychological dilemmas of the main characters in fantastical worlds that are related to but far removed from their everyday experience.12
Contrasting visual styles can also be combined with contrasting musical styles to enhance the narrative as in Disney’s The Lion King. Here the world of the African savannah is evoked by combining nature documentary–style visuals and ‘African-sounding’ pop songs by Elton John and Tim Rice. Hans Zimmer’s orchestrations effectively provide the required ethnic ambience that the songs themselves lack. Set against this overall visual style of panoramic long shots and leaping gazelles is the occasional use of non-realistic, stylised animation with savannah beasts doing things that you would never see them do on televised nature programmes. In ‘I Just Can’t Wait to Be King’, Simba launches into an early Michael Jackson–style number that simultaneously abandons visual realism for hyper-real colours, flat backgrounds and abstract patterns formed by a conveniently situated chorus of usefully marked animals. The style of Busby Berkeley immediately springs to mind (as it does in the ‘Be Our Guest’ production number from Beauty and the Beast), except that here it is the noble animal rather than Berkeley’s chorus girl that is visually dismembered. The good humour of the animal play hides any apparent exploitation and once again the musical refers to its own past. Yet, as in Dumbo, this musical number is crucial to the narrative because Simba is giddy with the anticipation of regal power and the freedom from regulations that he thinks it will provide. The number thus becomes a space where the possibility of a positive future can be imagined. In contrast to Dumbo, the sinister element in The Lion King is reversed. Dumbo’s dream is far more frightening than reality, whereas the party atmosphere of Simba’s production number is quite unlike the harsh reality of actually being king – an awesome responsibility that is placed on his young shoulders after the accidental death of his father. The terrifying realism of the wildebeest stampede and the destruction of the pride lands that follows shed a darkness over Simba’s world that is entirely absent both visually and musically from his earlier song.
Another visual device that can add to the impact of musical numbers is the use of symbols. Powerful images of steam trains occur in such movies as The Harvey Girls (1946), Oklahoma! and Evita. Train iconography is a vital part of the American visual landscape, as many nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings, prints, murals and Western movies show. And aside from being a vital means of transportation for an expanding frontier, the iron horse brought along with its dirt and noise the ideas and social codes that would ultimately lead to the civilising of the continent. The song ‘On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe’, from The Harvey Girls, celebrates the railroad line that will allow the Girls to bring a feminine brand of civilisation to the West, while ‘Kansas City’ and ‘Buenos Aires’, from Oklahoma! and Evita respectively, demonstrate the potent fascination that the modern city has for rural communities. Also, these last two songs take advantage of the film medium by changing their location from the stage versions specifically in order to incorporate close-ups of real engines that powerfully reinforce the sense of urban modernity. Similarly, ‘The Trolley Song’ in Meet Me in St Louis is heading for the 1903 St Louis World’s Fairground – a symbol of progress and the inescapable internationalism of the twentieth century. The family in this lavishly detailed period piece does not need to move to New York; modernity will reach them soon enough. Once again, movie musical characters are being thrust into the future through song. What these and my earlier observations illustrate is how the visual style and setting of musical numbers can affect the overall narrative framework of the movie.
The Indian film industry – both Bollywood and Anglo-Indian – has also become a more discernible presence in the English-speaking world of film musicals. This is not surprising since there is a long-standing tradition of Indian film musicals. Bollywood productions such as Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001) have successfully played in the West and UK director Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham) has ventured successfully into the genre with the delightful Bride and Prejudice (2004). However, the stylistic influence of such movies is most clearly felt in the production numbers and plotline of the show-within-a-show ‘Spectacular Spectacular’ that forms the centrepiece of Moulin Rouge! with its Indian characters – the beautiful courtesan, the evil Maharajah and the penniless sitar player – and the Indian-inspired choreography, costumes and set design of the techno production number ‘Hindi Sad Diamonds’.
Musical Style
No study of this rich cultural product would be complete without a treatment of the music and its relationship to surrounding elements.
Song
The basic component of the musical, the song, can be understood as a very flexible template, whose lyrics may provide narrative thrust, insight into a character’s psyche or a reflection on an external object. From the 1920s to the 1950s most of the popular songs used in movies exhibit a plan that consists of three discrete sections: an instrumental introduction, a verse and a chorus. Built into the pattern is the potential for repetition of the verse and the chorus. This overall plan continued to be used in later decades, but the increasing use of rock and other popular styles led to a greater variety of song patterns in musicals from the 1960s onwards.
The verse and chorus have either a single text or multiple texts that require musical repetition. Single-texted choruses may also be repeated many times. In general, the chorus carries the most musical and dramatic weight because it contains the most important musical and textual material and because of the frequency with which that material is repeated. The most common plan for choruses is four eight-bar phrases that form a thirty-two-bar pattern. Sometimes these eight-bar phrases can break down into two- and four-bar units. Thematically, choruses are most likely to fall into one of two distinct patterns that describe the eight-bar phrases: ABAC and AABA. The first pattern is the more symmetrical and has a strong half-cadence at the midpoint leading to the repeat of the A section. The second pattern has a strong half-cadence at the three-quarter point leading to the final repetition of A, giving more musical weight to the latter half of the pattern. Extensions and variations add nuance to certain phrases, but these two basic patterns form the backbone of the song repertory used in movie musicals. Rather than being abstract or arbitrary patterns, however, each has a quite different emotional effect. The ABAC pattern tends to feel more balanced and suggests restraint and elegance, whereas the AABA pattern drives more forcefully towards its final goal and, as a result, is often more passionate and direct in content and delivery. When combined with specific musical styles, time signatures and orchestrations, the choice of pattern can greatly enhance the meaning of the words and the specific dramatic context of the song itself.13
Diegesis
Even before the advent of the synchronised soundtrack, the movie-going experience had always been associated with the continuous playing of accompanying background music on piano, organ or even orchestra: these movies were thus never really ‘silent’. After the advent of talkies and the fixing of sound to visual images, both musical and non-musical films persisted in their use of background music, or underscoring. Film scholars refer to this special category of sound as ‘non-diegetic music’, that is, music that does not clearly emanate from a performance or other sound-generating source within the visual frame. But because movie musicals frequently contain so much diegetic music – actual performances, rehearsals, recording sessions and the like – they have been able to take this technological advance and turn it to aesthetic ends. For what this phenomenon allows is a more subtle transition from non-diegetic underscoring to actual diegetic performance. Since both musical and non-musical film use orchestral underscoring, the onset of a section of orchestral background music might be perceived as underscoring for a new scene, or the non-diegetic introduction to a song. It could also be music from a diegetic orchestra playing just off-screen – something that may not be apparent until a subsequent visual edit cuts to a shot of the musicians and/or singers in a nightclub or dance hall. Transitions into environments associated with live performance or rehearsal are much easier for an audience to accept than a less obviously musical environment because we would expect music to be present even if we do not at first see the source. Thus a diegetic performance can be used to accomplish transitions from one scene to another and to smooth over visual edits. Sensitivity to this blurring of diegetic and non-diegetic music can greatly enhance the viewing experience as well as furnishing a greater understanding of musical syntax in this genre.
Transitions
The makers of movie musicals have devoted a considerable amount of attention to the problem of how to effect the transition from speech into song, often with ingenious results. For example, Fred Astaire’s apparently spontaneous rendition of ‘No Strings’ in Top Hat is, in fact, very carefully prepared. Playing unobtrusively underneath Fred’s banter prior to the song is non-diegetic orchestral underscoring. As the conversation turns towards marriage, the dialogue introduces the topic of the song. Since Fred’s delivery of his lines is so lyrical and his singing voice so effortlessly conversational, it seems as if he has started to sing the song before we realise it. Simultaneously the underscoring becomes Fred’s orchestral accompaniment. By omitting the verse and leaping directly into the chorus of the song, Fred is able to project an air of spontaneity and immediacy. Later in the same movie, when Fred and Ginger are sheltering from the rain in a bandstand, a clap of thunder cleverly sets in motion a timpani roll that allows Fred to begin the verse of ‘Isn’t It a Lovely Day’. Again the preceding dialogue is directly related to the first sung words of the song and its overall theme. Visual clues – a few music lyres in the background and the bandstand itself – also provide a setting ripe for music making.
One of the more unusual approaches to solving the transition problem was the use of rhyming dialogue. Seen most effectively in two movies with scores by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Love Me Tonight (1932) and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum! (1933), a middle zone between speech and song is created through extended passages of rhymed, rhythmical and patterned dialogue, frequently with underscoring. Sometimes these passages lead into a full-blown song; at other times they conclude with a brief antecedent–consequent phrase in arioso style that functions like a Shakespearean rhyming couplet signalling the close of an act. Although rhyming dialogue was not widely used in subsequent movies, as a unique solution it deserves further scrutiny.
A related technique is used successfully in 8 Mile where the spontaneous breaking into rhymed rhythmical speech is a perfectly acceptable mode of discourse in a narrative about rappers. The technique proves very flexible: rapping takes place a cappella, to the omnipresent background beat of car radios, and in performance during the club battles. In an early scene the morning after Jimmy (‘Rabbit’) has choked during a battle at a local club, he is trying to fix his car with his friend Future. They mock both the banality of the diegetic background music ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ emerging from inside his mother’s trailer and her ineffectual boyfriend Greg who sporadically, but lamely joins in. Jimmy and Future playfully sing along with the melody but then Jimmy suddenly begins to rap about Greg, his mother, the trailer and his car with a fluency that he was unable to find the previous evening. This scene, which ends symbolically with the car starting, foreshadows not only Rabbit’s ultimate finding of his ‘voice’, but also his winning strategy in the final battle where he deconstructs himself and his life so thoroughly that his opponent, Papa Doc, has nothing left to throw at him.
Transitions out of songs also present a challenge to the movie director. Common strategies at the end of songs include a shot of the audience applauding, a view of the performer(s) from the wings of the theatre (for diegetic performances), fading to black or cutting directly to a new scene (for non-diegetic performances). Sometimes more humourous and inventive endings are fashioned. The opening number of Gold Diggers of 1933, for example, appears to be an electrifying live stage performance of ‘We’re in the Money’. It is not until the performance is interrupted that we realise this was merely a rehearsal – albeit an astonishingly well-polished one. A variant on this approach is an apparent stage performance that turns out to be a take for a movie. When someone off-screen shouts ‘cut’ at the end of the song, the illusion is broken.
Disney Styles
The Disney Studio has dominated the production of feature-length animated musicals since Snow White (1938). Even when live action musicals grew scarcer from the 1970s onwards, Disney continued to produce musicals on a more regular basis than anyone else. Finding renewed momentum with The Little Mermaid (1989), Disney has produced a string of modern classics that have earned numerous Best Song Oscars, utilise the latest computer-generated animation techniques to enhance visual splendour and are in many ways worthy successors to the classic musicals of the 1940s and 1950s.
Disney has also continued to experiment with musical style. The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, for example, both employ Broadway-style scores by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken where full-blown songs arise as a means of providing a narrative climax. In contrast, the score for Pocahontas (1995) by Menken and Stephen Schwartz contains several passages of singing that do not form complete or discrete songs in themselves but seem closer to the more continuous fluid style of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musicalised French epic Les Misérables (1987). Here, speech-like singing and smaller lyrical units are woven around more traditional musical numbers. Different again is The Lion King with songs by the pop megastar Elton John and the Broadway veteran Tim Rice. The rock orientation of the score combined with Hans Zimmer’s stylish and slick orchestrations made the CD soundtrack of The Lion King considerably more marketable than earlier scores. Overall, The Lion King returns to the earlier format of distinctly separate numbers. This successful formula is repeated in Tarzan (1999), with another rock megastar, Phil Collins, writing and performing songs that are greatly enhanced through exhilarating visual effects. As the previous examples show, the unique contribution of the animated Disney musicals must be included in future studies of the genre.14
On the other hand, alongside these fine animated examples, Disney’s live-action effort High School Musical (2006), though astonishingly popular, pales in comparison. With bland songs that even *NSYNC might have passed on, High School Musical presents a thoroughly sanitised and clichéd view of American high school plausible only to naïve eleven-year-olds. Drawing freely from Grease (1978), Fame (1980) and the stage version of The Full Monty (2000) (‘Getcha Head in the Game’ is surely a kid’s version of ‘Michael Jordan’s Ball’), this movie deflates the backstage genre by reducing the anticipated opening night of the show to a mere call-back audition that is itself upstaged by the post–basketball game dance number during which all school cliques make nice. The underlying message seems to be that the gym, rather than the stage, is the true locus of teamwork and collaboration. Quite.15
Song Migration and Interpolation
An interesting phenomenon occurring in this repertory is songs that appear in more than one movie. Songwriters for stage shows have often cannibalised their own songs for reuse in later productions and the tradition of interpolating other people’s songs into a show is well established. In movies, however, these practices are applied with considerably greater freedom. This is partly due to the lesser degree of control that songwriters had over the musical aspects of movies produced in a studio system. In any case, examining the different contexts of each version can be revealing. Irving Berlin’s ‘Blue Skies’ appeared in no fewer than four movies after its initial stage appearance in Rodgers and Hart’s Betsy (1926).16 Belle Baker, the star of Betsy, was concerned about not having a show-stopping number and asked Berlin to oblige. ‘Blue Skies’ did stop the show – much to the consternation of the show’s creators. Al Jolson’s version of the song in The Jazz Singer is a diegetic parlour room performance to his mother in charismatic style and optimistic mood – not a cloud in sight here. ‘Blue Skies’ next appears in Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938), again as a diegetic performance – this time in a nightclub and sung by Ethel Merman. Here the mood is quite different: the tempo is slower and the performance is tinged with melancholy. The nightclub audience joins in with a spontaneous accompanying choral refrain. Bing Crosby’s non-diegetic outdoor performance in Blue Skies (1946) is also fairly slow, but his unique crooning voice projects reassurance and optimism. Mother Nature even obliges by quelling the rainstorm before the end of the song. A fourth filmed version of ‘Blue Skies’ occurs in White Christmas (1954) and again features Crosby, this time dancing with Danny Kaye. The context is a live stage performance with an unseen but presumably diegetic orchestra. This upbeat dance number in vaudevillian style has the duo sporting straw boaters and canes and is more in the charismatic tradition of Jolson than the other versions. By tracing the progress of a song as it appears in various shows, the dramatic context for each version can be compared and contrasted, as can the orchestrations, tempos, performers and musical style. This is essentially the same song, but meaning in each case is located in the combination of a variety of factors.
The dramatic potential of interpolating popular songs that a contemporary audience might be familiar with in order to make a narrative point is demonstrated nowhere better than in Moulin Rouge! which includes, in part or wholly, a host of songs associated with pop icons: ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ (Carol Channing and Marilyn Monroe), ‘All You Need Is Love’ (The Beatles), ‘Nature Boy’ (David Bowie), ‘Your Song’ (Elton John) and ‘Material Girl’ and ‘Like a Virgin’ (Madonna) are just a few examples. The performance of both contemporary popular songs and ‘old favourites’ would certainly have been common practice at theatrical venues such as the Moulin Rouge. And, though anachronistic, a modern audience’s familiarity with several decades of pop music and its association with mega-stars, divas, and dance clubs provides a sonic, pop-culture window through which the heady atmosphere of the actual Moulin Rouge can be partially glimpsed.
Singing and Lyrics
The use of microphones in the making of movie musicals allowed for the possibility of a more intimate singing style. No longer did performers have to sing as if they were projecting to the back row of a theatre or filling a large auditorium with their voice. As Miles Krueger has noted, Paul Robeson chose to sing quietly with the microphone only two feet away when recording ‘Ol’ Man River’ for the 1936 movie version of Show Boat.17 The singing style of different performers also translates differently onto the screen. Compare, for example, the singing styles of Fred Astaire and Al Jolson. Jolson’s personality fills the screen and his huge voice is barely contained by the soundtrack. Astaire’s style, on the other hand, is more intimate and refined. Also, since vocal projection over a great distance is less crucial here, Astaire can focus on the clear diction and suave, elegant phrasing that is his forte. Technology can also affect the lyrics of songs. Before the regular use of amplified sound in theatres, lyricists developed the technique of placing long vowel sounds at the ends of lines to aid with projection (‘day/free/high/show/you’ etc.). But the intimacy of the recording studio allowed more complex lyrics to be fashioned that could, for example, end lines with short vowels and clipped consonants that would have been lost in a theatre environment.18
Dance Style
A wide variety of dance styles are present in this genre, ranging from high to low, elite to popular. They may be performed by a solo dancer, a couple, or a large ensemble in a ‘production number’. Contrasting styles are sometimes played off against one another – usually with the more popular styles winning out. Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell and Ann Miller are the best of the solo dancers. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers set the benchmark for the special chemistry that can be generated from the couple dance in Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ from The Gay Divorcée (1934), a remake of the 1932 stage show Gay Divorce. This number established new standards of direction, design, choreography, camerawork and editing, not just for the team’s subsequent dances, but also for many other couples as well. In a similar way, the production numbers of Busby Berkeley greatly influenced subsequent large-scale ensemble dances. The choice of dance genre can also be an effective method of communicating aspects of the narrative as, for example, in the ironic politeness of the ‘Waltz for Eva and Che’ from Evita or the prickling tension in the ‘Tango: Maureen’ from Rent.
Concluding Example
Clearly, the elements I have isolated do not operate alone in the projection of a narrative and should, ideally, be considered in conjunction with one another. A final example attempts to bring together some of the approaches suggested earlier.
The example is the ‘Roxanne Tango’ sequence from Moulin Rouge!, which takes place after the final dress rehearsal of the lavish show-within-a-show, ‘Spectacular Spectacular’. The Duke is unhappy with the ending and demands a rewrite and proof that Satine is really in love with him and not the penniless writer Christian. To save the show Satine offers to pacify the Duke by arranging a personal meeting while the rest of the cast and crew wait anxiously for the outcome of the assignation. ‘El Tango de Roxanne’ is performed by off-duty performers on the large Moulin Rouge dance floor and is a composite of interpolated and newly composed material.19
The tango genre itself is already loaded with pessimistic notions of love and a barely contained violence-tinged physicality. After being teased by Nini, one of the Moulin Rouge dancers, Christian is warned by the Narcoleptic Argentinian: ‘Never fall in love with a woman who sells herself.’ The dance begins diegetically with piano and violin. The use of a follow spotlight adds to the already theatrical mise-en-scène. The narrative content of the song, while abstractly about the dangers of falling in love with a prostitute (a level already present in Sting’s original lyrics), is clearly directed at Christian, warning him of the pain that will inevitably ensue from his falling for Satine. There is, however, also a hint of a tortuous and broken relationship between the Argentinian and Nini with whom he dances the initial duet. As more male dancers join in provocatively flirting with Nini, and Christian sings with anguish about his situation, the dance is intercut with shots of Satine and the Duke in the cold blue-grey lighting of the Duke’s castle. More dancers come to the floor and multiple couples join in the tango. Unable to contain himself, Christian makes to leave the theatre adding his own lyrical layer to the number as he slowly walks across the dance floor through the middle of the dancers – whose passionate contact is a painful reminder of the Duke’s proximity to Satine. Still more dancers join the tango while the Duke offers Satine diamonds – doubly symbolic for being both Satine’s stage name (‘the Sparkling Diamond’) and a reference to her rendition of ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ on the night she first met both Christian and the Duke. Like the marble and stone of the Duke’s room, diamonds are cold and hard and contrast to the warmer hues of the fabrics and wooden dance floor in the Moulin Rouge interior. Forlorn, Christian determinedly walks home past the elephant and looks longingly up at the balcony of the Duke’s castle.
Gazing down from the balcony, Satine briefly reprises ‘Come What May’ – a snippet of the secret song they have agreed will remind one another of their true love. The Duke realises this and is outraged. Now, the warning of the tango is also directed at him, for he too will endure much anguish because of his love for Satine. Violence erupts: the dancers mirror the Duke’s rough handling of Satine, the musical tension mounts with Astor Piazzolla–like dissonance, and the contrasting long shots and close-ups convey both the emotional intensity and physical separation of the two principal lovers. At the climax of the number, when all three male characters are virtually screaming and the rapid montage-like editing reaches its peak, the Argentinian mimes strangling Nini. Instead of Satine’s parallel downfall, however, the Duke is knocked out by a single punch from Chocolat, who has crept unseen into the chamber. Thus Satine is spared.
Flashes of red (the signature colour of the movie) abound within the Moulin Rouge – the Argentinian’s jacket, and the red glow from the theatre that bathes Christian as he stands in the street – suggest the true passion of these characters. These are contrasted with the icy blues, greys and blacks of the Duke’s castle. On the balcony, Satine is bathed in a wash of blue, but hints of her connection to Christian are given by red light bulbs of the ever-circling Moulin spokes (which have appeared numerous times already in the narrative, but most often when Satine and Christian are declaring their love for one another), and her red lipstick suggesting that, despite appearances to the contrary, she does indeed love him alone. Thus colour, lighting and set design are used in combination with music, lyrics, choreography, camerawork, and editing to create a powerful, emotionally charged number.20
Summary
Seemingly infinite access to eighty years of movie musicals through video, DVD and digital/cable/satellite TV, along with the movie-like production values of music videos and the impressively slick and continuously inventive medium of TV commercials, has broadened the niche of large-scale visual spectacle with music, dance and song of which the movie musical was once the sole occupant. Though critics might assert that some recent movie musicals have been based on successful stage productions or revivals – and thereby constitute a somewhat ‘safe bet’ for studios – many have not, and most have, at least in part, used the medium of film to enhance and deepen the narrative. This gives me hope that the genre will continue to reinvent itself and will make serious multidisciplinary study all the more necessary. Each time a new survey or textbook on musical theatre is published that does not discuss the unique natures of both stage and screen musicals diminishes the possibilities of bringing serious analytical consideration to bear on these powerful cultural artefacts. As other disciplines have already shown (film studies, cultural studies, American studies), the study of movie musicals can yield rich rewards. Again, I urge current and future scholars of musical theatre – particularly those versed in musical analysis – to continue the exploration of this magical screen counterpart.
