Film musicals. You love them or you hate them. Your cringe-o-meter pings into the red or your heart swells with joy, and I’m not convinced there’s any in-between. There once was a time, though, when a simple tune had the ability to stitch itself into the cultural fabric for anyone and everyone. What’s changed?
In recent years, we’ve been served the hip-hop-infused, cultural soup of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and In the Heights, the chart music bombast of The Greatest Showman, even stabs at nostalgia via Disney reboots and the Golden Era homage La La Land, the inevitable Broadway adaptation of which was announced last week. They tell good stories, have high-budget productions, and rake it in at the box office. At the centre of it all, though, I’m not convinced I hear any truly timeless melodies to be remembered or rebooted for the years to come. La La Land’s “City of Stars” sounds like an imitation of something classic without really being it, falling out of your mind like sand through your fingers after first listen; The Greatest Showman’s “A Million Dreams” may have been a huge hit, but it’s already sounding like an unfortunate chart song we’re guilty of liking six years ago. But the musical showstopper used to triumph – from 17-year-old Judy Garland’s iconic rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz to Gene Kelly swinging round that lamppost in “Singing in the Rain”. Think of every single number in Bugsy Malone, Grease, and anything Randy Newman ever wrote for Pixar, not to mention decades of Disney classics. Tunes for everyone, forever. Which begs the inevitable question: who’s in the forever business today? Has a certain kind of songwriter been discouraged from coming near the format of the musical? I think perhaps they have.
