Whenever a musical becomes a hit, a chorus goes up claiming that the genre is back for good. It happened with Moulin Rouge in 2001, Chicago (a best picture Oscar winner) in 2002, Mamma Mia in 2008, and Les Misérables in 2012. For older viewers, the musical evokes the golden age of Hollywood more explicitly than anything apart from the western. Crossover success is seen as proof that, regardless of the old saw, they do make them like that any more.
But the screen musical is unique among film genres in its tendency to totter back and forth between the limelight and the life-support machine. One minute it’s on its last legs, the anachronistic product of a more innocent age when audiences were content to have plot information warbled at them. (“I hate musicals,” the comedian Alan Carr whinged memorably. “Sing if you’re gonna sing. Don’t [breaks into melodic sing-song voice] taaaalk-like-this-for-four-houuuurs.”) The next moment it’s performing a cancan, kicking up a storm at the box office and hoofing its way to awards glory. The current success of Into the Woods, proves that there’s life in the old genre yet: it’s not over until the fat lady, and everyone else for that matter, sings.
Written by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Into the Woods is a knowing mash-up of fairytale characters which made its Broadway debut in 1987. But it is a very different culture into which the film version, starring Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Johnny Depp, is being released. Anyone seeking to understand its popularity might look at the way Disney, which financed the movie, tweaked the original stage show to fit a more family-friendly demographic. Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) now doesn’t die. Sexual innuendo has been toned down in scenes between the Big Bad Wolf (Depp) and Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford). The cleanup job has stopped just short of comprehensive: contrary to early reports, intercourse between the Prince (Chris Pine) and the Baker’s Wife (Blunt) is not merely of the social variety.
The proof is in the pulling power: Into the Woods has grossed almost $100m in less than a month on release. One of the reasons must be that it provides families and other multigenerational social groups with something they can all watch together without fear of anyone being excluded. It is a truism that our lives and viewing habits have entered an unprecedented stage of fragmentation. Even when we do convene with family members, we are likely to defer constantly to our smartphones and the tablets we clutch like swimming floats. Interaction falls into the category of what Kevin Spacey in his MacTaggart lecture at the 2013 Guardian Edinburgh International Television festivalcalled “that warm glow of precious family time when we all come together to ignore each other”.
Small wonder that anything capable of rousing us from that social coma assumes a kind of totemic power. And music is at the core of much of the entertainment bringing audiences together, be it Into the Woods, The X Factor or Frozen, the 2013 animated Disney musical that has made the transformation from success to cultural phenomenon. Not only has Frozen grossed more than $1bn worldwide, it is also enjoying a healthy afterlife in “singalonga” screenings. The previous musical to benefit from the “singalonga” phenomenon, The Sound of Music, was a popular but largely camp-oriented endeavour. The appeal of Frozen is not limited by age or sensibility. Toddlers and teenagers love the film but it might just as easily be the centrepiece at hen parties and office shindigs.
The likes of Disney’s High School Musical film series and the television show Glee laid some of the groundwork for the cross-generational popularity of Frozen. But the success of that movie, and now Into the Woods, represents a new kind of bespoke musical for the early 21st century. It incorporates the old-school genre convention – a return to the oblivious absurdity of actors bursting into song and everyone onscreen magically knowing the same dance steps. If you want a latter-day example of how gloriously ludicrous the genre can be, check out High School Musical 2, in which a baseball enthusiast performs an entire virtuoso song-and-dance number expressing his inability to sing and dance.
A young viewer’s concept of the musical will differ from the model cherished by their parents and grandparents. If your touchstone is Mamma Mia!, which hangs its narrative on pre-existing songs that were never intended to form an ongoing story, it must be slightly odd to see films like Meet Me in St Louis or Singin’ in the Rain, in which music, lyrics, plot and characterisation are indivisible. The songs in Mamma Mia! are karaoke inserts, providing strategic releases of euphoria or sadness, rather than urging the story along. So it demands a particular kind of suspension of disbelief for fans of that film to accept characters expressing themselves in song, as opposed to simply belting out Dancing Queen. Their minds might be blown, for instance, by Jacques Demy’s entirely sung-through masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Viewers who grew up with Chicago or Moulin Rouge! must also have warped expectations. The stroboscopic editing in those films provided a risk both to general intelligibility and any epileptics in the audience. It seems perverse for a musical to go to extravagant lengths in its choreography only for the editor to slice-and-dice the material so that the dancers need not even have been in the same room together. Thankfully, Into the Woods is a more clear-headed affair. Musical numbers are allowed to unfold before our eyes without endless jittery cut-aways and close-ups. This is very much in keeping with the last Sondheim work to reach the screen, Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which represented real progress. There was plenty of carving in that picture, but it was all done in the barber’s chair rather than the editing suite.
It is not only other movies that have altered the DNA of the musical. Television talent shows such as The X Factor and American Idol have done their bit to promote songs as entities which can be put to work supporting a narrative unrelated to their original context. Into the Woods must have been given the go-ahead with this in mind, as well as the success of Frozen and Glee – entertainment that spills over profitably into audience participation.
The screen musical will never date or die – it is only its commercial fortunes that have ever been touch and go. The common objection, that early 21st-century cinemagoers are too sophisticated to believe in characters expressing themselves through song, can only have been advanced by someone who has never spent a rowdy evening at Lucky Voice. Fogeys including me may complain about the direction the form takes, but we can nevertheless celebrate that the essential character of the musical is gloriously eternal.
There have been radical efforts over the years to retool the genre, even if some, like Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark in 2000, more closely resemble attempts on its life. With Frozen and Into the Woods, audiences are getting the sorts of musicals that still have one tap-shoe in the past. And there’s more to come: The Last Five Years, an adaptation of Jason Robert Brown’s musical about two sides of a love story, opens soon, and there are new versions of Damn Yankees and Guys and Dolls in the pipeline. (The Green Day musical American Idiot is also heading for the screen.) The innocence of the musical represents a balm in difficult times, but even more significant is its cohesive social power. If more movies follow successfully in the wake of Into the Woods, perhaps the screen musical will at last be out of the woods.
