A Musical Break: An Exploration of the Remediation of Film and Theatre

This week was all about the musical. Yes, yes, chock it up to the theatre geek-dom, but with the announcement of Ariana Grande playing Penny Pingleton in Hairspray Live!, the final curtain call for Lin Manuel Miranda, Phillipa Soo and Leslie Odom Jr. in Hamilton, the release of the cast album for Waitress Jessie Mueller and Sara Bareilles’ musical baby and of course, the announcement of the future film adaptation of In the Heights, musicals are on the tip of the public’s tongue. It is an artform that has never faltered, leading to the question: why is the genre so well loved? The musical form and the later film adaptations of musicals feed into exactly what a viewer looks for in entertainment. It is spectacle, it is escapist, it is a world where two acts and a collection of well written jollies can resolve the protagonists’ problems, make them fall in love and leave the viewer with a high they can barely explain. In this sense, the musical encapsulates the magic of performance art, and particularly with the advent of “talkies”, the magic of film.

There is no way we can really evaluate and explore film without harking back to its origin, theatre, and how the musical was incorporated into the artform by demanding its own wildly popular genre. There is a human, primal urge to perform. Humans are storytelling beings, using whatever is at their disposal to do so, including music, drama and movement. We are performers. The earliest visual manifestations of performance, in particular musical performance, were found in rock paintings and excavated objects. Though it is unclear about the performance’s purpose, it is clear that dance and instruments were culturally significant (“Musical Performance”). With an ancestry so dedicated to performance, it only makes sense that theatre was born. As time went on, language and style became more sophisticated but the drive to entertain and emote never faltered. From ancient Greek tragedies to the slapstick shorts out of Vaudeville, theatre survived and thrived by telling the audience a captivating story.

Film was going through its own evolution and formation, it could not lose its theatrical obsessions. It’s earliest recorded work in the late 1880s (with Le Prince’s Roundhay Garden), still feels staged and theatrical. For years, filmmakers worked with the art they understood, film their scripts statically, like a stage play, until their imaginations caught up with the technology and vice versa. As technology and mediums increased, evolved and expanded, so did the styles of performance. With the introduction of film as a visual and sonic medium, there was a demand to include the spectacle of performance. Thus, film interwove with its ancestor to create the movie musical. The movie musical, as it is known today, is a remediation of both theatre and film, forcing the two mediums together to cultivate a new way to tell a story. The viewer did not solely have to rely on visual cues or the cliched melodic motifs of the silent film era, now lyricists, composers and directors could affect their audience together and explore other avenues of conveying story and emotion. The score of a musical, much like the score of any other film, sculpts the story being told. It is essential to the advancement of the plot of the film, as well as the development/mindset of the character. Through melody, emotion is applied to the words coming out of the actors’ mouth. This is a product of what Rodgers and Hammerstein originated with Oklahoma! (1931), called the “integrated musical”. Instead of musical numbers being merely a performance for the audience as well as for the characters in the show, the integrated musical used songs to further the narrative of a story or a character’s development. With a jazzy big band number, the spectator is told to get excited and pay attention, with a reprise in a minor key and slower tempo, the audience looks more carefully at the mental/emotional state of the character, or with a slew of strings and a harmonized duet, there is a sense of bonding, typically romantically, between two characters. These show tune tropes tell the audience what to feel, how to feel and when to feel it. They have created their own brand of emotional contagion. The studio system cranked out some of the world’s most beloved musicals, such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Singin’ In  the Rain (1952), and Anchors Aweigh (1945), which all thrived off of this style of entertainment. Let’s take the “Broadway Rhythm Ballet” in Singin’ In the Rain as an example. This is an almost fourteen minute dream sequence by the protagonist of the story which completely breaks away from the plot of the film. The audience is only given a few visual and aural clues to determine the arch of its story. Of course, Gene Kelly is a charming captivating presence but there is no way that his charm alone could carry the entire sequence. What the “Broadway Rhythm Ballet” relies on is it’s large choreographed numbers, the actors’ performance and of course, Nacio Herb Brown’s emotional roller coaster of a score. With a switch of a chord, a rest, a slower hip thrust, a wink or a spirited high kick, the plot is propelled forward and the audience gets more enthralled with spectacle of the musical. In this example, there is a distinct difference between the moment Gene Kelly meets the Woman in Green versus the naive hopeful Gene Kelly singing “Gotta Dance!” with a one hundred person crowd surrounding him. The instrumentation is different, the tempo changes, the location shifts and so does Kelly’s demeanor. This scene is the mark of the evolving musical.

This magic did not die with the studio system, but once again evolved to fit the demands of its audiences, using newer to technology to give  viewers things they had not seen before in the genre. Writers and filmmakers alike often say “Show, don’t tell” as a way to challenge their abilities and give their audience a more compelling story. Musicals, often ignore this rule and do both. They are inherently “show-ey”, hurling visuals at the viewer through dance and singer’s performance, but are also unafraid to “tell”. Lyrics often dictate what the character is thinking or doing. It is upfront and in your face and often follows a two act musical formula, with songs that establish the location/characters,the central conflict or desire, conflict comes to head, a resolution, and a send off. There is a clarity that musicals have that cannot be replicated no matter how carefully the soundtrack has been curated for a film. It may not be edgy or considered “real sound”, but there is power in constructing an entertaining story influenced by music. Call it campy, call it intelligible, but the sounds of a musical reach out, grab the spectator and force them to understand the story being told. The modern evolution of the movie musical is not removing the telling aspect of the score, but by showing the audience more than just a theatre performance. They are showing the viewer what only film can capture and add to the story at hand. The 2012 Les Misérables film adaptation does not pretend it is the stage show, but takes its place as a musical period piece. The characters are not overperforming as to compensate for a small stage and a large audience, but have modified their acting to be subtle and realistic, as if the songs were just pieces of dialogue set to music. The camera follows the characters closely, revealing to the audiences the nuances behind each lyric and more of the internal motivation behind each moment. For those watching the film, they are transported to France in the time of their revolution, intimately experiencing war, romance and escape with the characters instead of just watching them at a distance. Les Misérables perfectly blended what theatre lovers love about live performance (by recording all of the actors singing in real time) but what film lovers adore about their medium (the realistic intimacy of the moment forever recorded). It is no wonder that this film was so popular, even winning Anne Hathaway an Oscar in 2012 for her performance as Fantine. In her award winning scene, she delivers a powerful tearful rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream”, as her hair is being cut off, as she is covered in soot and preparing for her next John. It is a raw and almost disturbing performance that the camera fully captures as it surveys her face, form and setting.

The musical is an artform that will never die as it is the combination of two mediums well rooted in our past. It will continually have a place in the theatre and in the cinema, as song, dance and storytelling will always entertain the masses.

Les Miserables. Dir. Tom Hooper. Perf. Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway. Universal, 2012. DVD.

“musical performance”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2016. Web. 14 Jul. 2016

<https://www.britannica.com/art/musical-performance>.

Seibold, Witney. “Free Film School #79: The Theory of Movie Musicals (Part 1).” CraveOnline. Crave, 25 Dec. 2012. Web. 14 July 2016.
Singin’ in the Rain. Perf. Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds. Prod. MGM, 1952.