New Book: New Tune

In Singing a New Tune September, Applause Books, author John Kenneth Muir has latched on to a good topic. He opens by focusing on what he considers the nadir of the live-action screen musical, the mid-'90s, when a film called I'll Do Anything was shorn of all its songs during test screenings; MTV's music videos had taken the place of screen musicals; and cynical audiences demanded realism rather than the sort of fantasy offered by musicals.

Muir's book is about how and why the movie musical was resurrected in the decade that began in the mid-'90s. But he precedes that story with a sixty-page history of the movie musical, starting back with The Jazz Singer and going on to champion such pictures as Cabaret, All That Jazz, Pennies from Heaven, and the little-known O Lucky Man!

Although Disney has hit after hit with its animated musical features, the mid-'90s is a time of decline in the live-action movie musical, with a picture like The Fantasticks finding itself shelved for five years. For Muir, things picked up in 1996 with the release of Alan Parker's Evita, which "asks the big questions about politics, our leaders, and the price paid to achieve power and hold it." One could question how big a hit Evita really was, particularly with the critics, just as one can question Muir's description of the property as "an old-fashioned book musical."

Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, with its singing non-singers, is followed by the 1998 indie Velvet Goldmine, a rock-opera fantasy about the world of glam rock, and "the missing link, or perhaps the bridge, to a film like Moulin Rouge....colorful, extravagant, magical, dotted by pop culture allusions, and unfailingly clever." Muir also likes the way South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut 1999 makes mock of the conventions and cliches of the genre itself.

Featuring songs by Gershwin, Porter, and Berlin, Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labours Lost is "a 1930s-style musical romp" marred by the casting of non-singer/dancers. Representing "a dramatic bridge between the canon of Dennis Potter and Rob Marshall's Chicago, especially in how it utilizes music and dance in the narrative" is the social melodrama Dancer in the Dark, from Danish director Lars von Trier, a film that "engages our hearts...in a way that few musicals ever have."

But it's not until 2001 that we arrive at "the movie musical's Hollywood comeback" with Moulin Rouge, a film that "first radically deconstructs then inventively rejiggers the movie musical format." Muir believes that Chicago would not have been possible without Moulin Rouge, which saw to it that "the musical was back and more entertaining than before."

Muir is high on Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which "acquaints audiences with a memorable and altogether unique character." Then comes Chicago 2002, "the very definition of razzle-dazzle."

After a step backward with From Justin to Kelly, there's Camp, which "doesn't retreat from including homosexuality as a legitimate and acknowledged fact evident in the American mainstream and teenage scene." The screen version of the TV miniseries The Singing Detective is described as "an unconventional musical experiment in which form reflects content."

Although he acknowledges that De-Lovely's star, Kevin Kline, believed it was a bad idea to feature contemporary pop singers delivering the songs of Cole Porter, Muir defends the film and its screenwriter, Jay Cocks, who "has used the music of the artist to give audiences new insights about the man" in a film that "feels like an MGM musical from the 1950s, only with modern sensibilities." Muir's study ends with last year's The Phantom of the Opera, which "makes no apologies for what it is, and evidences great joy in the artifice of a form Americans once adored."

Throughout, Muir relies heavily on quotations from about ten interviews he conducted with the makers of the films under consideration. Because of this emphasis, Muir tends to be kind to and devote more space to the films whose makers are interviewed at length.

There are a number of errors, mistakes which may be fixed between the uncorrected proof I read and the finished book. For example, Muir refers to the Florence Henderson of the movie musical Song of Norway 1970 as "a faded TV star," when her TV fame on "The Brady Bunch" was just beginning. And he says that many of the songs in The Rocky Horror Picture Show were written by Meat Loaf.

One wishes that Muir had devoted more space to the subject of television musicals i.e. Bette Midler's Gypsy, a topic he breezes through in a short chapter. Although this is a fairly thorough survey, there's nothing very surprising about the author's revelations about how Moulin Rouge and Chicago revitalized a genre. Then too, for all of Muir's enthusiasm, the book doesn't quite manage to convince one that the renaissance of the movie musical is a fait accompli.

Still, fans of the topic should find this a useful study, particularly if they're interested in hearing from the moviemakers themselves. What with the forthcoming films of Rent, The Producers, Dreamgirls, and Hairspray, this is a topic that we've yet to hear the last of.