With “In the Heights” arriving June 11, and eight more new screen musicals due before the end of 2021, it’s a ripe time to assess the musical genre’s present and future.
Published by Rutgers University Press, an intriguing new pocket-sized book on that genre comes from the only Ivy League professor — so far — to sing, dance and co-star in a Damien Chazelle musical.
The book is called “The Movie Musical.” Dartmouth College professor and author Desirée J. Garcia’s tightly packed and deeply researched study examines the genre’s illumination of more than just our collective daydreams and escape impulses.
Here’s the Chazelle angle. Seven years before the writer-director triumphed with “La La Land,” he cast Garcia as the female lead in his beguiling, low-fi, black-and-white 16 mm debut feature “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench.” Little seen by the public, it received critical accolades, suggesting the movie musical had found a nervy and vital new director in love with the form as well as all the right musical and cinematic influences.
Garcia’s book takes issue with the vaguely patronizing label of “escapism” often affixed to the musical genre. That, she writes, “tends to end the discussion. It dismisses the genre without being thoughtful about why musicals continue to be made over and over again.”
Her book operates in three sections. “The Musical as Archive” addresses how the genre pulls ideas, images and vocabulary from its own past, continually, to create something new. “The Musical as Society” cites films as disparate as “The Jazz Singer” (1927), “Applause” (1929) and “La Bamba” (1987), while “The Musical as Mediation” focuses largely on three recent John Carney films, which many wouldn’t even consider full-on traditional musicals: “Once” (2007), “Begin Again” (2013) and “Sing Street” (2016). With so many directors fascinated by the movie musical’s limitless canvas, we’ve seen avant-garde pioneers such as Sally Potter along with classicists exemplified by MGM master Vincente Minnelli test the boundaries.
“No matter which kind of musical you’re talking about,” Garcia says in a recent phone interview, “they all engage with this idea of continuity. They reach into the past in order to pull us into the current moment. Past entertainment forms, past forms of technology, past ways of being with one another: They’re always there. And always musicals give us a sense of comfort and community. That’s especially appealing in moments of great disruption and change, and times of alienation and isolation. In a pandemic, it’s no wonder musicals are having their latest comeback.”
Not quite a century old, the movie musical has offered audiences plenty of escape, but also more truth than many realize. Look at the backstage or rehearsal movies of the late 1920s and early ’30s: Director Rouben Mamoulian’s “Applause” (1929), director Lloyd Bacon’s “42nd Street” (1933) and others dramatize a show-business economy and a nation threatened by poverty, a Depression and some extremely tough choices for its characters, especially the women.
The grit on screen in pre-Production Code early ’30s musicals, Garcia says, provides a telling contrast to the forthcoming “In the Heights.”
“That film does two things really well,” she says. “It’s a folk musical in the truest sense of the word — it’s about this cohesive community threatened by change, in the same way ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ asks the question of what’ll happen to the community faced by disruption.”
And, she says, “In the Heights” is “the rare Broadway show and now Hollywood movie to depict a pan-Latino identity. It’s Dominicans, Salvadorians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans — it shows we’re not just one thing, but many.” Less effectively, she thinks, the movie piles on moments of didacticism at odds with the musical form.
Garcia’s book is likely to send you straight to streaming platforms for a little catch-up. For one, I’ve never seen Potter’s “The Tango Lesson” (1997), and it has been 30 years or more since my sole encounter with “Applause” — to Garcia, a key text in the study of the backstager sub-genre.
“I don’t think they’ll ever go away,” Garcia says of musicals. “We’ll always have the need for them. We’ll need them to help us mediate the changes we go through as a society and as human beings. As the movies change, we’re increasingly finding musicals on episodic TV, on social media, in every kind of amateur space and improvised context.”
The book is available on Amazon and via themoviemusical.com. And if you haven’t had a taste of Chazelle’s “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” you can find various numbers from that film on YouTube, including Garcia’s own rendition of “It Happened at Dawn.” It owes a little to Jacques Demy (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”), a little more to Jacques Brel in its plaintive melody composed by future “La La Land” composer and Oscar-winner Justin Hurwitz — and a lot to the entire history of the genre Garcia writes about in “The Movie Musical.”
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
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