Hey Hol­ly­wood, let’s make more musicals!

When the Hol­ly­wood west­ern ​‘died’, it moved to Italy where it found new life under the guid­ance of Ser­gioes Leone and Cor­buc­ci, and when that well final­ly dried up, the cow­boys swapped hors­es for space­ships and guns for lasers (or lightsabers), to find rel­e­vance in the chang­ing tastes of soci­ety. The Hol­ly­wood musi­cal began its slow decline around the same time, mov­ing to France where direc­tor Jacques Demy breathed new life into the genre that he so loved.

With a revi­talised vigour, the musi­cal was soon sashay­ing its way back across the Atlantic to find acclaim in the hands of Bob Fos­se and Nor­man Jew­i­son. How­ev­er, audi­ences now clam­our­ing for grit­ty real­ism were less and less inclined to see films where char­ac­ters burst into song and dance, and despite sev­er­al attempts to revive the genre, the only con­tin­u­al­ly suc­cess­ful mak­er of musi­cals in the 1980s and ​’90s was Disney.

In 2002, Rob Marshall’s Chica­go became the first musi­cal since Car­ol Reed’s Oliv­er! in 1968, to win the Acad­e­my Award for Best Pic­ture. Along­side the pre­vi­ous year’s Moulin Rouge!, this crit­i­cal and box office suc­cess ush­ered in the post-mil­len­ni­um ​“dark” musi­cal – a star-stud­ded cast, some musi­cal­ly trained, some very much not, heavy dra­mat­i­cal­ly-inclined themes, and lots and lots of blood (Sweeney Todd) – at the rate of about one film per year. In addi­tion to some live-action and ani­mat­ed Dis­ney films, this new breed of mega star musi­cal has seen a resur­gence in the­atri­cal atten­dance, and has land­ed its lead actors and musi­cians a host of major awards.

But is this suc­cess due only to a mod­ern audience’s desire to see its most trea­sured screen icons toe­ing the waters of song and dance, or could we have been duped into slow­ly falling in love with some­thing seem­ing­ly long for­got­ten? Year on year it seems as if a new musi­cal is released and imme­di­ate­ly praised for its orig­i­nal­i­ty, its actors’ capac­i­ty to pick up instru­ments in such a short time span, and the almost preter­nat­ur­al fun that live music brings to a film.

Yet this big-screen suc­cess has not trick­led down to the mid-bud­get lev­el, or out­side the tight­ly-con­trolled para­me­ters of mass mar­ket pro­duc­ers. Sure­ly in a world where Broad­way and West End musi­cals sell out months, and even years in advance, the movie musi­cal could gen­tly flour­ish with­out an A‑list call sheet.

Over the last few years pop cul­ture has been dom­i­nat­ed by (among oth­er dis­ap­point­ing things) an obses­sion with Lin Manuel Miranda’s ​‘Hamil­ton: An Amer­i­can Musi­cal’, at once prov­ing that non-white voic­es can indeed have mass appeal, and that a good musi­cal can still whip soci­ety into a fren­zy. Com­plete­ly sold-out shows – sec­ondary sales for the show debut­ing at the Vic­to­ria Palace The­atre in Novem­ber 2017 have seen tick­et prices as high as £2000 – have done more than empow­ered the POC and mar­gin­alised the­atre com­mu­ni­ty. Hamilton’s boom­ing suc­cess has also like­ly begun to dis­man­tle stu­dios’ beliefs that musi­cals are only fun pas­sion projects, exist­ing far out­side the realm of recouped expenses.

With La La Land, writer/​director Damien Chazelle has tak­en the best bits of Gene Kelly’s musi­cals from the 1950s and ​’60s, mixed in with the dra­mat­ic mag­ic of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrel­las of Cher­bourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, and cre­at­ed a sin­gu­lar work of homage-based nos­tal­gia. Open­ing up mod­ern audi­ences’ eyes to the incred­i­ble achieve­ments of its musi­cal pre­de­ces­sors, Chazelle and his band of mer­ry-mak­ers also prove that music in film, just like music in the real world, has the pow­er to con­vey more than sim­ple hap­pi­ness, love and blind ebullience.

Just like jazz, La La Land, and the films from which it draws its great­est influ­ences, cin­e­mat­ic song and dance can con­vey a range of emo­tion, and has the uncan­ny abil­i­ty – in an almost uni­ver­sal lan­guage – to con­nect people.

Films like Chica­go, Moulin Rouge! and La La Land have suc­ceed­ed not because they were spec­tac­u­lar or shin­ing exam­ples of musi­cals, but because they exist in a vac­u­um. Watch­ing our heroes (be it Meryl Streep, Hugh Jack­man, Nicole Kid­man or Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone) fal­ter in voice or in step cer­tain­ly helps the more nor­mal among us relate to these almost extra-human per­sonas, but there is also some­thing to be said about watch­ing soon-to-be heroes like Jen­nifer Hud­son, Jamie Foxx or Bey­on­cé Knowles absolute­ly crush it on screen.

Per­haps the musi­cal is all but dead, and only the blind hope in chore­o­g­ra­phers’ hearts and star pow­er keeps them alive. Or just maybe the hum­ble Hol­ly­wood musi­cal is final­ly ready to make a come­back in a big way.