Poke a Bear and See if He Sings

Blogger Andrew Brinded has been busy unscrambling a very silly post by the Guardian’s Stuart Heritage. The thrust of Mr. Heritage’s argument is that characters in film musicals should just say how they feel rather than sing. He does, however, admit to liking “The Bare Necessities”, to which Andrew parries:

“I would suspect that as Baloo is a talking bear, it’s okay for him to sing”

There is much wisdom in this. Let’s poke this bear some more.

There is a notion in some quarters that cinema audiences no longer accept characters bursting into song MGM-style. What is credible on stage apparently becomes ridiculous on film. I disagree. I just think that most of today’s film musicals either skirt around the problem or aren’t quite good enough to overcome it. Let’s go back a bit.

Cabaret marked the turning point. In the stage show there are “book” numbers performed by the characters in the story and “concept” numbers performed in the Kit Kat club. For the film version they dropped the book numbers so that the only songs performed were the ones performed in the more “realistic” setting of the cabaret itself.

Post-Cabaret there followed a relatively fallow period. Then Disney brought Broadway back to the screen. Suddenly movies were singing once more. There were singing mermaids (Little Mermaid), singing prince-beasts (Beauty and the Beast) and singing lions (Lion King). Even the warthog got its own number. And clearly audiences weren’t put off by it.

Ah, but this was animation and a difference this makes. Musicals need to exist in a world of “heightened reality”. This doesn’t necessarily mean a fantastical world but there has to be some sense of “bigness”, a reason to sing rather than merely to speak. Animation, by its very nature, already exists in this world. This is where Andrew’s comment gets to the nub. For an audience member, the imaginative leap required to move from talking bear to singing bear is less than it is to move from talking human character to singing human character. But it’s essentially the same imaginative leap, the same basic need for the willing suspension of disbelief. Animation just makes the leap a little easier.

So Disney offered a way back for the film musical. But the real test came with the live-action stuff and that’s been more of a mixed bag. Two exceptions have been Oscar-laden Chicago and the box office hit Enchanted. But neither film really challenges the idea that audiences won’t accept real people bursting into song. Chicago works on a similar basis as Cabaret with the songs being presented as artificial “concept” numbers. Enchanted, although for the most part a live-action film, leaves the singing to characters transported from an animated world.

So the notion that cinema audiences won’t accept people bursting into song persists to this day. Of course it’s bunk. Audiences will accept plenty of things on film – “flying cars, wizards, dragons” as Andrew points out – so there’s no reason to think that they’d be put off by characters singing. They weren’t in MGM’s day, they wouldn’t be now. The problem is that no recent screen musical has done it successfully enough to prove the point.

In the meantime, we'll always have Baloo.

Unrepeatable, Is That What You Are?

(This is a bit of an old article but still worth a comment or two)

More from the Guardian Theatre Blogs on musical theatre. This time it's Dan Rebellato venturing the opinion.

Money is, again, the starting point. (There does seem to be a train of thought that is highly suspicious of anything in the theatre that makes a profit). So recent boffo box office from the likes of Wicked and The Lion King are "likely to be a cause for grumbling as much as celebration". Well, you can't please everyone:

"Musicals generate polarised responses for two reasons."

I'm assuming he's taking about people who work in the theatre rather than audiences. Judging by the box office, at least, the response of the paying public generally seems favourably unilateral.

"First, musicals are pleasure machines: vast theatrical mechanisms to generate rapture, exhilaration and joy. If you go see a musical with a sceptical attitude, these efforts are bound to seem teeth-clenchingly awful."

This is true. But it's not the exhilaration and joy that make it awful; it's the creekiness of the drama. The same thing happens with bad political theatre where the message is hammered home at the expense of the drama. It all becomes too obvious and embarassing to watch.

"Second, the scorn for musicals on one side tends to inspire equally passionate defences on the other, and vice versa, so that musical audiences wind up getting mocked as much as musicals themselves."

And, presumably, the scorners get mocked for being joyless ponces.

“Those of us who work in theatre tend to think what is distinctive about the form is its unrepeatability, its liveness...Some musicals raise that to a high level. Seeing enormously skilful dancers and singers performing complicated dance steps and hitting high Cs is an exhilarating live experience. But other musicals have taken the opposite route. These are the shows in which liveness takes second place to smooth reproducibility"

Two points. The first is that his subsequent examples – Cats, Phantom and The Lion King - are not judiciously chosen. Cats is essentially a dance musical requiring plenty from the performers including high Cs. Phantom goes two tones higher to a piercing high E. As for The Lion King, I admit I've never seen it. But I hear the giraffes are t’riffic.

The second broader point is that I don’t think the theatre’s “liveness” is best equated with its “unrepeatability”. Yes, every theatrical performance is technically a one-off but, in reality, most performances and most aspects of a performance do get repeated to one degree or another. And knowing that a performance will be repeated doesn’t diminish my experience as an audience member. My experience is still unique. So I don’t see that replicating a West End show in Toronto or Sydney or Reykjavik really demonstrates that “liveness takes second place to smooth reproducibility”.

I suspect what Mr. Rebellato means is that some potential aspects of a live performance such as spontaneity and improvisation can be lost in a large-scale musical production. This is true but inevitably so; indeed the larger the production, the less spontaneity is possible. But rather than dimishing the “liveness” this kind of production can bring out another aspect of it. When a well-drilled group of people work together to turn a song and dance routine into a smooth effortless joy the results can be exhilarating; a kind of exhilaration only possible with a large-scale musical. Co-ordinated disipline is as much to be admired as spontaneity; repeatability can be a virtue. It’s the difference between a marching band and a jazz quartet.

For me the “liveness” of theatre is more to do with its immediacy and riskiness than its “unrepeatability”. This is a significant point when the article brings up the important issue of microphones. Miking can take away from the immediacy of the singing voice and the kind of audio trickery that “cleans up” a singer’s voice in real time also takes away the risk. There’s a genuinely useful discussion to be had here.

But unfortunately it doesn't happen.

Instead the article continues with some cryptic talk about miking being “symbolic displacement” in theatre’s “connectedness to time and place” which suggests the need for “a vision of value that can't be reduced to market exchange?”.

Told you: it all comes back to the money.