What happened to melodies in today’s movie musicals?

Film musicals. You love them or you hate them. Your cringe-o-meter pings into the red or your heart swells with joy, and I’m not convinced there’s any in-between. There once was a time, though, when a simple tune had the ability to stitch itself into the cultural fabric for anyone and everyone. What’s changed?   

In recent years, we’ve been served the hip-hop-infused, cultural soup of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and In the Heights, the chart music bombast of The Greatest Showman, even stabs at nostalgia via Disney reboots and the Golden Era homage La La Land, the inevitable Broadway adaptation of which was announced last week. They tell good stories, have high-budget productions, and rake it in at the box office. At the centre of it all, though, I’m not convinced I hear any truly timeless melodies to be remembered or rebooted for the years to come. La La Land’s “City of Stars” sounds like an imitation of something classic without really being it, falling out of your mind like sand through your fingers after first listen; The Greatest Showman’s “A Million Dreams” may have been a huge hit, but it’s already sounding like an unfortunate chart song we’re guilty of liking six years ago. But the musical showstopper used to triumph – from 17-year-old Judy Garland’s iconic rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz to Gene Kelly swinging round that lamppost in “Singing in the Rain”. Think of every single number in Bugsy Malone, Grease, and anything Randy Newman ever wrote for Pixar, not to mention decades of Disney classics. Tunes for everyone, forever. Which begs the inevitable question: who’s in the forever business today? Has a certain kind of songwriter been discouraged from coming near the format of the musical? I think perhaps they have.   

Movie musicals are in a special niche of their own – musicals written purely for film, rather than adapted from stage shows or based on songs that are already hits (“the jukebox musical”). But, understandably, they still bear the influence of landmark musical theatre writers. Greg Wells, the music producer behind The Greatest Showman and In The Heights, tells me that a certain trend may have started with Jonathan Larson’s Nineties musical Rent, which was set in New York under the shadow of AIDS. “It took an archaic, old-timey thing like the Broadway musical into the contemporary and made it cool,” he says. Perhaps this is where the more fluid, less melodically catchy song began to take the lead, rendering classic songwriting unfashionable. “Certainly,” says Wells. “Rent has been a primary influence on the work of Lin-Manuel Miranda” – with whom Wells has now made three films, including the Larson biopic musical, Tick, Tick… Boom. “The Greatest Showman is in that canon,” he adds, “taking the form but making it accessible to younger audiences.”   

One of Wells’s formative influences was witnessing Jesus Christ Superstar in the cinema as a three-year-old with his Mum in downtown Peterborough, Ontario. The lyrics of that musical, which leapt from concept album to stage show to film in the space of three years in the early 1970s, were written by Sir Tim Rice. The multi-Oscar, Olivier and Grammy-winning lyricist is an acknowledged master of the form, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”, “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” and “A Whole New World” are all his doing. “Making something in an original way can become increasingly difficult and people will always be looking to push the boundaries of theatre, sometimes to the detriment of a song’s staying power,” Rice tells me.

He thinks that “a lot of pop music these days is really obsessed with ‘me me me’. It’s all ‘my problems’, and I’m not sure that’s necessarily what the world wants to hear.” This can result in musicals that are “rather inward-looking”, he explains. “What about looking beyond your own little world? What about trying to see what’s out there besides yourself?” On his Get Onto My Cloud podcast, Rice has listed a 10-point guide to writing a successful musical – although, he tells me, ultimately “there are no rules” really, it comes down to “a meticulous honing of one’s craft and the ability to tell a really good story”. Wells echoes this sentiment: “If you don’t have a really compelling story,” he says, “it doesn’t matter what songs you have, the tale has to really grab you by the collar or ultimately you’re doomed.”   

Story is king, that’s for sure, but Guillermo Del Toro’s recent reimagining of the Italian fairytale Pinocchio is an interesting example of poor songs dragging down an otherwise excellent film. Here is a legendary visual filmmaker, pulling off a dedicated feat of stop-motion ingenuity. In charge of the music, however, is Alexandre Desplat, a sensational film composer, but apparently not a songwriter by any stretch. Forced scanning and confused melodies weave jarringly throughout this beloved fable. Most tellingly, when Sebastian the Cricket as voiced by Ewan McGregor begins to launch into “Better Tomorrows”, Del Toro, in an apparent act of mercy has the thwarted sidekick swallowed up by a furious whale before he even gets to the first chorus. It’s as if Del Toro somehow knew we’d breathe a sigh of relief. Why, for instance, did Damien Chazelle’s La La Land look and feel so magnificent, but drop the ball on the musical numbers? I couldn’t whistle you even a fragment from that film and I’ve seen it three times at this point. Maybe the fact that it harkened back to the days of yore made the ephemeral music all the more disappointing.     

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I’m tempted to say that musicals such as Jonathan Larson’s aforementioned Rent and the Lin-Manuel Miranda oeuvre it inspired continue the tradition of the late Stephen Sondheim. It works beautifully when Sondheim does away with predictable writing techniques – although he could also write showstoppers like “Send in the Clowns” and “Marry Me a Little” – but it’s almost as if the writers he influenced took on all the structural freedom without necessarily being capable of reproducing the devastating emotional intelligence that Sondheim was able to wield. As Rice says, “Sondheim is very good at being Sondheim, and he has inspired a lot of people who copy him – and they’re not as good at being Sondheim. And so they write musicals that don’t really have much emotional contact with the public.” The result is a style I often find cluttered and random while also being overly loud in its sentimentality. This I think is where so many contemporary musicals threaten to wallow.

It may also be worth looking into how the modern movie musical is put together in the recording studio and what’s going wrong there. To achieve timelessness, the tools you’re using should be subservient to the art you’re making, otherwise, you’ll pin it to its era with the technology of the day. In the case of musicals, an excellent start would be to turn off the autotune. Human error is a beautiful thing; the ear craves it. It’s obviously worth hiring actors that can hold a note – but remember that perfection is boring and honesty is everything. Hats off to Tom Hooper, who made his cast sing entirely live throughout his film version of Les Misérables, and Meryl Streep for wanting to sing for real in Mamma Mia. Think of an auto-tuned voice as a face that’s been cynically photoshopped – it’s not to be trusted and it’s culturally irresponsible. By way of example, listen first to Robin Williams’s performance of “Prince Ali” in 1992’s Aladdin – an unhinged tour de force, full of all the happy accidents you’d expect from Williams at the height of his powers. Now turn to Will Smith’s reprisal of the genie in the 2019 Disney reboot. Smith’s vocals have been so heavily computer processed that you’re hearing more iRobot than Fresh Prince. The singer is neutered and the beloved song practically evaporates. If Julie Andrew’s lark-like vocal acrobatics had been hemmed in by these same production techniques on 1964’s Mary Poppins, would we continue to agree that “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” was quite such a banger?  

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Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that movie musicals are now more curated to specific corners of culture. There is no mainstream anymore, just varying degrees of cult, tailor-made for everyone’s own particular algorithm. If it’s for children, then it’s going to be sugary and loud, and unsubtle. If it’s for musical theatre fans, then it’s going to be alternative and impenetrable to the unconverted. The middle ground to my mind is a movie musical that has songs written with clarity, their complexity masterfully disguised as simplicity, recorded with honesty, and based around stellar performances. Lyrics can be broad yet intelligent. Choruses can be catchy but not annoying. There is a realm for music where everybody is able to get on board. Remember Julie Andrews telling us exactly what the hills are alive with during the sweeping technicolour introduction of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s towering 1965 classic The Sound of Music (instant tears just thinking about that opening scene).   

I should conclude by saying that from the age of 12, I have written songs – for my own project Flyte and for other bands and pop artists too, eventually finding myself in a similarly inclined group of friends and collaborators. Never, though, have any of us dared to approach the musical. And like the beer-clutching, sofa sitters shouting at a football match on TV that we ultimately are… we have always had a disparaging word to say about the current quality of the modern musical number. But in the act of writing this I’ve realised I’ve stumbled upon a call to arms. A rallying cry to future generations of willing young writers. Could the heights of Cole Porter be reached again? All it ever takes to spark a creative renaissance is one truly special vision that gets funnelled through to the masses against the odds. Artists would be wise to remember this simple advice from the late, great songwriter Burt Bacharach: “Never be ashamed to write a melody that people remember.”