When Chicago snatched the 2002 Academy Award for Best Picture, beating out such mighty competition as Adaptation, About Schmidt, Far From Heaven, and The Pianist, it had been 34 years since a movie musical had won that coveted prize. Until then, the most recent winner had been the 1968 Dickensian tuner, Oliver! Indeed, the 1960's were the most favorable decade in Academy Award history for crowning musicals with its top prize -- and coincidentally, all four winning films were adaptations of their acclaimed Broadway predecessors: West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), and Oliver!
This isn't to say, however, that movie musicals, both original and adapted from another source, weren't still being made. The 1970's were a productive time that saw original film musicals (New York, New York, 1977; All That Jazz and The Rose, both 1979), as well as remakes (A Star is Born, 1976), sequels (Funny Lady, 1975, the follow-up to 1968's Funny Girl), biographies (The Buddy Holly Story, 1978), and, of course, more stage adaptations (Fiddler on the Roof, 1971; Cabaret, 1972; A Little Night Music, 1977; Grease, 1978; Hair and Jesus Christ, Superstar, both 1979).
Still, the genre was beginning to fade, and from the 1980's on there began to be noticeably less to sing and dance about. In more recent years, producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (who also served as executive producers on Chicago) have done admirable work in keeping the musical genre alive, especially on television, and particularly accessible to younger audiences with their all-star remakes of such familiar fare as Annie, The Music Man, South Pacific, and Cinderella (the latter even upping the ante with a racially mixed cast.)
But it was the razzle-dazzle triumph of director/choreographer Rob Marshall's Chicago -- which, in itself, owes a debt to the 2001 success of Baz Luhrmann's extravagant Moulin Rouge -- that really got studios doing pirouettes, buying up rights to established stage musicals, and pushing forward endlessly delayed projects. Just last winter, the lavish, long-awaited film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera finally hit movie houses. And still to come soon to a multi-plex near you will be movie musical adaptations of such high-octane Broadway shows as The Producers and Hairspray. Interestingly enough, all three began as straight films before becoming hit Broadway musicals, and are now returning to their big screen roots reinvigorated with song and dance.
Now‌you wanna talk about a real "hit" musical? Once again, this is a show that began life as a straight film -- but one that was so ridiculously, ludicrously over-the-top that it has, in fact, become one of the all-time camp classics. Then, on April 29, 1999, the musical version of this infamously awful 1936 propaganda flick premiered at the 99-seat Hudson Theatre in Hollywood, CA for what the producers thought would be a short fun run. Instead, Reefer Madness! became one of LA's longest-running hits, generating enough buzz amongst critics and theatre-goers alike to keep it playing for a year and a half before making the move to Off-Broadway, and sweeping up nearly every LA theatre award possible along the way. Not long after the 2001 New York production was cut short by the tragedy of 9/11, co-creators Kevin Murphy (book and lyrics) and Dan Studney (book and music), both of whom have a background in film and television as well, began writing a joint venture film adaptation of Reefer.
Recalled Murphy, "Once we'd completed a draft, we reunited director Andy Fickman, original producer Stephanie Steele, and the stage cast for a two-night only gala concert reading at the Coronet Theatre in West Hollywood. We invited every producer and distributor we could think of. One of the attendees was Robert Greenblatt, who two days earlier had first reported to work as the new President of the Showtime premium cable network. He loved Reefer, called us into his office and said he wanted the Reefer movie for Showtime and that he wanted to keep our stage cast and Andy Fickman. We began the deal-making process, and five months later we were scouting locations in Vancouver."
But, as is almost inevitable in show biz -- and particularly in musicals -- budgetary realities necessitated the inclusion of star names. "The plan was to make an extremely low-budget movie utilizing the stage cast," Murphy continued. "But as Showtime began to make budgets, it became clear that even a low-budget musical would be more expensive than we'd all hoped. At that point, additional funding became available to us through a German company called Apolloscreen, but their participation was contingent upon us making an honest effort to bring some stars aboard to give the picture international value. Ultimately, we ended up with five of the stage cast in the movie. Happily for us, the stars we were lucky enough to attract were all brilliant. It's awfully hard to argue with the likes of Alan Cumming, Neve Campbell, Steven Weber and Ana Gasteyer."
And so, on April 16, 2005, Reefer Madness, The Movie Musical premiered on Showtime -- the first ever movie musical created for that cable station. The response, from a variety of sources, was impressively positive. "Subscribers and affiliates loved the film, as did a majority of TV critics," Murphy said happily of the viewer feedback. "In fact, Showtime is so excited that they are mounting a huge Primetime Emmy campaign this year!"
There were several points about Reefer Madness that changed during its stage-to-screen transformation, but one of the most significant concerned the music. The stage production used a five-piece rock combo, but the film was able to utilize a full orchestra. Explained Studney, "In the stage show, there was only so much you could do with the rock band and a synth. In the movie, we had limitless possibilities, and only one 'performance,' so to speak, committed to film. One other big thing was that those original electric, more anachronistic instruments (and the styles/sounds you get from them) were now just one color on the palette. Early on in the orchestration process, I decided that they'd be used as the 'bad boys' in the score (aka 'evil' and 'reefer'), whereas the acoustic, more pastoral, more orchestral instruments and styles represented the happy teenagers and clueless lovers -- the characters that get drawn into the Evil World, lose their morals and get destroyed."
While musicals are often seen as simply popcorn entertainment, there are some, like Reefer Madness, that are able to offer comic social satire as well as a jaunty tune. Others, such as the upcoming film adaptation of legendary Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim's bloody, brooding masterpiece, Sweeney Todd, have a much darker side to them. Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator) is penning the screenplay for the Tony award-winning Sweeney. He is a long-time fan of the musical genre, both on stage and screen, and speaks eagerly and animatedly about the subject. He's not surprised by the end-of-the-century declining interest in movie musicals, but he blames it largely on the financial realities of movie-making, as well as cultural shifts in the national consciousness.
When asked about what's changed since the '50s and '60's, when musicals were more appreciated and accepted by a wider audience, the playwright-turned-screenwriter replied, "I think the hackneyed response, which may also be true, is that we've lost a bit of wonder, a bit of poetic life, where people could sing, and musicality and the rhythms of music could become exalted and become an extension of a person's experience. But another part of it also simply has to do with box office, with numbers. If you're coming off those few years that had Hello, Dolly! and Dr. Doolittle, suddenly making musicals is not a proposition studios are going to want to get into: they tend to be very expensive, and frequently it's location, period, a big cast, buying rights to a book and to music, post-dubbing, etc. So I think the balance sheet suddenly didn't add up for them.
"But here's the more important point," he continued. "Broadway was becoming irrelevant to popular music. I hate to go back and say 'blame it on the Beatles,' but when we lost the crossover between a Broadway show song that then became a pop hit, there was no popular response to Broadway music. Or that built-in audience for Broadway music was no longer there. And so, a studio executive looking at that could say, 'Well, I may happen to love the Stephen Sondheim musical Company, for example, and I can sing every word of 'Being Alive,' but the people out there in America can't because they haven't heard it on the radio. They haven't been listening to it, it's not at all familiar to their ears. So I would say, in the largest possible sense, it was that evolution where Broadway writing and Broadway musicals became removed from popular music; that gulf really created the gulf in movie musicals, too. Maybe. I don't know. It's a theory, anyway."
So, is the movie musical destined to make a reprise? Looking at what's happened already, and what's still in store, it would seem so -- though the idea of an original movie musical seems far more distant and unlikely than the current trend of making musical adaptations of existing works.
"I think a new, original movie musical would be fabulously exciting," enthused Logan. "But I also think it's unlikely. Those great old songwriters -- the George and Ira Gershwins, the Cole Porters, the Irving Berlins -- they spoke the music of the times. The songwriters and Broadway composers of today are not necessarily speaking to today's musical audience. It's hard to say trends, in terms of what might happen. But will there continue to be a place for musicals in the film world? Well, if you'd asked me a year before Chicago came out, I would have said, 'No. Absolutely not. Musicals are dead.' And I would have said that sadly, because I love the concept of the movie musical. I think there is always the possibility that an audience will respond to a movie musical -- that there will be an insane enough director, or a passionate enough writer, or a twisted enough studio that will say, 'Let's roll the dice on a movie musical.' They'll never completely go away. And certainly, they never have. Look at Disney's or DreamWorks animated movies -- Beauty and the Beast is a musical, as is The Lion King. But in terms of movie musicals for adults, it's a risky proposition. But one worth taking."
Studney agrees that song and dance will continue to find a home in films, though perhaps now in a different shape, and despite the loss of Broadway's influence on popular culture. "The movie musical has been around since the talkies," he pointed out. "It never really went away, though its form has often changed. Starting around 1980 or so, and with the advent of MTV, the 'traditional, Broadway musical' started, perhaps, to become persona non grata -- though Grease, the highest grossing musical movie ever, was only a scant two years earlier. I feel this is due to the fact that Broadway had fallen hopelessly out-of-step with what was playing on mainstream radio and television, in contrast to the times of Rodgers & Hammerstein or Lerner & Loewe, where what was popular on the Great White Way was also popular on the radio and Ed Sullivan. I don't think film dropped the musical so much as it dropped that style of musical for a while. But people like singing and dancing; they always have. It's special. The form it takes and the medium to which it is delivered morph around from time to time, but there will always be movie musicals."