As long as there have been movies, musicals have been right there with their tap shoe in the door, and wherever there are musicals, Broadway can’t be far behind. The intricate dance between Broadway and cinema has been a true Hollywood-style love-hate relationship if ever there was one.
Making a movie out of a Broadway smash sounds like the perfect symbiotic relationship. The filmmakers get a story that they know audiences will love, most of the writing and creative work is already done for them and they have a built-in audience before the movie even hits theaters. On the other side, Broadway artists get to make their show ten times larger and more intricate than the stage could ever allow. The musical movie also solves the biggest tragedy of live theater: its terrible fleetingness. Through the magic of the silver screen, Broadway’s best stories are immortalized for all eternity and happy viewers can watch these masterpieces whenever they want, as often as they want.
The stage-to-screen transition seemed to be the perfect fit, and for the longest time, audiences were devouring every glorious note. Broadway adaptations such as “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music,” and “West Side Story” achieved enormous success both with critics and the box office. Then all of a sudden, they seemed to stop. The film community decided that musicals were too campy and unrealistic and the theater began to balk at screen adaptations, fearing that they would destroy the stories they built. In a world of high definition pictures and special effects, big production numbers and musical dialogue just didn’t seem to fit, and so movie musicals fizzled and screens went tuneless for a season.
All that changed when “Chicago” won the 2002 Academy Award for Best Picture. “Chicago” reminded the world how much of a role fantasy plays in real life and, what’s more, reminded them how beautiful a stage-to-screen collaboration could be. It wasn’t long before major production companies caught the idea, and within five years we were given screen adaptations of some of the best musicals ever made including “The Phantom of the Opera,” “The Producers” and “Hairspray.” With the great success of “Les Miserables” in 2012, it seems that movie musicals are here to stay. In fact, three Tony Award winning musicals, including the star-studded “Into the Woods” and reimagined “Annie,” sang their way to the silver screen in 2014 and more have been promised.
While the camera can never fully capture the magic of live theater, there’s still something to be said for the movie musical.
