Spectator Cartoons Yes, Humans No

By Kurt Anderson

Maybe it's just just me; maybe lots of heterosexuals born since World War II really do love musicals. But I have never knowingly hummed a show tune. I take it only on faith that Rodgers and Hammerstein were geniuses. Ethel Merman's voice was powerful, sure, and powerfully annoying. Each new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical seems like an ice show putting on airs, Siegfried and Roy with bathos. To a majority of people under 50, I'm convinced, the formal conceit of musicals (a so-so play during which the actors inexplicably sing their hearts out every 10 minutes) is both corny and surreal, like some unpleasant crossbreed of Salvador Dali and Norman Rockwell. We don't buy it, and we haven't bought it since Mary Poppins. Our disbelief refuses to suspend.

( Trained by TV to be literal-minded and by the zeitgeist to be a bit cynical, today's younger generation began driving the traditional musical toward extinction more than two decades ago. The genre's zenith came, not coincidentally, at the last moment of baby boomers' cultural powerlessness, during the 1950s, when a big Hollywood musical appeared every few months. It's incredible, in retrospect, that An American in Paris, Royal Wedding, Show Boat, Singin' in the Rain, April in Paris, Calamity Jane, The Band Wagon, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Kismet, Oklahoma!, Brigadoon, Guys and Dolls, High Society, Funny Face and The King and I all appeared in movie theaters in a single 2,000-day period.

As the children of the '50s became the moviegoing teenagers of the '60s and '70s, however, Hollywood's output of musicals shrank radically, and the genre had its last hurrah as an effectively two-woman industry: there were Julie Andrews musicals (Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Thoroughly Modern Millie), and there were Barbra Streisand musicals (Funny Girl, Hello, Dolly!, Funny Lady), and that was about it. Grease, a distant 15 years ago, was the last traditional movie musical to become a hit.

But ambition, hubris and nostalgia still inspire many of the most talented American filmmakers to try the form. Steven Bochco, after creating the hit series L.A. Law but before creating the hit series NYPD Blue, created the very expensive flop series Cop Rock, a weekly musical about police. "It was the most fun I've ever had in television," says Bochco, whose father was a Broadway pit musician. The audience regarded Cop Rock as a curious taste not worth acquiring -- "I think people sitting at home alone," Bochco figures now, "were embarrassed" -- and ABC canceled it quickly. James Brooks, the director of Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News, finished shooting his movie musical I'll Do Anything last February, but test audiences reacted so negatively that Brooks has embarked on a radical course of rejiggering; one possibility is removing most of the musical numbers, a destroy-the-village-to- save-it remedy ABC proposed to Bochco for Cop Rock. The picture has been delayed until February.

Despite all the cautionary tales, they keep coming. Disney, last year's disastrous Newsies notwithstanding, seems on the verge of turning its hegemonic attentions to live-action musicals: the studio has the splendid composer Danny Elfman (The Simpsons, Tim Burton's films) and Alan Menken, & Newsies' composer, each developing a new live-action movie musical, plus Oliver Stone in preproduction on Evita.

As a creator of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin for Disney, Menken has almost single-handedly revived the movie musical, albeit in cartoon form. And with the success of Disney's giddy, macabre new animated musical The Nightmare Before Christmas (it is the most popular movie in America right now), we are in a new golden era: Disney is to the '90s what MGM was to the '50s. "We came in with real respect for the established traditions of the American musical," Menken says of his blockbuster cartoon movies. Except, of course, for the tradition of filming actors. It seems that people at the end of the 20th century can accept a movie character bursting into song only if that character is nonhuman. And the main audience for today's new musicals is children, who tend to come with very little disbelief in need of suspending.

Slightly older children are the audience for the four-minute musicals known as music videos. If Aladdin is a traditional book musical, most music videos are not even booklet musicals. VH1 has hired Francis Coppola to oversee a series of special, half-hour music videos directed by important younger filmmakers, and it seems axiomatic that if some new species of live-action long-form musical is to evolve, it will owe at least as much to R.E.M.'s video Everybody Hurts, say, as to Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis. A big problem with Newsies, admits Menken, was that "it didn't resemble a video enough. There weren't enough camera angles."

As recently as the '70s, Hollywood automatically considered Broadway a wellspring of stories and concepts. But almost none of the hit Broadway musicals of the past decade have been turned into a movie. Indeed, the east- west flow of material has rather suddenly reversed itself -- movies now turn into Broadway spectacles. La Cage aux Folles, 42nd Street and The Phantom of the Opera were films first and stage shows second, as were both of this season's big hits, Tommy (essentially a set of music videos performed live) and Kiss of the Spider Woman. And what are some of the big musicals about to arrive on Broadway? The Red Shoes (based on the 1948 movie), Sunset Boulevard (based on the 1950 movie) and, next spring, the Disney production of Beauty and the Beast (based on the 1991 Disney movie).