Where are all the musicals?

Are musicals a dying film genre or are they just now making a come back? Sometimes it seems that in early film you couldn’t have a movie unless that movie had a song in it and movie musicals were one of the sure-fire moneymakers for the big studios. Every one of the Marx Brothers' movies have a song in as to the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope Road Movies. There are so many famous movie musicals, most of them adapted from Broadway musicals.

A very short list of my personal favorites are Singin’ in the Rain, Porgy and Bess, Carmen Jones, Guys & Dolls, The King and I, The Jazz Singer, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, My Fair Lady, No Business Like Show Business, Anything Goes, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Gypsy, and Show Boat. The list could go on and on, but I won’t fill up an entire post with a list of great musicals. The point is that old movies are chock full of musicals or at least song. Sometimes its hokey, sometimes its too sugary sweet and upbeat, but it always adds humor to a comedy or sadness to a drama. I still tear up every time I hear the strains of “Ol’ Man River” from Show Boat.

Of course, the popularity of musicals seemed to taper off in the late Eighties, and Nineties. Sure, there were such classics as Evita and John Waters’ Cry Baby and the Original Hairspray (which I find far superior to the current version. Just saying), but musicals were nowhere near as dominate on the film screen as they have been in the past. Of course, nowadays, musicals seem to be making a comeback. We have Chicago, Moulin Rouge, The Producers, and Sweeny Todd, all movie versions of Broadway plays (or in the case of The Producers, a version of a Broadway play that is a version of a movie). Still, musicals are not as prominent in our culture sphere as they once where.

I have a lot of remaining questions about what happened to the good old-fashioned movie musical. Why is it that studios don’t seen musicals as the seat-filling blockbusters they used to? What about our culture doesn’t seem to enjoy musicals as much as we used to? Did the musicals change or did we?