There is a long-running, adjustable joke that has served many purposes. “How can you tell if someone is [fill in target here]? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.” You hear this a lot about blameless vegans.
Anyway, how can you tell if someone doesn’t like musicals? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you. Just recall how keen folk were to let you know they hated La La Land. Plenty of people don’t like romantic comedies or science-fiction films. But they don’t make it part of their identity in the same way.
Hollywood may have been listening. For some years the industry has made a habit of releasing trailers that conceal the relevant film’s propensity to burst into song. The most notorious case was that of Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, way back in 2007. It took close to 30 years to bring Stephen Sondheim’s classic musical to the big screen. When it finally arrived, the distributors, terrified of the musophobes mentioned above, included not a line of sung dialogue in promos. The Guardian reported that at least one complaint was made to the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority.
There have been other examples since. But nothing like the fury of concealment that has just hit us. The initial trailer for Mean Girls presents the film, which opened in Ireland on Wednesday, as a straight remake of the similarly titled 2004 high-school comedy. “A new twist from Tina Fey,” a legend blares. Well, yes. The twist is that, with her team, Fey is adapting the stage musical of Mean Girls that she brought to Broadway in 2018.
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Videos – possibly unreliable – have emerged in recent days of audiences hissing the first song. An offending trailer for the upcoming The Color Purple, also an adaptation of a Broadway musical, is not quite so disingenuous. There is one brief shot of Fantasia Barrino bellowing to the skies, but the rest of the preview allows no suggestion that characters intermittently warble. The first full trailer for Wonka had not even a hint we were in for nondiegetic trilling.
Does this strategy work? Why make musicals if you presume the audience doesn’t care for them? Do audiences resent being so misled?
The Color Purple – coming our way next week – opened in the United States on Christmas Day (they do that there) to spectacular figures before fading away in subsequent weeks. Mean Girls debuted last week in the same market with a strong $32 million take at the box office, but we have yet to see how it will hold up (after people discover it’s a m*sic*l). Wonka has been a genuine smash. The prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory just passed $500 million at the world box office. It seems few ran screaming when Timothée Chalamet opened his mouth to breathe the first of Neil Hannon’s songs.
So musicals can still work. The Wonka example suggests that, if the content is up to scratch, audiences won’t punish distributors for being backwards in forwarding the tunes. Indeed, for all the obituaries written for the form, musicals have proved durable in a way that classic genres such as the western have not. True, many of the highest-grossing tuners (as Variety would excruciatingly have it) are in deep disguise. Most of the top 10 of all time are animations: The Lion King, Frozen, Aladdin, Sing and so on. Some in the extended chart aren’t really musicals as they used to be understood: hits such as Bohemian Rhapsody and A Star Is Born. But, over the past few decades, live-action, nondiegetic musicals such as Mamma Mia!, The Greatest Showman and La La Land have been huge hits. Don’t let it be forgot that The Sound of Music was the film that finally, after nearly 30 years, passed out Gone with the Wind to become the highest grossing of all time.
This is all most confusing. Some will argue that the whole thing is an appalling scam. Make films people don’t like. Lure them into the opening weekend under false pretences. By the time they discover the awful truth you’ve already made back your investment. Remember that, in the modern world, the opening weekend is everything. Ha ha!
Obviously, this is nonsense. That plan is going to work even better if you make films that people actually do like. It seems more likely that the scheme, if we can characterise it thus, is there to cope with a stubborn self-delusion. The problem is that people think they don’t like musicals. Put them in front of Meryl Streep bellowing out Abba numbers and they come around. Ask them for their favourite childhood flicks and they’ll mention Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the original Willy Wonka. Trust me. There is nothing more absurd about bursting into song at points of high emotion than there is about inheriting superpowers from a radioactive spider.
