Top Five Reasons Musicals Need To Be Condemned

STARRING: STEPHIN MERRITT as Rob Gordon!!!!

We have no protagonists in musicals, only heroes. Because it sounds more... dramatic! Also, this sounds completely horrible.

OTMFM.

That's a great movie!

Smithes? Or The Smiths?

The Smiths' musical would be called "It Happens A Lot 'Round Here", feature a torch-song rendition of "Back To The Old House", and be the only rock musical in history to be picketed by fans of the band it was based around...

I like musicals, but usually only when they are at least fifty years old. I went to see "Rent" when it came out, and remember thinking that the Pet Shop Boys had addressed the topic much more successfully and, at 1/50th of the duration, much more efficiently.

"Hair: The Original Broadway Cast" is a great album, which, among other things, features the excellent drumming of funk/jazz master Idris Muhammad. Somehow Alex Harvey also has something to with "Hair" but I am an American, so to me he is just a name out of the Harmony Encyclopedia of Rock.

I can see recasting the HiFid characters in NYC terms just on the real-life indie-shop crazies I've experienced, but that's not gonna sell $80 tickets (which is the real reason the form is even deader than it was 20 years ago).

There was renewed interest in Hair over the past few years when some of the other work of the composer Galt MacDermot was discovered to be sampledelic. Sample-icious. Sampledelicious.

Aquarius
Donna
Sodomy
Colored Spade
Manchester, England
Air
I Got Life
HAIR HAIR HAIR HAIR HAIR HAIR HAIR HAIR (fist pumping a prerequisite)
FRANK FUCKIN MILLS
Black Boys/White Boys
THREE FIVE ZERO ZERO MOTHERFUCKERS
Good Morning Starshine (especially when it degenerates into babytalk)
LET THE SUN SHINE IN

You guys need to realise that not only musical styles that have existed for less than 25 years have any musical value, even in a current context.

Of course. OK, I confess. "South Pacific" has been in heavy rotation at my house for the past few weeks, and I sort of forced myself to watch "West Side Story" the movie the other day to confirm that the movie doesn't work too well, but the OBC album is great. I've even gone to Broadway musicals and enjoyed them (Not "The Capeman" though, although I did cross pass with Quincy Jones on the way to the men's room.) But the musical is a pre-rock era form, and contemporary musicals usually try to pastiche current styles in a way that makes them as dull as I presume the Pat Boone version of "Tutti Frutti" was. I mean, I sure that there are talented people out there, but to invoke some kind of great man fallacy, even the intentionally bad lyrics Ira Gershwin wrote for "Kiss Me, Stupid" are better than most of the stuff people do these days. (I hope this is as boring for you to read as it is for me to write it.)

So there are two questions: first, can you make a musical out of contemporary materials, and second, why were musicals good in the first place. For the second, I recommend watching a good movie musical such as "Singing in The Rain" a few times, or maybe "Cover Girl," "Shall We Dance" or "Top Hat." For the first, I don't know, and I don't really care too much. I leave it to a greater mind than mine to answer, perhaps the mind of, say ... Momus?

Opening number would have to be: "No Action." Perhaps we have seem kind of Alexander Graham Bell-like figure inventing Bakelite before the music starts.

I think those were "dummy" lyrics written for that melody, which Billy Wilder utilized for the film years later. I know Ella Fitzgerald recorded it.

"Carousel" is my kinda classic musical: burglary, spousal abuse, suicide, ghosts etc.

Mind you, this is only the FILMED version that I'm crazy about. Can't make any claims for the original stage production, which presumably didn't feature any tanks or fighter jets.

Spring Awakening. Good grief.

i got no problem with musicals; rock musicals, on the other hand, are rarely, if ever, anything other than absurdly patronizing (e.g., "this is what the kids like today, so let's ineptly approximate it for them!").

that said, the musical episode of "buffy the vampire slayer" made deeply embarrassed fools of grease, hair, and their ilk. using members of redd kross (as opposed to session shmoes approaching rock from outside) and borrowing arrangements from love ("something to sing about" is a dead ringer for "you set the scene") helped. and the singing was so charmingly inexperienced that you never had any of that I AM CLENCHING MY FISTS overemoting nonsense.

I don't know how you go from something as awesome as "Avenue Q" to something as horrific as "High Fidelity"? Is it drugs, maybe?

I've said this before but the musical episode of Buffy was total bullshit.

...and so was the rest of the series.