“Good mornin’! Good mornin’! We’ve talked the whole night through…” It’s a tune intrinsic to the iconography of the beloved Singin’ in the Rain, this time emanating from Judy Garland’s slight frame, more than a decade earlier in the forgettable Babes in Arms. Across the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, songs were frequently subjected to this process of recycling—singles were shattered, stripped for parts and repurposed for each new movie musical. This songbook reverberated across culture, coloring every corner of the public’s media intake. In 1939, the same year Babes in Arms made the leap from stage to screen, Garland further proved the staying power of this era of movie music by securing her spot with the year’s number one track. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” remains the definitive example of singing on film, an apt, potent metaphor for an indescribable yearning. Filmmakers have been trying to capture the inexact emotion—the kind that launches careers and secures legacies—ever since, to varying degrees of success.
In recent years, this success has felt especially unreachable. Wonka’s “A Hatful of Dreams” coils around the repetition of “I got nothing to offer but my chocolate,” abrasively throwing the audience into the plot rather than exposing them to Dorothy’s delicate, childlike emotion. While “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” held The Wizard of Oz together, propelling the film into a hallowed place in cinema history, every recent example of the “I want” track common to musicals exposes the gaping emotional vacancy that sits beneath these modern projects.
The strictures of modern moviemaking seem to hold any onscreen music back from being great. Wonka follows The Greatest Showman in establishing the legacy of competent direction upended by bland music. By the time a musical finally makes its way to cinema screens, it has historically undergone several levels of reinterpretation. More recently, this process of reimagining has shifted in film’s direction. This wasn’t always the case: Through the early to mid-20th century, theater was the enviable platform for actors to platform their talent; six of the ten Best Lead Actress winners of the 1950s won for roles originating on Broadway, in comparison to the zero theater-based actress wins of the 2010s. Performers used to draw from the stage, but more recently the opposite is true, with composers desperate to ensnare dwindling theater audiences through musical versions of cult classics. From Heathers to Beetlejuice to Mean Girls (the latter of which is now receiving its own screen-to-stage-to-screen adaptation), films are the starting point to frame new musicals.
At least part of this run of lackluster adaptations can be attributed to the birth of the internet and the death of monoculture. Social media was initially seized as another way for people and corporations to calculate public engagement with art. Instead, though, it threw consumers into flux, splintering our attention across different forms and elevating conversations around niche films to the same level as blockbusters. Matters are further confused by the internet’s impossibly short memory, which can cut cultural phenomena down, reducing them in size and scope. Think about how supposedly successful every season of Stranger Things was, for each to be largely forgotten by Twitter users within a week of its release.
Our on-screen offerings, especially musical ones, are rarely compelling enough to rise above this culturally muddled fray. John Carney’s admittedly lovely Begin Again and Sing Street featured bubbly arrangements of single-worthy songs. Each successive number in these films deserved attention—but the small, contained melodies can’t compete with the overwhelming noise of a hit. Like newly polished windows, “I Will Always Love You” and even “Shallow” marked clarified glimpses into the genre’s wider potential, expressing sounds that are engineered to break into social spaces, contorting any critical conversations around them. These songs filter their films (The Bodyguard and A Star is Born, respectively) into pure, brief expressions of melodrama (with Whitney Houston’s cover of the former outperforming the original in popularity). And at their hearts, musicals are always melodramatic, bridging the gap between our deepest, most extreme instincts and the observers taking them in from the outside. It is in the valley between internal and external that the form swims, with songs like these boldly bridging the two in loud, exciting bursts.
But if you compare John Kander and Fred Ebb’s lyricism in Cabaret’s “Maybe This Time,” which is the tragic hinge from which the plot swings, to something like Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s work on Dear Evan Hansen’s “Waving From a Window,” you can see that wider trends in songwriting have diluted this thematic potency. Kander and Ebb use this moment (a third of the way into the plot) to bluntly express Sally Bowles’ deep-seated worries. “Not a loser anymore / like the first time and the time before,” she sings, drawing out an unspoken history in the implications lurking within the space around “time.” Sally’s pain simmers beneath the song, like a low-burning pressure that patiently bursts into a fire of emotion. Pasek and Paul borrow from the verbiage of modern hits, placing its listeners in a web of distinguishable references. “I’ve learned to slam on the brakes / Before I’ve even turned the key,” Evan admits in one of the first scenes. It’s a Taylor Swift-esque flair, one that substitutes more poetic musings on the state of the character’s world with a familiar metaphor, replacing layered complexity with recognizability.
Pasek and Paul are beloved by younger Broadway-goers, merging the simpler, replicable melodies of pop music with a sound directed by individual characters. In an ingenious act of summary, “Waving Through a Window” communicates the entirety of Dear Evan Hansen, revealing the direction of the plot—from one side of the window to the other, peering in to peering out. But such a trick only conveys the film’s shallow messaging. Once you are clued into the shape of the song, the story is spelled out, flattened by the obvious metaphor.
The Mean Girls musical suffers from a similarly colorless predictability. The original script’s snark goes untranslated into the tracks of the musical—a medium known for its earnestness. “I’d Rather Be Me” is the climactic final act number, victoriously belted by actresses playing the grungy, forceful Janis Ian. The hook—“I’d rather be me than be with you”—is a blunt, sickly sweet version of Janis’ (Lizzy Caplan) actual speech, where she defiantly announces having a “big lesbian crush” on the newly dethroned Regina George (Rachel McAdams) before launching herself into a waiting crowd. A knowing and clever comeuppance turns into an act of faux catharsis.
Musicals as whole have shared a similar trajectory in the past few decades, devolving into the palest, least compelling versions of themselves. They have twisted themselves into indigestible shapes, responding to the strain of a Broadway desperate to ensnare a young audience with frothy, fun pop alongside the pressure to make the next larger-than-life ballad. As a result, most pieces of their music fall somewhere between the two, neither pure vestiges of current pop sounds nor standalone smashes big enough to dominate the cultural consensus.
Like every genre, musicals are victims of their cultural circumstances. Certain trends—namely the development of online fan culture and a shift away from theater towards pop—have preceded a decline in musical quality, necessitating a rise in haphazardly constructed songs, with soundtracks buried beneath layers of alteration and modification. “Waving Through a Window” now overwhelms a space once reserved for “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and “I’d Rather Be Me” drowns an audience once kept afloat by the thrilling complexity of “Maybe This Time.” The modern musical soundtrack is proof that no amount of onscreen skill can disguise a boring tune, and greater regard for movie magic shouldn’t come at the expense of a Broadway-bound score.
London-based film writer Anna McKibbin loves digging into classic film stars and movie musicals. Find her on Twitter to see what she is currently obsessed with.