So you hate musicals? Well, both of these people could have kicked your ass and made you like it. Also, Ginger would have done it backwards and in heels.
Yes, I have reached my boiling-over point. I’m no great defender of Glee, but recent discussions which have expanded to the oft-worn and always-wrong “ha ha musicals suck” trope point to a larger, more salient peeve of mine. Dismissing the entire musical genre without viewing the greats with a critical eye is like dismissing horror because you saw FearDotComrather than Psycho, declaring comedies to be miserable because Date Movie entered your field of vision before Tootsie, or never again seeing a science fiction film because the Blockbuster near your house had copies of Virus, but none of Forbidden Planet.
For many, Glee will be a gateway drug. Hopefully those watching will seek out the Broadway and film work of the accomplished singers involved,which in turn will lead them to the classics and beyond. Attempting to pin down “musicals” as one thing or another is as difficult as saying there’s only one form of animation, by which I mean it’s impossible. A casual watching of Swing Time might lead to The Broadway Melody of 1940, and Frank Morgan’s performance there could cause an audience to revisit his performance in The Wizard of Oz (a musical, lest we forget). Singin’ in the Rain gives us an itch to see more Donald O’Connor, and by the time we’ve reached Out to Sea with Brent Spiner’s outrageous musical sequences in an otherwise tame comedy we’ve begun to widen our net to find more films with song and dance men.
High School Musical is not the be-all-end-all of the genre; even Kenny Ortega, its director and tween-wrangler, has created more interesting numbers in Newsies and This Is It. So long as Phantom of the Paradise, Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Band Wagon, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, Bugsy Malone, Walk Hard, Pennies from Heaven, and even The Commitments(from where my namesake hails) exist, your arguments against musicals are ill-informed. Maybe you’ll stay ignorant of their joys, much to your detriment. Or maybe you’ll find that you’re immune to everything from In the Heights’ rapid-spit rhymes to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’s gleeful and anachronistic shtick to Streets of Fire’s stunning Eighties-future opulence. Maybe you’ll stare at these all with a fixed gaze and declare them all worthy of your scorn.
But I doubt it.
