This winter season we have been treated to three movie musicals: one that is original (apart from the reprise of a much-loved track) and two original Broadway hits. One good thing they have in common is that they all include big ensemble dance numbers, reminiscent of the big road show musicals of the late 1960s, such as Oliver! (1968, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture) and Hello, Dolly! (1969, one of the most expensive movies of its time). Patrick Honoré writes…
Wonka
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★★ ✩
While Tom Holland was thought to be a frontrunner for the lead role in Wonka, the prequel to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (based on Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), the part ultimately went to Timothée Chalamet, who performed in several musicals during his time at LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in New York City. He turns out to be an excellent choice, even though, as is often the case in Hollywood today, the trailer more or less hides the song and dance elements so as not to alienate the moviegoers who wish to avoid the genre.
This is a strange phenomenon – the songs were always prominent in trailers during the Golden Age of musical movies – but perhaps the compositions by Neil Hannon, leader of the group The Divine Comedy, are not the strongest ingredients in this mostly original musical affair. The only memorable numbers come from the great Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, penned for the 1971 movie starring Gene Wilder: ‘Oompa Loompa’, delivered by Hugh Grant, and ‘Pure Imagination’, emotionally performed by Chalamet.
The dance sequences, on the other hand, are top-notch. Christopher Gattelli – choreographer of Newsies and SpongeBob SquarePants on Broadway, the TV series Schmigadoon!, and the forthcoming musical version of Death Becomes Her in Chicago – does a terrific job showing off and developing the natural dancing abilities of Chalamet, whose joy and enthusiasm through what must have been a tough training process is obvious to the moviegoer.
Many references to Gene Wilder are happily thrown in, and the sequence on a rooftop with Chalamet and Calah Lane as Noodle is pure poetry in motion. As for the repeated flying, it appears to be a direct reference to the tea sequence at Uncle Albert’s in Mary Poppins, with which Wonka can compare in its visuals and choreography, but unfortunately not in the quality of its music. Some of the other dance sequences conjure up the movie version of Oliver! as well, but again, not with as strong of a score as support.
Let’s hope Chalamet will find better material for his next movie musical venture. If Holland becomes unavailable for the Fred Astaire biopic, he surely could be considered. Still, even if not clearly announced as a musical, Wonka, by becoming a box office hit, helps pave the way for more musical movies to get the green light, which is a good thing already.
The Color Purple
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★★ ✩
Just as Wonka didn’t venture into the darker side of its title character, the screen adaptation of the Broadway musical The Color Purple is much lighter than the Spielberg movie, especially with its cheesier happy ending. Again here, as with ‘Pure Imagination’ in Wonka, the song we remember most from the 1985 film is ‘Sister’, which many people surely missed in the Broadway musical.
The musical score by Brenda Russell, Alee Willis and Stephen Bray does contain one memorable melody, ‘What About Love?’, sung by Fantasia Barrino, re-creating the role of Celie from the Broadway production, with the great Taraji P Henson as showgirl Shug Avery. The latter also delivers the juicy, jazzy ragtime number ‘Push Da Button’, extended in the movie to a big production number with inventive choreography by the renowned Fatima Robinson, who previously participated in the Dreamgirls movie and the TV presentation of The Wiz Live! Just as with ‘Cell Block Tango’ in the movie of Chicago and ‘Be Italian’ in that of Nine, this sequence is the sexiest moment of the film.
The opening scene, ‘Huckleberry Pie’/‘Mysterious Ways’, has also been developed into an outdoor, large group production number, reminiscent of those found in the Streisand-led movie Hello, Dolly!
We must be grateful for those production numbers, giving the movie a dimension of dance that is almost absent from the Broadway show and particularly the more minimalist John Doyle staging of the Broadway revival, which began at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London in 2013.
Mean Girls
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★★ ✩
The device of making musical numbers happen in the heads of characters was memorably used in the Herbert Ross movie Pennies from Heaven (1981), in which Bernadette Peters and Steve Martin escaped the grim reality of the Great Depression through a fantasy world based on the movie musicals of Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire. Twenty years later, Lars von Trier did it again in his musical melodrama Dancer in the Dark, in which Björk also imagined herself in Hollywood musicals. But it was Rob Marshall and screenwriter Bill Condon who pushed forward the concept to make Chicago work on the big screen after many other attempts had fallen through.
Wonka, and particularly The Color Purple, also dealing with dark subject matter, fully use that device to make the transition from narrative to musical numbers palatable for today’s moviegoers used to more realistic treatment. The movie version of the Broadway musical Mean Girls (2018), itself based on the movie of 2004, both with books by Tina Fey, is no exception.
Nominated in 12 categories at the Tony Awards, Mean Girls ran on Broadway for 833 performances, only closing due to the pandemic. The musical finally opens this summer in London.
Marking the directorial debuts of Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr, working from Fey’s screenplay, the new movie stars the sizzling recording artist Reneé Rapp who played the part of Regina George on Broadway. Though a bit mature for the part, she is still a good choice, particularly for her spectacular vocals. In the part of Cady Heron, Australian born Angourie Rice is quite convincing in her first big leading part after small roles as a child actor, notably in the Marvel Spiderman movies.
Ashley Park, who received accolades on Broadway in the part of Gretchen Wieners, just has a cameo, while Bebe Wood plays Wieners with zest here. Avantika Vandanapu is also perfectly cast as Karen, as is Christopher Briney as the heartthrob Aaron, while Jaquel Spivey, straight from the Broadway Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop, is ideally cast as the “too gay to function” Damian. Among the few adults, aside from Tina Fey herself, Busy Philipps as the overcool mum of Regina stands out.
Kyle Hanagami effectively choreographs the musical sequences to the serviceable score by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin, but the theatricality of Casey Nicholaw’s original Broadway choreography gets a little lost along the way, perhaps a deliberate choice if the movie version is targeting audiences which like the original movie rather than those who follow what happens on the Great White Way.
Another common trait among these three movies is that their musical identities are very much hidden in the trailers, with the producers apparently desperate not to scare away musical haters, This is a dubious choice from the start, since they are all entertaining, and while they won’t change the course of musical film history, they truly are musical movies. Why deceive audiences about that?
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