Two Movie Musicals

I watched two movie musicals this weekend. One worked; one didn’t. Which was which? You might be surprised.

It’s very hard to make a credible movie musical. On a stage, everything’s somewhat artificial, so when people spontaneously burst into song, it’s easy to suspend disbelief. Movies mimic reality far more closely, so filmed people who sing instead of speak always look, at best, slightly ridiculous. At worst, they look like total buffoons.

If you doubt this, watch the movie version of The Phantom of the Opera, AKA Buffoons on Parade.

Musical theatre snobs look down their noses at the collected works of Andrew Lloyd Webber, but I think they do so for all the wrong reasons. They think Lloyd Webber is a talentless hack; a wannabe Sondheim that one friend of mine dubbed “Andrew Lloyd Salieri.” Very clever and snarky, but this overlooks the fact Lloyd Webber is an exceptionally skilled pop composer with a gift for catchy melodic hooks.

That’s why I believe his most successful piece is Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, because it doesn’t aspire to be anything but a plain ol’ good time. Lloyd Webber only falters when he tries to gain the respect of the snooty purists who claim to hate him but would kill for his box office grosses. So he churns out dreck like Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, which are supposed to be Big and Important, yet both feel like high school term papers by teenagers with more ego than insight. Even in his worst shows, though, Lloyd Webber manages to produce some truly stellar melodies, like Superstar’s “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and Evita’s “Another Suitcase In Another Hall.”

That leads us to The Phantom of the Opera. On stage, it’s Webber’s best and worst show, all at the same time.

It’s the best because of the tunes, or, at least, the ones that work. The title track rocks, and “Music of the Night” and “Think of Me” are simple, effective melodies that linger in your brain long after the show is over. When the show tries to pretend to be some sort of grand opera, it becomes pretentious. Still, the haunting Gothic romance at the heart of the story ends up succeeding in spite of Lloyd Webber’s best efforts to drown it in a sea of bombast.

At least, that’s the stage version. In the movie, the story never gets a chance to come up for air. It’s all bombast all the time, and it’s deeply, intensely silly.

It doesn’t help that Lloyd Webber chose Joel Schumacher to direct this pile. Schumacher is the wunderkind who inflicted the movie Batman and Robin on the world, complete with the disturbing BatSuit with BatNipples. Schumacher’s Phantom is BatNipples put to music – big, stupid, cluttered, and noisy. Yet for all its frenzied motion, the show never goes anywhere. It’s painfully, agonizingly slow. Schumacher lingers on his extravagant, expensive art direction – which is stunning, indeed – and dazzles us with his clever camera angles and such, but he never bothers to engage you in the characters, most of whom are woefully miscast, including the Phantom.

Especially the Phantom.

Gosh, this Phantom sucks. First off, he can’t sing. Second, he’s better looking than Raoul, which gets the story exactly wrong. And when he takes off his mask, he looks like he’s had a really bad sunburn. That’s it. That’s the reason he’s a murderer and a lonely miserable outcast. He fell asleep in a tanning booth.

The irony is that the movie is entirely faithful to the stage production, which is one of the main reasons it fails. Schumacher has no idea why these people start singing out of nowhere, and he makes no attempt to compensate for the difference between stage and film. Instead, he shows us lots of pretty set dressing and hopes that will be enough.

Contrast that with High School Musical II, which my kids can’t stop watching, so I sat down with them to see what all the fuss was about.

It was a whole lot of fun.

It wasn’t great, ponderous theatre. It was light and fun, with very engaging actors and a whole lot of catchy tunes. Was it Sondheim? Heavens, no. It was an airy pop confection, and it didn’t pretend to be anything else. It also made allowances for why everyone is singing all the time. It worked as a movie, not just a musical.

I should admit that it helped that the whole thing was filmed at the Entrada Golf Course just outside of St. George, Utah, about five minutes from where our family used to live. Those red rock cliffs in the background were very familiar Southern Utah landmarks that look nothing like New Mexico, where the film was ostensibly set. When we went back to visit, some friends took my girls to go meet the High School Musical cast, and they came back with autographs. (They said that Ashley Tisdale was very nice to them, but Vanessa Hudgens was kind of snotty.)

So, to sum up: enjoy High School Musical II. Skip Phantom. And beware of Sweeney Todd, the Sondheim masterpiece that’s getting the Tim Burton treatment this Christmas.

I’m thinking it will probably suck.