Teeny Bopper Musicals Versus the Real Deal
Whether you are a parent, sibling, baby-sitter or maybe a fan yourself, it´s difficult to not have heard or been a part of the recent mania over teeny bopper sensations and their launch of the musical genre into the limelight. Kids like The Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus with her box office success The Hannah Montana Movie, and the entire cast of High School Musical with their silver screen release HSM 3, have been running around, singing their little prepubescent hearts out.
With titles like High School Musical 3 dominating the box office and bringing in more money for the musical genre than their classic counterparts, one begins to wonder if when it comes to the big screen, the genre of ¨musical¨ now belongs to preteen stars and their poppy high school romances/dilemmas.
Or, perhaps it´s only that when people go to the movies to watch singing and dancing, they prefer singing and dancing of the perky variety. If you consider the musical releases in the last few years, the successes have been titles that boasted happy-go-lucky themes, a lesson learned ending, and only lacked the packaging of Zac Efron´s jailbait good looks to catapult the releases into record breaking numbers.
Films like the 2008 remake of the ABBA album based mother-daughter story Mamma Mia! and the don´t judge a book by its cover classic Hairspray in 2007 did very well, each reaching over 27 million. On the other hand, darker films such as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street made only 9 million and dramas like Dreamgirls, though it did eventually get its fair share of awards including several Oscars and a Golden Globe for the song Listen, only brought in about 14 million. Even 2005 Rent´s ¨No day but today¨ theme didn´t help it earn more than 10 million in its opening weekend.
Maybe I´m biased by my particular tastes in music, or perhaps it´s the fact that I am not a 16 year old Disney fan, but it seems to me that the musical genre has a lot more to offer than peppy choreography, cheesy smiles and bad acting.
Take, for example, 2007´s Across the Universe, a great effort that turned 33 of the Beatle´s hits into a trippy, beautiful illustration of love and the conflicts of the sixties. The movie was received well by some critics, worse by many, and barely grossed 25,000 million in theatres overall. In my opinion, from the first number Girl to the final, All you need is love, and every choreographed scene in between, Across the Universe boasted every classic component of a musical without recycling anything too boring from the usual bag of tricks and delivering it in the complete psychedelic way that a Beatles musical should be.
Musicals like Across the Universe hark back to the classics like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Wizard of Oz. These are musicals that had those Somewhere over the rainbow moments, but also offered up enough monkeys flying on broomsticks and acid tripping choclatiers, that by the time Dorothy realized there was no place like home and Charlie learned you don´t have to be a spoiled brat to have your dreams come true, half the audience hadn´t keeled over from choking on the fluff that fills the more modern version of a musical.
Chances are that something like Across the Universe won´t be topping the box offices anytime soon. And the way things are going, the world may just be blessed with some sort of ridiculously successful musical centering on Vanessa Hudgens singing about college midterms and her long distance relationship with Zac Efron while one of those crazy Jonas Brothers tries to tempt her into drinking underage at the local frat party. Or maybe some producer will get carried away with this whole teenage musical business and put out another From Justin to Kelly (Kelly Clarkson´s decidely worse mistake since winning American Idol), something that would hopefully bring the production of these teen crowd pleasers to a screeching halt, allowing some mor elevated musical to take the spotlight.
