The movie musical's changing fortunes at the Oscars - and what next for the genre

The Hollywood musical and the Academy Awards go back a long way. Almost all the way, in fact. The first sound film to ever win the best picture Oscar — at the second Academy Awards, in 1930 — was a musical, namely Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Broadway Melody, starring Bessie Love and Anita Page as vaudevillian sisters trying to make it big on the boards. With studios inspired by its success, musicals (both original, like The Broadway Melody, and adapted from the stage) would come to dominate Hollywood during the following decades. Especially through the voluminous output of MGM, which would release another 192 film musicals by the time the genre tilted into decline at the close of the 1960s.

As productions grew bigger, bolder and brighter under the guidance of innovators such as Busby Berkeley, Vincente Minnelli and MGM producer Arthur Freed (who co-wrote the songs in The Broadway Melody), performers such as Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby and, later, Julie Andrews and Barbra Streisand blossomed into megastars, many of them having been savvily imported from vaudeville or Broadway. Audiences could not get enough. In 1966, for example, The Sound Of Music overtook Gone With The Wind as the highest-grossing movie of all time, taking almost $160m worldwide (that is around $1.4bn adjusted for inflation). Even now, musicals can do massive business: La La Land, Les Misérables and The Greatest Showman all grossed more than $400m at cinemas worldwide, the two Mamma Mia! films combined took more than $1bn, and numbers are even bigger in the case of the top song-powered animations.

It is not difficult to view the Holly­wood musical — a genre as American as the western — as the very apotheosis of the crowdpleaser. It can hardly be coincidence that its popularity spiked during darker times: the Great Depression of the 1930s; the Second World War; the social divisions of the 1960s.

While musicals regularly deal with gritty themes — racism and street violence in West Side Story, for example, or Nazism in Cabaret — they are primarily received as an escapist, cathartic experience. “In the midwestern world I grew up in during World War II,” wrote film historian Jeanine Basinger in her 2019 book The Movie Musical!, “it was considered not only bad manners but downright unpatriotic to shout and scream and shove your emotions down someone else’s throat… Go to a musical and let yourself feel it through song and dance. Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

Producer Julie Oh of Imagine Entertainment, who is a lifelong fan of musicals and was instrumental in bringing playwright Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical Tick, Tick… Boom! to Netflix, goes so far as to describe the genre as a benevolent, unifying force. “There’s something beautiful about the fact music is one of the most universal things on our planet,” she says. “It transcends language borders. And because storytelling is also universal, to incorporate that into a movie leads to magic.”

Winning the vote

And yet, for all its magic, the film musical is not as beloved by Oscar as you might expect. To date, only nine best picture winners have been out-and-out musicals (perhaps 10 including borderline case Going My Way, a drama in which Bing Crosby performs five songs). Musical stars have fared little better, outside of honorary achievement gongs. “Gene Kelly was never nominated,” notes Olaf Jubin, who teaches musical theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London. “Fred Astaire was never nominated. Ginger Rogers only won for one of her few dramatic roles, in Kitty Foyle in 1940.”

Despite at times enjoying huge popularity, and despite requiring ambitious production achievement, the musical has often been underappreciated by awards voters. It is astonishing that Singin’ In The Rain, perhaps the finest film Freed’s unit at MGM ever put out, only received two Oscar nominations — for supporting actress Jean Hagen and Lennie Hayton’s score — with no wins (it did receive a best film nomination from Bafta, while actor Donald O’Connor won a Golden Globe).

As Jubin observes, it was only when a musical was deemed as having dramatic worth that it garnered awards recognition (at least outside of the Golden Globes’ musical/comedy category) — West Side Story’s board-sweeping 10 Oscar wins in 1962, for example. Or Streisand’s best actress win in 1969 for Funny Girl. “I would argue that Judy Garland was only nominated for A Star Is Born in 1955 because of that famous scene in the dressing room where she breaks down,” says Jubin. “It wasn’t for the eight great songs she performs by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin.” (The actress prize that year went to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl, which Groucho Marx famously told Garland was “the biggest robbery since Brink’s”.)

In addition, while the studio system was churning out musical hit after musical hit, a performer’s ability to sing and dance was largely taken for granted. Just part of the deal. It was only when they proved they could really act that awards voters took notice. These days, however, the reverse is largely true. When an established actor reveals on screen they can also sing and dance, their surprise “triple threat” credentials invariably attract plaudits. Like Catherine Zeta-Jones and Anne Hathaway, who each won the supporting actress Oscar for Chicago and Les Misérables, respectively, or Emma Stone’s best actress win for La La Land in 2017. It is as true this year as any, with Andrew Garfield Oscar-nominated for his performance as Jonathan Larson in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tick, Tick… Boom!, a musical lead role that required him to learn to sing and play piano before shooting began.

“I think Andrew has always been a theatre kid at his core,” says Oh, “but then through making this movie, he has become a ‘musical’ theatre kid. How could you not be when you’re being led by Lin-Manuel Miranda? That’s the greatest musical-theatre education anyone could ask for.”

Priming today’s audience

After peaking in the 1960s (when four of those nine musical best picture wins happened), the musical largely fell by the wayside in the decades that followed — not least because the collapse of the studio system stripped away the necessary infrastructure to maintain such a costly and talent-intense genre.

Walt Disney Animation Studios continued to produce films replete with song-and-dance numbers, and experienced a surge of success during the 1990s. This arguably primed an early 21st-century audience, raised on the likes of Beauty And The Beast and Aladdin, to embrace a comeback for the live-action musical. A comeback that, aside from a few notable exceptions (Moulin Rouge! and La La Land), has been fuelled by a wealth of tried-and-tested-on-stage intellectual property: Chicago, Dreamgirls, Sweeney Todd.

In 2012, Working Title Films made its first venture into the genre with Tom Hooper’s ballsy, starry adaptation of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Les Misérables and was rewarded with more than $440m in box-office and eight Oscar nominations — including best picture, making it the first musical best picture nominee since Rob Marshall’s Chicago in 2003. Since then, Working Title returned to the stage-musical adaptation less successfully with 2019’s widely derided Cats, and continues with its upcoming version of beloved West End hit Matilda (from the stage show’s director Matthew Warchus) and this month’s Joe Wright-directed Cyrano, starring Peter Dink­lage, which arrives in UK cinemas on February 25 boosted by one Oscar and four Bafta nominations.

“You need great underlying material, you need a brilliant story, you need fantastic creative partners, and you need wonderful music,” says Working Title co-chairman Eric Fellner of his decision to turn this stage-musical take on Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac into a feature film. “I was lucky enough to come to the material with all of them in place.”

It is arguable that Cyrano relies more on audience familiarity with its title character than it does with the specific Erica Schmidt stage musical (with songs by The National) — which opened off-Broadway in November 2019, mere months before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Either way, Fellner expresses concern about Cyrano’s ability to reach its audience in today’s cinematic climate. “At the time, I felt we had a triple-A qualitative project that I was excited to put into the marketplace. We take tricky films that are narrative, dialogue and character-based rather than concept-based and try to have hits with them. And we’ve been incredibly lucky to have a good hit rate. But when we considered Cyrano, we hadn’t appreciated the demise of the specialist cinemagoing audience due to Covid.”

We find ourselves, Fellner continues, in “a weird place”. One where a fresh, Steven Spielberg-directed adaptation of cast-iron stage hit West Side Story can earn great reviews and awards heat, and yet still make only around $64m globally (at press time). “We did nearly $500m with Les Mis. Why would another good musical not do that? I don’t have any answers right now.”

Tick, Tick… Boom!, which originated as an off-off-Broadway 1990 one-man show by Larson, was, on the face of it, an even riskier proposition. “I think we have been conditioned a little bit in the last several decades that musicals are only made when they’ve been successful in another medium first,” says Oh. “‘A huge Broadway hit!’… ‘It won all the Tony Awards!’… But I was pitching something slightly different — this intimate, autobiographical musical that never made it on Broadway and has only been produced regionally. I wasn’t pitching a remake of Rent [Larson’s groundbreaking hit show, already adapted by Chris Columbus in 2005], which would have been more understandable in terms of commerciality. I was pitching a feeling.”

The best way to share that feeling, producers Imagine decided, was to partner with the streaming giant Netflix, with which Oh says: “This movie could be accessible to the largest audience. It didn’t rely on whether or not they had a cinema in their town that was playing it.”

Defining the audience

This is an age where the movie musical, like any film genre, is no longer confined to the cinema or traditional home-entertainment formats. Jubin points out how Disney has recently enjoyed a number-one chart hit in both the US and UK with Encanto’s ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’, thanks primarily to its proliferation on TikTok. “Social media has changed the whole discourse about what is a hit and what isn’t,” he says, regarding a tune that is now even bigger than Frozen’s ‘Let It Go’. “I’m quite sure Disney are kicking themselves for not suggesting this one for best original song [at the Academy Awards].”

So while far fewer people turned out for Spielberg’s West Side Story than expected, there is still an audience hungry for the genre’s charms. But who exactly are they? Jubin’s analysis, by his own admission, follows the clichés: older, nostalgic viewers (who, for example, might fondly remember the 1961 West Side Story); women (“think of Mamma Mia!, which moves up the sales charts every Mother’s Day in Britain”); the LGBTQ+ community; and children. “I remember going to an afternoon performance of The Greatest Showman,” says Jubin. “At the end, it was the children in the audience that were applauding.”

Fellner, meanwhile, is reluctant to draw any conclusions on this matter. “We loved Les Mis, so we decided to do that. We loved Cyrano, and we decided to do it. We’re doing the Roald Dahl show [Matilda], and we took Billy Elliot The Musical on stage. So I guess we like musicals, but we also like all sorts of other films. Ultimately, what drives a Working Title production is, do we think it’s really good? Do we think people will like it? Can we make it at a price that makes sense for the size of the audience that potentially could come?”

Oh takes a more optimistic view. “I believe that everyone is the audience for a musical, if you do it right,” she says. Although ‘doing it right’ does mean adapting an existing property. “IP is king,” she notes. “If you look at most of the musicals that have been popular on the stage in the last 10 years, the film rights are probably with someone.”

Aside from Working Title’s Matilda, Jon M Chu’s Cynthia Erivo-starring adaptation of Broadway hit Wicked is in progress at Universal, and Heyday Films has Stephen Sondheim’s Follies in active development. Meanwhile, Paramount is lining up a film version of the Mean Girls stage musical — an adaptation of an adaptation, like The Producers and Hairspray before it. All are based on existing properties.

In contrast to the glory days of the Hollywood musical, original productions like La La Land (winner of six Oscars) have become the rare exception, rather than the rule. “I hope that in the next five, 10 years, people will put out original movie musicals so that not everything will be an adaptation of something,” says Oh. “I also hope people continue to discover new music and new stories. And I really hope that more people make musicals, because they make us happy. After all, what else is there?” 

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