Top 10 of the Golden Age

Andy has requested a top 10 list of musicals from the Golden Era. Here’s my first attempt, in no particular order:

1. Carousel, for the best score of all the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, the saddest ending and the homeliest special effects (stars on strings in a dry ice heaven).

2.  Show Boat, the 1951 version with Ava Gardner, Howard Keel and his magnificent moustache, which should have had its own publicist and trailer.

3. Funny Face, with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, a terrible movie in lots of ways, but irrisistable in others. Best scene is the opening one when Kay Thompson sings ‘Think Pink’ and hefts about the place like a tank in a dress.

4. Guys and Dolls.

5.  South Pacific, my second fave of the R and H musicals, for its combination of silliness, its desperate stab at gravitas in the person of Rossano Brazzi and all those definitely-not-gay sailors on the beach.

6. Seven Brides for Seven Brother. Why does no one try plank-dancing these days?

7. Gigi. I know Maurice Chevallier singing Thank Heaven for Little Girls isn’t ideal, these days, but Cecil Beaton was the production designer and Leslie Caron is so good, like Audrey Hepburn might hav been if she’d eaten the occasional meal, that I think you have to approach the whole thing as a work of art.

8.  The Bandwagon, for Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse’s dance numbers and one of those preposterously tortured plots that only exists to illustrate songs that had already been written.

9. Meet Me In St. Louis - it’s really pre the Golden Era, this, made in 1944 and too schmaltzy for some, but I love it. Sanctifies a type of small town American life I’m not sure ever existed. (In the same way that Kristin Scott Thomas embodies a version of England, in the English Patient, that is likewise entirely fictional).

10. A Star is Born. The Judy Garland/James Mason version. So tragic that after you’ve seen it you wish someone with a camera was around to capture the epic and picturesque scale of your suffering.

Other ideas anyone? Oliver! I guess, if you can nip out in the middle to do something else…

Dreamgirls: it’s not as good as it thinks it is

Did you see Dreamgirls yet? I saw it last week at the Ziegfeld cinema in New York, a huge barn of a place that could screen an episode of Emmerdale and make it seem glamorous. It was the day before the Oscar nominations came out, when the of absence Dreamgirls from Best Picture category would cause the only real upset (discounting Leonardo DiCaprio’s nomination for Blood Diamond over The Departed.)  Dreamgirls is one of those films you come out of feeling psyched, as if you’ve been in a fight, but the effect of which wears off so dramatically that by the time you get home you can hardly remember a single scene in it. The actors give it their all and Jennifer Hudson’s voice alone is enough to justify the ticket price. It’s a musical that isn’t ashamed to be a musical - the actors sing at each other, like in the old days, without looking too mortified (C.F Kevin Kline in De-Lovely). The film aches with good intentions and hurls at the audience every cliché of musical theatre - grasping men, abandoned women and children who don’t know who their fathers are. But there comes a point, somewhere in the middle, when all you can think is how much better it would’ve been if the score was made up of real songs by the Supremes. A musical can contain the best performances in the world, but if the music crap – or in this case, generic – then it just isn’t worth the effort.

I have written a book about musicals, but not in a film studies type way. It’s about why I love them and why those of my friends who don’t also love them, hate them. The divide is roughly 50/50.  People keep asking me what my favourite musical is and I tend to say Show Boat because it’s less obvious than Guys and Dolls and I love a good tragedy. I don’t like the Sound of Music. I don’t like Grease or Rent, either. So you see, the book is not without controversy. I saw Wicked just before Christmas and thought it was like going to the panto. How do the cast members memorise songs with so little tune in them?