I started out a series called “My Favorite Musicals” on my other blog by this same name, but I never followed up on my plan to do write more. I’m hoping to remedy that with this series on musicals. If you’re not a fan of musicals, I strongly suggest you take a little time to read these anyway. They may help you understand why musicals have remained a viable art form for many decades. If you still don’t understand or want to understand, I won’t be offended.
Too much.
I have a good friend who says he doesn’t like musicals because it just doesn’t make sense that everyone always knows the same songs. It’s a valid point, but its validity lies solely in a decision to judge musicals on a single issue. I could just as easily say movies like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Avatar suffer from the same issue. To fully enjoy those movies, you must employ a well-known and accepted tactic, and that tactic is called suspension of disbelief.
Suspension of disbelief is the avoidance—often described as willing—of critical thinking and logic in understanding something that is unreal or impossible. --- Wikipedia
If you go into a
movie like Indiana Jones (pick a number), you’ll find a fellow who teaches
college, but who also manages to be an action hero in his spare time. He can do
amazing things with a whip. He knows quite a bit about everything related to
the subject matter the movie focuses on (of course, good writers make sure that
happens), and he always defeats the bad guy and gets the girl in the end. He
does all this to the tunes that are ably applied by John Williams.
To fully enjoy that movie, you have to sit back, toss reality out the window, and enjoy your popcorn. If you decide to analyze it, you’ll be hoarse by the end of the movie because you’ll have said, “That’s not how it would really happen,” or ‘That’s wrong!” so many times you can’t talk any more. Whether things would really happen that way or not, whether they’re wrong or not, you still enjoy the movie because it’s entertaining.
The same sort of thinking needs to be applied to musicals. Suspend disbelief. You’re right. In most instances, people don’t all break out into song. They don’t all have the grace and style to dance at a moment’s notice. But they share one very important thing with the movies I mentioned earlier.
They tell an entertaining story.
Sometimes that story is simply a love story, although there’s really nothing simple about love.
Sometimes they look at history and portray events from a viewpoint that’s not usually discussed.
Sometimes they take ordinary people and reveal them to be extraordinary.
That’s called entertainment, and I’ll submit that a well-done musical may have more value than a well-done action movie. We can debate that later, so don’t have a stroke. I like action movies as well. They may be the subject of a later series.
My first entry into this series is going to be The Sound of Music. It’s the one I started off with originally, but I’m going to revisit it and freshen it up a bit.
I hope you enjoy this series. Feel free to comment.
Take care. Stay Safe.
cma
