This book would not have been possible without the work done by so many others in this field—particularly to the trailblazers: Rick Altman, Jane Feuer, and Richard Dyer. Their foundational work has been ably supplemented by so many others, and I have attempted to give credit to as many as possible throughout the following pages. In particular, I wish to thank Steven Cohan, Adrienne McLean, and Desirée Garcia, three people with whom I have spent much time talking about musicals and who have impacted my thinking broadly and deeply. I also wish to thank the research staff at the Cinematic Arts Library at USC, the Special Collections Library at UCLA, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library for their assistance on this project over the years. I am also grateful to Southern Methodist University for providing funding so I could travel to these institutions, and to the faculty and students of the Division of Film & Media Arts for their encouragement and support. I would also be remiss if I did not thank my longtime editor and friend, Jayne Fargnoli, who did not hesitate when I proposed tackling this project. She has guided me through so many projects, and I am indebted to her beyond measure. I am also indebted to Drew Casper, whose course on the musical genre at USC back when I was a Masters student gave me the first sense that perhaps I wanted to become a film professor. Much love to my family and friends, particularly my husband Harry, who sat me down and made certain I watched The Apple (1980), and to both my Mom (who dutifully went to see All That Jazz [1979] with me because it was rated R and I was not 17 yet!) and my Dad (who instilled my love and respect for films at a very early age). And lastly, to all those who have been involved in the creation of the films and television celebrated herein—a toast to your imagination and determination.

“Today, there is no single definition even of what constitutes a musical, period.”

—Ethan Mordden¹

What is a musical? When I teach a course on the musical film genre, the first thing I do the first day is ask students this question. I do not bring lecture notes to this first class session, because the entire class time is spent trying to agree on a definition—and the question is left open and looms over the rest of the semester. Over the course of writing this book, I have often asked friends and acquaintances over cocktails or dinner what they think a film musical is. Although there are common concepts that carry across people’s reactions, I am constantly intrigued by the range of opinions. I do not judge who is right and who is wrong, but I often like to play devil’s advocate—either coming up with an example of a movie that I know they will not think fits the definition they just voiced but that they will agree is a musical; or, conversely, coming up with an example of a film that does fit their parameters, but I am pretty certain they will not think is a musical. The conversations often get pretty heated, but in a fun and friendly way, leaving people mulling over the boundaries of the category “musical” more than they thought was possible.

Such a question has nipped at the heels of those writing about the musical film for ages, leading to the quote by musical theatre historian Ethan Mordden that opens this introduction. Barry Keith Grant, in The Hollywood Film Musical, admits in his Introduction that “the definition of the film musical is a matter of some debate.”² Clive Hirschorn’s The Hollywood Musical attempts to be encyclopedic in its overview, aiming “to be as complete a record of the genre as possible, but it clearly was essential, very early on, to establish workable guidelines as to what constitutes a ‘musical’ … I remain painfully aware that there will always be room for disagreement.”³ Ethan Mordden’s own history of The Hollywood Musical includes an entire chapter called “What’s a Musical?,” and Richard Barrios’s A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film also contains a chapter entitled “Is It a Musical?”⁴ A number of articles foreground this conundrum, such as Richard Dyer’s “Is Car Wash a Musical?,” Andrew Caine’s “Can Rock Movies Be Musicals? The Case of This Is Spinal Tap,” and Jane Feuer eventually asking “Is Dirty Dancing a Musical, and Why Should It Matter?”⁵ The title of this volume is taken from a 1930 MGM movie that also begs this question (Figure 1). The film contains three songs and one reprise—and the first song is not introduced until a half hour into the picture. Many would consider the picture to be a comedy, particularly due to its star, Buster Keaton.

A central tenet of this book is to explore those limits, and I am purposefully, almost tauntingly, inclusive. It is quite possible that some readers will start to get downright argumentative at certain points, such as one student who said, “If you are going to try to tell me that 8 Mile (2002) is a musical, we are going to have to take this out into the hall.” If the following chapters elicit that reaction, then I have accomplished my mission. Why? I feel that the musical genre has been hampered for generations with a limited and limiting definition, one that has led to what I feel is an erroneous conclusion: that the film musical genre is dying or dead already. Jane Feuer recognizes the prevalence of “speaking of ‘the musical’ as if it were a static structure, a hygienically sealed system free from the lint of changing audience tastes and of those historical transformations other forms seem to endure.”⁶

On an elemental level, musical films center around and focus predominantly on the performance of music and/or dance.⁷ To leave it at this seems far too broad to many, and my expansive list of possible candidates for the genre emerges from the reliance on this clear‐cut condition. Rick Altman, in his landmark work The American Film Musical, certainly felt so, writing that “critical work on the film musical continues to depend on a definition provided largely by the film industry itself … a film with music, that is, with music that emanates from what I will call the diegesis, the fictional world created by the film.”⁸ He then argues that this is an unwieldy definition, “that every conceivable film with diegetic music [must then be] accepted and treated as a musical, from Gilda to Singin’ in the Rain, from Hallelujah to The Lady and the Tramp [sic], from Paramount on Parade to Woodstock, from the films of Shirley Temple to those of Elvis Presley.”⁹ The seeming intention of this list is to incite incredulity in the reader that all of these movies could be considered musicals, and Altman moves on to establish criteria to limit the corpus of films. Yet, if Altman rejects the self‐proclaimed authority of the film industry over matters of genre, then the self‐proclaimed authority of the critic must come under scrutiny as well. If someone regards any or all of the above movies as musicals, who is Altman (or myself) to tell that person she or he is wrong?

I do agree that it is possible to parse this basic statement a bit further. In centering or focusing on the performance of music, there is the expectation that the viewer will be entertained or take pleasure from that performance. Many have suggested that such pleasure comes from the sense of music and dance as a form of heightened expression—that song lifts beyond ordinary speech, that dance expands movement of the body past the everyday motions. A common canard in discussing musical theatre is that “when the emotion becomes too strong for speech, you sing; when it becomes too strong for song, you dance.”¹⁰ In a certain way, song and dance present a sense of liberation from the normal constraints of existence. We enjoy watching performers accomplish those feats of liberation (remarkable singers, gifted dancers), vicariously experiencing that liberation ourselves.

Yet, while song and dance entice as moments of emotional and/or physical release, music and choreography are highly structured art forms. Music is written to a certain rhythm and organized according to a set of particular patterns. For example, the common rhythm of an American popular song in the first half of the twentieth century was a cycle of four beats, or four beats per measure, and songs were typically set at thirty‐two measures: eight measures for the first verse, eight measures for the second verse (which was very like but just slightly different than the first verse in melody), eight measures for the bridge (a new melody), and eight measures for the concluding verse (a return to original melody, but often with a unique flourish to indicate the end of the tune). Similarly, lyrics had to match the structure of the melody, usually setting up a pattern of rhyming in the first eight bars that would carry through the rest of the piece (abab followed by cdcd, for example, or aaab followed by cccb). Dancers also needed to learn how to perform certain steps, to put them into particular combinations—and to have the dance match the music being played. Such established formats give artists a foundation to build upon, and give audiences a sense of comfort in recognizing (however unconsciously) how the structure works rather than feeling confused and alienated by something strange and unknown.

Thus, the entertainment or pleasure of experiencing music and dance performance is a delicate, ongoing balance between the comfort of structure and the joy of liberation. A number of songs, dance routines, and plotlines of musical theatre and cinema hew so closely to the established patterns that they become tedious. On occasion, some do the polar opposite, trying so hard to do something new and different that it creates a sense of bewilderment in audiences. (At times, audiences find what was new and strange has become less threatening because time has helped them grow accustomed to these new structural ideas.) The largest percentage of songs, dance routines, musical theatre productions, and musical films work within the accepted parameters, but with specific planned moments that push or go beyond the usual boundaries: a singer hits an unexpected high note, a lyric piles on multiple internal rhymes at a key point in the song, the dancer accomplishes a breathtakingly new move. They bend and expand the possibilities of the format, but without breaking it—or, to put it another way, using music terminology: theme and variations. Amy Herzog, in Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film, focuses on “this contradiction, between the sameness of the identical repetition and a movement toward transformation, difference, and excess.”¹¹ Intriguingly (for my purposes), she asserts at the outset that she is “not interested in establishing film distinctions between musical and nonmusical films” and that “the majority of the films [she] reference[s] … push the boundaries of the musical canon.”¹²

The need to negotiate between freedom and order runs parallel with a common issue in discussing the musical genre: the relationship between the musical number and the narrative. The requirements of the plot and the ecstasy of the musical performance need to be merged somehow seamlessly in order for the whole piece to work. Sometimes the narrative is about the struggle to successfully perform the numbers—thus the numbers are the goal of the narrative. Another strategy is to have the characters feel so deeply moved that they shift from speech to song, from walking to dancing. Another strategy pushes this last idea to its farthest point: where there is no distinction between narrative and number and the entire story is sung and danced without any spoken dialogue and/or non‐choreographed movement.

Many have used the narrative/number dichotomy as an entry point for a more specific definition of the genre, with the narrative providing structure and the number providing liberation. The narrative functions as the “real world,” and many musicals follow a very tried‐and‐true set of plot clichés (boy meets girl, the show must go on, etc.). In counterpoint, the numbers are usually outside normal logic, presenting the audience with a sense of utopia (as Richard Dyer has famously put it), liberated from constraint and want.^13141516

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