Musicals—24

Most of the first decade of the century was devoted to film recreations of Broadway musicals—Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Moulin Rouge, Phantom of the Opera, Dreamgirls, Hairspray, Mama Mia, Rent. One exception was The Producers, which was actually made from the movie of the same name! A trend that will come back in the present day… but more of that in the next decade.

As we began a new year, a new decade, and also a new century, one of my two favorite musicals hit the screen: Chicago [2002] by Bill Condon.

But wait a sec, you might ask, isn’t Chicago just another stage musical made into a film? And the answer… not really.

The story behind the film is as special as the film itself. Chicago was a famous stage play in the 1920s, made into a musical on Broadway in the 1970s but unlike other successful musicals, it took a long time to make it to the screen—about 27 years. Why? Well, it’s all about point of view.

The musical was a huge hit—outlasting the infamous Cats in its Broadway run. But no one could figure out how to make it into a film with a consistent through-line. Why? Because the stage musical was pretty much just a series of vignettes which, when strung together, told the story of these two women on trial for murders they committed.

It wasn’t until screenwriter Bill Condon had the idea to tell the story through the eyes of Roxie’s character that the movie fell into place. And you can see it from the very beginning, as the camera zooms into Roxie’s actual eyeball. Suddenly, all the songs and overlaps between Roxie and Velma’s stories work.

Take a look the movie’s trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXWryx-oJ0.

Can you feel the energy? Because that’s a big part of what makes this musical work—the sheer energy of the performances, the music of course, and especially the very, very quick pace of the film. Take a look at the cuts in the musical numbers, they’re just so beautifully timed—you don’t have a moment to get bored or even look away. Genius.

What IS energy anyway where we’re talking about film? Sure, you can enhance it with great editing—with an editor and a director who know how to use cutting to move extremely fast through a scene/story. But truly great energy comes from the script—from short scenes that are put together in such a way as to keep the development executive flipping those pages because they can’t wait to see how the story comes out.

And that’s what you want when you write—you want short, clipped scenes that advance your story. You want dialogue that’s not repetitive but is just perfect for the scene, and you want to move it all along as fast as you can by cutting at just the right moment from one scene to the next—and in a musical, that means judicious cutting during the songs as well.

It ain’t easy.

But use Chicago as the model for excellence in all these areas as you write your own musical, and you can’t go wrong.

Copyright © Diane Lake

05Jan20

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