MOVE OVER, PUCCINI

From: What a song and dance (Emma Brockes, The Guardian, January 20th, 2007)

Emma Brockes spent her early life pretending to enjoy the music her contemporaries approved of, while secretly indulging her passion for the likes of Oklahoma! And then she thought, where's the shame? Musicals hold the key to more or less everything

"It's funny. When people don't like metal or jazz or pop or classical music, or when they don't like westerns or sci-fi movies, they are content, generally, to confine their dislike to avoiding them. When people don't like musicals, they feel a need not only to tell you about it, but to convince you of why you shouldn't like them either. Musicals, so their reasoning goes, are for people who are too thick for opera and too square for pop music. They are for people from the sticks, who twice yearly put on evening dress and migrate en masse to the major capitals of the world where they enjoy themselves by watching things they have seen before at twice the price they paid last time. They are for the sorts of people who, even though their coach will be waiting outside the theatre after the show, still take their umbrellas."

Don’t worry, I promise not to link you to anything from The Sound of Music.

Last month, Think of England posted on Desert Islands Discs, which led to an interesting discussion on musical tastes. Perhaps it was just me, but I sensed a vague discomfort with any mention of songs from musicals. As I am as big a fan as Ms Brockes, it awakened my longstanding puzzlement as to why musicals seem to be the only genre that one is supposed to be both embarrassed to admit liking and embarrassed to hear someone else admit liking them. It seems all other types can be loved proudly or hated defiantly, but musicals are like an old-fashioned family secret, to be listened to alone and only after dark with the curtains closed.

Pondering this enigma in the past few weeks, it dawned on me that the reasons so many “bright” people disdain musicals are similar to why they disdain America, and that the anti-musical animus parallels political and social anti-Americanism quite closely. After all, musicals are pretty much an American invention and they are definitely an American specialty. Like Americans, they are associated with a general spirit of light and literal optimism, technical brilliance and a “can-do” mastery of presentation, which offends sophisticated, gloomy continentals who seem to equate profundity with sombre backdrops and deep and haunted lives that end in suicide. Confusing optimism with naivite , they assume that the veneer of light-heartedness is all there is. Wrong. American optimism is a conviction, not a disability, and both they and their music are no strangers to the darker side of life.

And just what is wrong with artistic expressions of hope and optimism? Only a professional curmudgeon could fight off an involuntary ear-to-ear grin at this piece from Hello Dolly, here sung well, but indifferently danced, in an amateur production. (You should see what a Broadway choreographer can do with it.). Broadway sunshine combined with unsurpassed talent can turn a dark scene from the classics into pure hum-along charm. It can take a big pile of silliness and combine it with raw talent to to craft wistful nostalgia. It can deal with sensitive issues of racial etiquette while forcing our spirits into the stratosphere and filling our heads with a melody it takes days to shake. Sometimes, unparalleled musical, lyrical and artistic excellence can all come together to create even an animated masterpiece.

The slander, of course, is that is all there is. Not at all. The lightness is often just the mise-en-scene and counterpoint for the exploration of darker, more contemplative themes. Want no-holds-barred political protest? Biting, surreal social satire? How about a bittersweet reflection on life’s poignancy or a near-sacred ode to its eternal riddles? Broadway has churned out endless numbers of odes to happy-ending love, but also hauntingly beautiful expressions of the painful, doomed version. In one short song, a musical can convey more about the allure of decadence or the beauty of evil than a thousand philosophical tracts.

And then there are moments that just simply defy categorization.

I could go on and on and try to prove to any lingering doubters among you that musicals do indeed say everything there is to be said about life, but I’m just too darned caught up in the music, and it’s almost show time. Oh and, sorry, but I’m just having far too much fun to be held to my promise. So, Harry, this one’s for you.