The impending opening of “Into the Woods” prompted Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette and theater critic Nelson Pressley to compare notes on their very different takes on the last major movie of a Sondheim musical, Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd,” and on what makes a movie musical work.
Midgette: So you want to talk about stage-to-screen adaptations? I think “Sweeney” is the single most brilliant example you can name. Name me one other that works even half that well. My runner-up list might include Bergman’s “Magic Flute,” “My Fair Lady,” “Chicago,” “West Side Story,” the 1930’s “Show Boat” and, sigh, “The Sound of Music.”
Pressley: I watched “Sweeney” like I watched NBC’s “Smash,” with my hands over my face.
Give me “Cabaret,” “Oliver!” and most of the Rodgers and Hammersteins, and I’ll also take a lot of the bright, sticky pop stuff that was sort of ersatz to begin with – “Mamma Mia,” “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Hairspray.” Just don’t make me listen to non-singers croaking through great scores – sorry, Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp.
Midgette: And here I am the big vocal aficionado who went to “Sweeney” prepared to hate it and I didn’t – at all. Whereas for me, few of those Rodgers and Hammerstein films, apart from “Sound of Music,” actually work.
Pressley: Those are the shows that I grew up with – I was a kindergartner in a college production of “King and I” and was immediately hooked for life – and my memory is that they’re a lot like the stage shows, without inordinate fiddling or adapting. Putting stage musicals on screen wasn’t a head-scratching problem to work out.
Midgette: Which is exactly why I find it perplexing that they so often did it so badly. I was hooked on all of the classic musical soundtrack albums as a kid, but it was rare that the movie adaptations bore out their promise. “South Pacific”? Or, worse, “Pal Joey”? Though I can’t criticize “Pal Joey,” since I found it so unwatchable that I literally stopped watching.
Pressley: I am interested in what it was about the “Burtonvision” [in “Sweeney Todd”] that was potent enough to keep you hooked. Your ears didn’t burst into flames as Depp murmured “Epiphany” and Helena Bonham Carter did a girlish singsong with Mrs. Lovett’s “Worst Pies in London”?
Midgette: No. I found both those scenes very true to those particular characters; “Epiphany,” with that raw, shredded voice corresponding to the rawness of Todd’s emotion, still gives me chills. After I listened to the “Sweeney” soundtrack in 2007, before I even saw the movie, I wrote: “Using the actors as singers actually furthers good vocal values. The voices sound natural, like speaking voices – back to the roots, the place from where all good singing should start.”
Pressley: I always hope that some of the values that are thrilling when we hear these things live will be captured in film. It’s why I still enjoy “Cabaret” – Bob Fosse’s love of performance bathes Liza Minnelli and the Kit Kat gang in a sleazy but loving spotlight. It’s what irked me about “Rent,” which inserted all that drab dialogue on screen and muted the show’s exuberance.
Midgette: I agree that “Cabaret” works wonderfully, but “Cabaret” is inherently easier to film because many of the production numbers are part of the narrative, in that they’re performed as cabaret songs in a club.
And big production numbers are, of course, the most obvious challenge of a movie musical, the element on which it rises or falls. The onstage showstopper is exactly what you don’t want on screen. For a while, the Technicolor aspect of movie musicals gave them an artificial brightness and color that eased the translation, approximating visually the candy-colored Broadway glitz. (“My Fair Lady” comes to mind.)
Pressley: That’s true about the value of the set pieces. It’s one of the reasons I so liked the new “Into the Woods.” (You did too, didn’t you?) There were almost no letdowns when this cast had to step up and put a musical number across. For me, one acid test of any “Into the Woods” is “Agony,” which isn’t as funny if the princes nail the lyrics but can’t much sing the mock heroic tune. At the screening I saw, the audience laughed delightedly and burst into applause at the end.
Midgette: I worry that what seems to be a growing interest in singing these days (from “American Idol” to “Glee” and “The Voice”) may be creating a faux snobbery about vocalism. There are a lot of ways to convey emotional truth with the voice, and not all of them involve beauty (hello, Bob Dylan). Sondheim is a composer who’s happy to write for unbeautiful voices: Witness “A Little Night Music,” in which the roles of Desiree and Madame Armfeldt can both accommodate less-than-marquee-level singing. I tend to be a particularly tough critic of the voice, but that’s partly because in some operatic singing, technical virtuosity can take precedence over the emotional aspect that is its raison d’etre.
Pressley: There is a difference, though, between composing for rough voices or being a gravelly pop star and casting charismatic actors in established roles that they’re not up to vocally. I confess to a snobby streak. I’ll put up with a lot in the daffy ABBA jukebox “Mamma Mia” (even Pierce Brosnan), much less in “Todd.” If there’s a chance of a musical thrill, I want it.
Midgette: Whereas I couldn’t stand Brosnan in “Mamma Mia” – he looked and sounded ridiculous – and I found Depp gave me a lot of thrills, having found his own viable take on the role.
Pressley: There is a 1990s New Yorker cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan in which a man stands onstage in front of a curtain and announces, “Tonight’s performance has been canceled, because the star of our show has decided that musicals are stupid.”
A lot of people feel that way. I always fret that musicals – especially the “unnatural” aspects, meaning singing and dancing – will be sanded to dust or edited into microbursts in hopes of appealing to absolutely everyone.
But maybe “Glee” and “Smash” and the fresh tide of live NBC musicals indicates that people are hungry for something – for Performances – that are larger than life, after all.
Midgette: Your point spotlights a pair of contradictory prejudices about the form. On the one hand, some people (in my field, certainly) see musicals as populist junk. On the other hand, there’s an idea that audiences don’t like them. One problem the “Sweeney Todd” film allegedly encountered was that audiences who came to see Johnny Depp in a Tim Burton film didn’t realize that it was all going to be sung.
Yet, as you say, there’s more interest in singing than ever. I was fascinated to learn that Meryl Streep’s biggest box-office success, the film that made her a real star for the first time in financial terms, was “Mamma Mia.” And this year’s biggest family hit was “Frozen,” which had small children belting out “Let It Go” all over the country.
So musicals are in the odd position of being at once too popular and not popular enough, and I think “Into the Woods” hits that high art/low-art divide head-on. I wonder what families who bring the kids on Christmas to see the latest Disney fairy-tale/princess musical are going to make of it. If it does fly, it will be precisely because of (director Rob) Marshall’s handling of the set pieces – like “Agony” (in which he kind of sends up the whole notion of the set piece) – his ability to work the commodities, if you will, seamlessly into the whole.
Pressley: “Into the Woods” also has a head start thanks to its broad fairy-tale world (which it neatly cuts to human scale). It so exceeded my expectations that I’m feeling pretty hopeful ... at least for the moment.
