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| BROADWAY: HOME OF THE STAGE MUSICAL |
Earlier this month, I wrote about two recent American film musicals I love: Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe” featuring Beatles songs and Tim Burton’s adaptation of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”
Musicals are a home-grown escapist entertainment – an important part of American popular culture that was born on the Broadway stage and later successfully moved to the big screen.
The genre demands a willing suspension of disbelief and your complete acceptance that characters at any moment will break out in spontaneous song and dance accompanied by an unseen, full-blown orchestra. If you do, if you wholeheartedly accept the basic conventions of a musical, you can often find yourself swept away.
While I have seen great film musicals in recent years, including versions of such stage hits as “Evita,” “The Producers” and “Hairspray,” the heyday of the genre was in the 1950s and early 1960s when a rich stable of long-running Broadway productions graced the screen.
Today, in honor of one of my favorite film genres, I open “Top Five Week” at Sneak Prevue with my picks for the top five film musicals. I will share other Top Five picks in other genres Monday through Thursday of this week – so don’t forget to bookmark this site and visit often.
