Why Is Hollywood Afraid to Reveal These Movies Are Musicals?
In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Sometimes, other critics interrupt. Read the first entry here.
It’s time for me to be the hero Gotham needs and interrupt this Movie Club!
It’s comforting to hear a handful of film critics I respect say that they’re actually hopeful for the future of movies and moviegoing, but it has struck me that someone has yet to identify one of the main attributing reasons for this mass return to theaters. The Movie™ may or may not be back, but the movie musical certainly is! Quite a few of the most-anticipated and most-successful films this year are musicals, but oddly, the marketers behind these films tried to hide their musical nature from potential audiences until tickets were bought and butts were in seats. This wasn’t just the year of the musical, no—it was the year of the stealth musical.
Of course, the stealthiest of this year’s stealth musicals are two of December’s biggest films, Wonka and The Color Purple. The Color Purple’s initial trailer had plenty of people wondering why the Hollywood gods were giving us another adaptation of Alice Walker’s classic 1982 novel, when no less a director than Steven Spielberg directed it the first time around in 1985, getting nominated for 11 Oscars in the process. I mean, it’s not like The Color Purple is the hottest IP around! Interested parties who dug a little deeper would come to realize that Blitz Bazawule’s take on The Color Purple is actually a screen adaptation of the 2005 Tony Award–winning Broadway musical. Similarly, fans of Timothée Chalamet may have been excited about the heartthrob embodying the most famous chocolatier in the literary canon, Wonka, in a film from the mind behind the beloved Paddington films. But they wouldn’t know from Wonka’s promotional material that Greta Gerwig’s male muse would be giving us a little melody and a shuffle ball change amid his confectionery shenanigans.
However, 2023’s stealth musical exists beyond movies that indeed are full-blown musicals but, for some reason, don’t want ticket buyers to know. The term also encompasses the movies this year that are musicals but pretend to be otherwise. I’ve already hashed out in Slate how ostensible action movie The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes sure has a lot of singin’ in it! The music, written by Grammy Award–winning Americana and country artist Dave Cobb, is as important to the film’s critique of spectacle as the action set pieces are. You can convince yourself you were there for the Hunger Games mayhem, the romantic tension, or the worldbuilding all you want—you and I both know you were most engaged in the goings-on of Panem when Rachel Zegler was singing the hell out of “The Old Therebefore.”
Still not convinced? The stealth musical doesn’t stop there. Esther already correctly pointed out Barbie’s “musical numbers that feel like they were dropped into from the 1950s.” Well, yes! Dua Lipa gets the doll treatment and lends her voice to an early dance number, while Ryan Gosling steals the show with the Grammy-nominated full-scale song-and-dance “I’m Just Ken,” complete with an ensemble of background Kens animatedly facing off in a turf war fit for Grease or West Side Story. And then there’s Dana’s Top 10 pick Theater Camp. The brainchild of some actual musical darlings, including Evan Hansen himself, Ben Platt, Theater Camp delighted the theater kids of the world with its hilariously heightened mockumentary about the battle for the soul of an upstate New York thespian camp. And the undisputed peak of the movie is the set of child actors completely nailing the beautiful, deranged final performance of “Joan, Still.”
Hollywood may have tricked the musical averse into sitting down for two-plus hours of harmonies, chassés, and catchy hooks, but no one seemed to mind! In fact, 2023 has proved that maybe we all want a little song and dance with our melodrama and existential crises, even if we don’t know that we do. And this trend shows no sign of stopping, with another similarly hilariously confusing trailer for January’s adaptation of Mean Girls (the musical)—thank God for that.
Musically vindicated,
Nadira
Read the next entry in Movie Club: Why Has Everyone Already Stopped Talking About The Holdovers?
