MUSICALS AND REAL LIFE

My sister and I were not moderate children.  We used to check out the public library’s VHS copy of The Wizard of Oz every week.  I don’t know what happened if someone else wanted it, because they didn’t have a chance.  We watched that movie every night for weeks.  We’d grown more sophisticated by the time I was about ten, when our movie of choice was the 1962 version of The Music Man.

The Music Man had a couple of things going for it that made it watchable day after day.  I know that I wanted to be Marian Paroo, and I coveted every one of her beautiful dresses.  (Looking back now, I think I’d rather have Shirley Jones’s beautiful voice, but the only way in which I currently resemble her Music Man character is that I teach piano).  But the real draw was the enormous musical numbers and the colorful dances that accompanied them.

I’ve heard people say that musicals are unrealistic.  There are actually two types of people who say it: people who don’t like musicals and are trying to rationalize a completely irrational bias against them, and people lamenting how seldom spontaneous song and dance routines break out in public places.  I’ll admit that I can’t remember the last time I led an entire small Iowa town in a rousing chorus designed to convince them that they need a boys’ band, but my childhood often felt like a musical.  My sister and I used to say that Daddy had a song for everything, and it was nearly true.  Many words and phrases reminded him of songs, and he really did break into song on a regular basis.  We had to provide the dancing ourselves, and while our rough choreography would never have made it on the stage, we lived in a musical that lacked nothing but the full-skirted dresses.

A musical is really a strange kind of theater.  It requires performers who can not only act, but do so while singing and dancing.  It requires suspension of belief from an audience that knows the singing and dancing is unrealistic, and also patience as they wait through music that often does not serve to advance the story they’ve come to see.  We have come hundreds of years from a time and society when the common person was expected to carry a tune and to know a few basic dances, and movies have taught us to expect fast-moving action and a heightened reality from our entertainment.  It’s surprising that the musical didn’t die out years ago.  It seems almost archaic.

Maybe it turns out that we aren’t as interested in progress as we think.  Of the hundred longest running Broadway shows, nine of the top ten are musicals, three of which are still running now.  Either musicals are more like real life than we’re willing to admit, or we’re okay with some things being unrealistic.

If you need me, I’ll be standing on my balcony (which gives me a view of the city that’s enough to make anyone burst into song) belting out this.  There are plenty of moments in real life that call for a bit of song and dance.  I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'm living in a musical.  Once you start, you can never go back.