Take 5...musicals with a darker edge
Show Boat (1936 and 1951)
Though this seminal musical was filmed twice, the presence of Howard Keel and Ava Gardener in the 1951 film means that film gets my vote.
Show Boat's more of an operetta than your typical Broadway song-and-dance, but let's not be nit-picky. Written in 1929, it was one of the first musicals that tackled a serious theme. The success of
Show Boat proved that musicals could be more than light-hearted fluff.
It's set on a 19th century showboat, travelling down the Mississippi to entertain the locals with a bit of song and dance. Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel are the lead couple: she's the shy but talented daughter of the captain, he's a gambler reformed by love. Though their relationship encounters difficulties over the years, it is the story of the star attraction of the show, Julie (Ava Gardener), which raises social issues. Julie is mixed-race but her husband is white, thus breaking the miscegenation laws. Poor Julie's plight, just like the plight of the black slaves that work the cotton fields, is doomed to misery. The advantage that the 1936 film has is that Paul Robeson plays Joe, the black stevedore of the ship whose lament, 'Ol' Man River', has become a classic. It's filled with good songs but my other favourite is 'Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man of Mine', 'an old Negro song' sung unashamedly by Julie.
The ending may not be tragic but it's definitely bitter-sweet.
West Side Story (1961)
Before
Step-Up and
Save The Last Dance, there was
West Side Story. Loosely based on
Romeo and Juliet, it is the tale of two rival gangs- the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. Tony (Richard Beymer) is a Jet; Maria (Natalie Wood) is the sister of the Shark's leader, Bernardo (George Chakiris). Entangled in gang culture and racial hatred, can their love survive? Well, it's based on
Romeo and Juliet...
These gangs don't use street dance- they strut around their territory, using ballet moves that are surprisingly effective. The opening number,
Prologue/Jets Song, is a classic piece of musical choreography.
The songs are filled with teenage frustration and doomed romance. If you're looking for social critiques,
America is a witty yet clever ironic ode to America. If you're a sucker for tragic romance,
Somewhere will give you shivers. For those who think they hate musicals, try this one.
Cabaret (1972)
If you really don't like musicals at all,
Cabaret is the one for you. If you have to restrict yourself to just one serious political musical, pick this one, based on Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiography,
Goodbye to Berlin. Brian Roberts (Michael York) is a young writer living in Berlin in the late twenties, scraping a living by teaching English to the locals. Eccentric Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli, in her career-defining role) is his roommate, and the star of the Kit Kat Club, a decadent Berlin nightclub presided over by the sinister MC (Joel Gray). However outside of the Kit Kat Club and Brian and Sally's love affair, the Nazis are rising and Berlin will be changed forever.
Cabaret is both witty, ironic, and sinister. These Nazis are much more frightening than those ones in
The Sound of Music. The songs in
Cabaret are all set in the Kit Kat Club, apart from a Nazi boy’s anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”, so there’s no breaking out into song-and-dance at the drop of a bowler hat. Great songs, great story, and made all the more darker by the fact that it’s a musical.
Chicago (2002)
Kander and Ebb’s next musical after
Cabaret. Also set in the early thirties, it charts wannabe star and murderess Roxie Hart’s (Renee Zelwegger) struggle to avoid the gallows and become a star like Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta Jones). It’s up to louche lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) to use his razzle dazzle to save her from the gallows.
Based on a true story, this is a clever satire on the media and the legal system, where being infamous is better than being famous. The music is fabulous jazz, the dancing is glam, and it’s so much fun that you forget how dark it really is. If Nazis don’t do it for you, singing-and-dancing murderesses might.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2009)
For stage musical fans, there’s two big names. One is crowd-pleaser Andrew Lloyd Webber, responsible for hits like
The Phantom of The Opera and
Cats. The other name is crowd-punisher Stephen Sondheim, whose musicals drip with cynicism. Even fairytales end miserably in Sondheim-land. Both Lloyd Webber and Sondheim are loved and loathed in equal measure but if you don’t like musicals, you’ll probably find yourself siding with Sondheim (who was involved in the lyrics for
West Side Story. ‘America’ is a typical Sondheim song).
This musical based on a penny dreadful (although special features on the DVD imply that there is a grain of truth there). Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) is a bitter barber, out for revenge. His admirer and neighbour, Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), bemoans the lack of custom she gets in her bakery. Lovett proposes a business plan: as Sweeney’s parlour is conveniently above Lovett’s bakery, he will slit the throat of his customers and they will fall through a chute into Lovett’s bakery, where they will become tasty meat pies. The only meat Sweeney wants though is that of Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who raped Sweeney’s wife and is now the guardian of Sweeney’s teenage daughter Johanna, who he locks up in her room so he can drool over her. A family musical, then.
The film is not as good as the stage musical- it misses out the epic Prologue for starters, aesthetically it looks a bit like a teenager’s computer game, and the singing is not that strong (is Tim Burton bound by law to cast Depp and Bonham Carter together?), but even as a record of the musical, it’s worth it. Unlike
Show Boat, there’s no bitter-sweet ending. It’s as bitter as a cuckolded coffee bean forced to watch the entirety of Sondheim’s repertoire.
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