So, in a previous phase of life, there was a period where I was making something of an effort to work as a screenwriter (as much as one can, I suppose, without moving to Los Angeles). I had a couple of ideas, I wrote a spec script or two, and I wrote a couple of pitch letters that actually got me phone conversations with guys who were at the time agents (were talking circa 1996-1997). One of those people in particular was an agent named Vince Gerardis, who is now one of the producers for Game of Thrones. Obviously, it didnt go anywhere, but it gave me a different kind of appreciation for how movies get made and why certain decisions get made in the filmmaking process. More generally, there was a piece of advice that Vince Gerardis gave me that has stuck with me to this day, which is to avoid writing things that are on the nose. To put it one way, if youre writing a scenario where somebody asks somebody else, Why are you crying? and the answer is Im crying because my dog died and I just feel so sad about it, thats on the nose. Youve written words that *tell*; you havent written a scene that *shows*. Its much more powerful, say, to have the person crying not answer verbally, but perhaps pull out a photograph of a loved one, with the implication that that person has passed away. Or something like that. I just watched a clip from a major animated movie musical of the last year, perhaps *the* signature, unavoidable clip from this musical, and I found it absolutely wretched. What was so wretched about it? Well, besides the composers of the music mistaking volume for good arranging, every single line of the song was as on the nose as I could possibly imagine. There was no poetry, no metaphor, just IIIIIIM FEEEEEEELING THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS for three and a half minutes, synchronized to imagery that seemed largely detached from the lyrics. The visuals appeared to move along the plot while the song was simply a dump of emotions on the part of the character. Okay, bad enough. But it seems to me that the animated musicals of the last 25 years or so have tended to follow Broadway trends more or less. Beauty and the Beast was Rodgers and Hammerstein for the most part; Hunchback of Notre Dame was Sondheim-y. This particular number seemed like a weird mixture of the approaches of Rent, The Secret Garden, and Les Miserables, which -- it must be said -- are all very on the nose in their own way as well, bits of some being worse than other bits. Clearly something of a satisfying theatrical experience is more or less possible with all three shows, but theres a lot of telling the audience in them, so to speak. Is this a shift thats happened with how musicals have come to be written over the last 20-30 years? Is it just how it is? Does it bother anybody else? Matthew Murray? Jon Lutyens? TL;DR -- is it a thing now that contemporary musical theatre consists basically of bad theatre for the deaf spectacle pieces and the songs just underline all of the major emotional beats with a Sharpie?
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 01:09:52 +0000
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