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Genre Criticism: The Musical

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Cabaret is perhaps the most interesting 1970s musical, because it reflects the changes not only in the musical, but in the industry at large. It is a very dark and depressing movie. The boy gets the girl for a while, and he also gets the other boy for a while. Not very many movies, musical or otherwise, had dealt with bisexuality at this time, or with abortion, which also figures prominently. Setting Cabaret in Berlin in the 1930s insures that the film will be overlaid with a pervasive gloom, assuming that the filmmaker is at all true to history. The filmmaker is Bob Fosse, best known for his stage productions rather than his films. All of Cabaret's songs are performed on the cabaret stage by Liza Minnelli and others, except for the haunting and terrifying "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," begun by a young Nazi idealist and finished by everyone within hearing distance of him. Music is a powerful unifying force, as shown by this song, which mimics the power Hitler and his followers commanded over the German people, particularly the youth. And in the cabaret itself, the music performed unites the underworld of Berlin and unites us with the performers. We feel as if we understand Minnelli when she sings "Maybe This Time," though we may not agree with her when she is not singing. Joss Whedon, creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," recently wrote and directed a musical episode of "Buffy," claiming that only through song would his characters be able to express the emotions that they were hiding from each other. Music is an emotional catalyst. We get the sense that characters in movies will bare their soul through music, though they wouldn't dream of saying anything so personal with words. So it is in Cabaret. Whether we agree with Sally over her abortion or not, we must empathize with her, because she has told us through her music how desperate a person she is. She does not come across that way through her dialogue and acting — she seems self-assured, self-reliant. The songs she sings at the cabaret say something different.

This move toward the personal fits in with the overall trend of '70s filmmaking. For the first time, independent filmmakers and former studio directors were realizing the freedom they had after the studio system fell. They were free to explore mature themes and make depressing films if they wanted to do so. I must admit that I do not know what this meant to Bob Fosse in particular, because I haven't seen any of the other films he directed, or (obviously!) any of his stage shows. Since Fosse is a choreographer, I find it interesting that Cabaret has no real dance numbers in it. There may be some cabaret, chorus-line type dancing, but there is no virtuoso dancing in the film — all of the music is based on singing. But again, as far as auteurism goes, I really have no idea about Fosse.

Cabaret went against everything I had come to expect from the musical genre. I had been raised on the 1940s and '50s fare, and was admittedly not ready for the radical '70s. I admired, but didn't like, Cabaret when I first saw it. Now that I've seen other '70s films, I believe that it is more influenced by the non-musical films of its time than by the standards and conventions of the musical genre. Other notable musicals in the 1970s include the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar and the '50s nostalgia piece Grease — and you could hardly pick two musicals more different from each other, and from Cabaret. The '70s filmmaking scene was truly diverse.

Not very many musicals have been made in the last 20 years, except for concert films and music videos, which lack the straightforward romantic storyline that the musical genre has traditionally embraced. The few exceptions (Woody Allen's Everybody Says I Love You, Alan Parker's Evita) have been coolly received. Most people today, when asked why they don't like musicals, complain that musicals are not realistic-real people don't break into song in the middle of the street, and everybody couldn't know the words to songs that the characters make up on the spot. Baz Luhrmann figured out a splendid way to get around that objection in his ground-breaking and possibly musical-reviving Moulin Rouge (2001). He used songs that everyone knows-pop songs-and added them to a plot as heady and romantic as any seen in a long time. Like many musicals of the Golden Age, Moulin Rouge is set in the show-business world, and several of the numbers arise naturally out of that situation. The other songs are audio montages, if you will, of well-known older songs. My best friend's husband (who admits that he hates musicals), liked Moulin Rouge because he "knew all the songs." And if the audience knows all the songs, it's easy to see why the characters all seem to know the songs — they've heard them before too! It only makes it better that Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman do their own singing — they're good enough singers not to be annoying, but not good enough that they couldn't be real people. Moulin Rouge returns to the roots of the musical genre, but includes elements that classical Hollywood could never have used: the heroine is a glorified prostitute; the conflict is that she must sleep with another man. And it breaks the happy ending rule by having Kidman die of consumption — a very classic Hollywood disease, by the way. Everybody in 1930s movies died of consumption, I'll swear.

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