Happy Days May Be Back for Film Musicals

Talk about delayed gratification.

In 1968, a full-page ad appeared in the papers announcing the coming of “Funny Girl,” the movie. It was many months, no, seasons before the actual premiere of the film, but somehow the advance fanfare seemed appropriate. And, if you filled out the coupon at the bottom of the page, you would be put on a priority list that would accord you the privilege of ordering tickets before anyone else on your block. Thousands reached for their pens.

It was a big deal. Barbra Streisand was a big deal. Movie musicals were a big deal.

But not for long. The same year, a white elephant named “Star!,” with the infallible Julie Andrews at its center, was released with the sort of hoopla that spelled E-V-E-N-T. The tills were alive with the sounds of silence. The following year, when “Hello Dolly!” flounced in with a studio-busting budget and a miscast Streisand, the response was more or less the same: Big deal.

The era of the Hollywood musical was effectively over, done, finito. As Dolly Levi sang, wave your little hand and whisper so long, dearie.

Well, stand back: Buenos Aires, “Evita” and Madonna have splash-landed on a tidal wave of expectation that is as close as we have come to the Streisand-”Funny Girl” phenomenon in 30 years. Talk about delayed gratification: We’d been waiting since the ‘80s, when Madonna was first mentioned for the role and it was feared that she was off the short list of “Evita” contenders because she allegedly refused to audition. Now, once again, thousands have booked seats in advance. Even before its release, “Evita” has made the movie musical seem possible again. Hip, even.

The fact that it took no less than 18 years from its Broadway premiere to come to the screen, however, is a measure of just how low the musical had sunk since the late ‘20s and ‘30s, when movies such as “The Jazz Singer” and Oscar winner “The Broadway Melody” seemed like the most effective way to exploit the new medium of talking pictures.

What happened? Did we change or did the movies?

The reasons are manifold and oft-discussed: the spiraling costs, the growing supremacy of television, the evolving sophistication of a film audience that had increasing difficulty accepting the convention of characters breaking into song. More to the point, however, may be what didn’t happen, what didn’t change that needed to if the musical was to remain necessary. On that count, Broadway and Hollywood could share in the blame.

The nexus between Broadway and Hollywood was unmistakable, if not always direct. Even when Broadway was not a direct source of material--as in the ‘40s and ‘50s heyday of the original MGM musicals--it influenced its sensibility: The composers and the choreographers, if not the stars, owed a clear debt to the Great White Way. Show tunes, moreover, were blithely in sync with the hit sounds of the day.

By the ‘60s, Broadway musicals stopped in their tracks. The big Shubert Alley guns who made creative decisions were dismayingly out of touch. While there was still a handful of vintage shows waiting for the big-screen treatment, few teens and young adults were really champing at the bit to see Sophia Loren lip-sync “Aldonza” or hear Elizabeth Taylor breathe her way through “Send in the Clowns.”

As Broadway idled in neutral, Hollywood revved itself up into a split-personality crisis. One camp doggedly worshiped at the shrine of Tin Pan Alley, while the other was trying to figure out how to tap into the hordes that flocked to the Beatles movies and, a few years later, the Woodstock documentary. Both missed the boat.

The hipsters gave us the Bee Gees in “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1978), and a 34-year-old Diana Ross doing the Dorothy Gale routine in “The Wiz” (1978). The Broadway die-hards, bless them, attempted to buttress the diminishing supply from the theater, plundering their own past for “original” musicals with Broadway seasoning: “Goodbye Mr. Chips” (1968), “The Jazz Singer” (1980) and “Lost Horizon” (1972). The latter would inspire Bette Midler to remark famously, “I never miss a Liv Ullmann musical.”

Midler put a trenchant finger on another significant nail in the coffin of movie musicals: the suicidal tone-deafness of Hollywood producers. When the bottom line was box office, went the thinking, anyone could sing like Garland, anyone could cut a rug like Astaire. If not, they could make like Rex Harrison and fake it, with style. For two decades, the “Liv Ullmann musical” and its ilk sent audiences bolting for the exit.

In the declining decades of the Hollywood musical, only a handful of directors had a clue, and only two of them--Bob Fosse with “Cabaret” (1972) and Blake Edwards with “Victor/Victoria” (1982)--achieved artistic success with something that even marginally resembled the lamented, book-and-production-number Broadway show. Except for those films, few of these filmmakers came up with box-office bonanzas, but they managed to comment on the musical form or reconsider it in ways that would forever change the rules.

I’m thinking of Robert Altman’s “Nashville” (1975), Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York” (1977), Herbert Ross’ “Pennies From Heaven” (1981) and, most significantly, perhaps, Ken Russell’s “Tommy” (1975).

No other film of the past 30 years provided the bridge between Richard Lester’s Beatles films and the MTV-style video as directly as Russell’s surreal and hyperkinetic parade of settings for the Who’s rock opera. Television finally got the message that the movies never could: Rock videos--with their synchronized dancing choruses, flashy editing and alluring production values souping up an often dubious array of musical talent--would be the heir apparent to the Hollywood musical.

Who else, then, would be more qualified to rescue the screen musical from oblivion than one of the founding mothers of the rock video?

One movie does not a renaissance make. If “Evita” breaks box-office records, it is conceivable that there will be a rush to uncover more musical projects for the movies. And if Woody Allen’s “Everyone Says I Love You” cleans up, it will encourage producers to continue to cast them in Liv Ullmann terms. When one considers that Michelle Pfeiffer was an “Evita” front-runner, we shouldn’t be surprised if Hollywood condemns itself to repeating the recent past. That’s not entertainment, that’s contempt.