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New Releases
Jay Stone
November 2009
Movie Entertainment
There’s a big new movie musical this month, Nine, an adaptation of the Broadway show that was itself based on the movie 8½ and starring Daniel Day Lewis, Nicole Kidman, Penélope Cruz, Sophia Loren and others. This will be exciting news for a certain constituency, myself among them, who love the joy of the genre, and it will baffle a lot of other people who just don’t get movie musicals.
A lot of people tell me they can’t understand it when all of a sudden characters burst into song and start dancing down the street to full orchestration: where did the violins come from, anyway? These are the same people who like movies in which alien robots destroy Paris, France. Me, I’ll take Frank Loesser.
Loesser was the brilliant songwriter who composed Guys and Dolls and How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, two great Broadway musicals that limped to the screen, the victims of bad casting in the first — Guys and Dolls is the movie where Marlon Brando sings — and static staging in the second. But they both feature Loesser’s fabulous songs: Sit Down You’re Rocking The Boat, Adelaide’s Lament and I Believe In You and so on. He also won an Oscar for writing Baby It’s Cold Outside.
The transition from Broadway to screen is the trickiest part of the movie musical (Nine’s road from screen to Broadway and back is a path also followed by The Producers, which doesn’t bode well). Even when a musical is adapted with the right choreographic excitement, like West Side Story, it can suffer from having Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood cast as the two lovers, lip-synching with moony toothiness. And did you ever see a worse street gang than the Jets? They look like the high school A-V club.
I also had trouble with My Fair Lady, which had most of the right elements — the costumes, the great story — but dropped the Broadway star, Julie Andrews. Instead, Audrey Hepburn was cast, and while she had the right look, she couldn’t sing and so Marni Nixon, queen of the substitute voices, was called in. Nixon also did Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Deborah Kerr in The King And I. The modern musical isn’t like that: Richard Gere was allowed to do his own singing in Chicago, for instance, and Kidman showed in Moulin Rouge that she could carry a tune. So could Ewan McGregor. It’s always exciting when a performer shows a hidden talent like that, which is one of the reasons I’m looking forward to Nine. Daniel Day-Lewis has shown he can do almost everything brilliantly, so there’s no reason to think he can’t sing and dance, too. And those violins? Just pretend they’re in the alien spaceships.
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