April Foolish Predictions #2: Music and Sound Categories

[drumroll] It's Time! Our annual April Foolish Oscar Predictions have begun.

Ad Astra was supposed to be out next month but rumors are that it's not finished yet

First we looked at Animated Features and now we turn our attention to the Sound categories. It's rather perverse to do them second and here's why: Original Songs and Original Scores are among the last things we have confirmed each year. Technically speaking you can wait until your whole film is nearly complete before adding a score or commissioning an original song. It's not always wise to wait of course since songs, especially, can be more effective if they're woven in and some directors prefer to work with some idea of what the score will be like while they're editing. Nevertheless there is much that's completely unknown about this film year in terms of its music...

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Soundtracking: Rock 'n' Roll High School

by Chris Feil

This day and age the jukebox musical has moved firmly into passé territory, a product that plays squarely to a built-in audience usually of the nostalgic variety. It’s hard to imagine anything shaking the subgenre up when it’s now become a factory for your dad’s favorite bands to make a little extra cash. But the jukebox musical didn’t start with your dad’s regular bands, it started with your dad’s cool bands. Reader, how is the Ramones’ Rock ‘n’ Roll High School celebrating it’s 40th anniversary?!

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Stage Door: "The Prom" is a delight

by Dancin' Dan

The Prom caused a big splash at the Thanksgiving Day Parade last year, giving us the first same-sex kiss ever aired as part of the parade broadcast. The uproar that followed almost single-handedly justified the musical's existence, proving that maybe the world does "really need" a musical about a bunch of past-their-prime Broadway stars who travel to Indiana to help a young gay teen who isn't being allowed to bring her girlfriend to prom. If that plotline makes The Prom sound insufferable, a hopelessly pandering piece of liberal agitprop designed to make the Broadway audience feel oh so very good about themselves for having the same morals as the show's creators, well... that's not exactly the case. The Prom has more up its sleeve than that, and it all comes down to the show's tone.

It's clear from The Prom's first scene that the musical's main target is not the people of Edgewater, Indiana, but rather the vainglorious Broadway stars who insert themselves where they don't belong...

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50th Anniversary: Bob Fosse's "Sweet Charity"

by Eric Blume

Fifty years ago today, audiences saw their first Bob Fosse film:  Sweet Charity, the Cy Coleman/Dorothy Fields musical for which he won the Tony for Best Choreography three years earlier.  It’s fascinating to look back at this movie five decades later to see all the seeds that Fosse later brought to fruition in his subsequent films...

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Stage Door: The misunderstood, exquisitely sung "Superhero"

by Nathaniel R

Don't let the title fool you though it's not at all deceptive. Tom Kitt's (Next to Normal) newest musical both does and doesn't involve superpowered do-gooders. This anguished but gorgeous intimate drama is, more specifically, about a teenage boy who loves comic books (new find Kyle McArthur who has been with the show since its developmental process). The boy is still reeling from the death of his father two years before the play begins. He loves to draw superheroes which we see projected on to the stage at times. His widowed depressed mother (Kate Baldwin), struggles to connect with this typical juvenile obsession ("What's Happening to My Boy?") especially since they really need each other given the sorry fate life handed them.

Early in the musical the boy becomes obsessed with a mysterious neighbor who he is convinced is either a superhero or supervillain --  the jury still being out...

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