Soundtracking: "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"

Happy Halloween! Chris Feil's look at music in the movies takes on the genre-bending musical classic...

The Rocky Horror Show is a peculiar kind of musical. Quickly dismissed on the stage, it will always be more at home in the cinema, adding Picture to the title and thus embodying its B-movie inspirations. With its notorious run from flop to cult sensation to now subdued midnight ritual, this musical belongs to the masses in a way unlike any other. But weirdly the music itself feels tangential to the cultdom - isn’t it strange that one of the most famous musicals is seldom celebrated for the music itself?

Or maybe if any of the songs themselves are cherished, it’s the worst number in the lineup. Come now, you know that “The Time Warp” is Rocky Horror’s worst song. I know it, you know it, we all know it (The banister knows it!)...

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I'm fluent in "Cher"

I discovered that I can read if not speak Cher fluently. So if you are not so blessed I shall translate this tweet for you after the jump...

Just finished Song🎂
Think Benny will Like it.
Think Ol will Love it
Think ML will laugh & Dance around with me👻👻

— Cher (@cher) October 23, 2017

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Soundtracking: "The Lure"

Just in time for Halloween, musical oddity The Lure has joined The Criterion Collection. Here's Chris on its soundtrack...

Yet another Polish lesbian mermaid pop musical? Geez. For those that complain that musicals have no originality anymore, may I introduce a bloody disco ball of a film: The Lure. The story of two mermaids who come aground and quickly rise to success singing in a Warsaw nightclub, it’s both fairy tale and metaphor for female sexuality. But most importantly, the music kicks a whole lot of ass.

Led by young stars Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszańska and with some disco diva stylings from Kinga Preis, the film is about the most delightful genre hybrid we have seen in some time. It’s a femme-centric mix of musical and horror, with more pointedly ironic sexuality than any music video once banned from MTV. It would be glib to describe it as a t.A.T.u. performing a Let The Right One In jukebox musical of Abba songs but that is the closest I can get to painting a vision of its giddy melodic morbidity. Or describing the fun of its singular strangeness.

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Here We Go Again...

Amanda Seyfried posted the following photo online this weekend with the hashtag #HereWeGoAgain which leads us to believe that Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again is officially filming now...or has officially wrapped filming? One or the other...

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Stage Door: "Prince of Broadway"

by Nathaniel R

Though I don't cherish the form I've seen quite a few jukebox musicals in my day. Sometimes they take the biographical route like Jersey Boys. Often they'll sift through the lyrics of some artist's catalogue hoping to yank out phrases and threads from which they can stitch together a frankenstein story. Mammia Mia is either the apotheosis or the nadir of that latter form, depending on your perspective. But what if the jukebox isn't beholden to one composer? Prince of Broadway, which just opened at the Samuel Friedman in NYC, is devoted to the producer Harold Prince who did not write music. So what you have is a greatest hits of, uh, dozens of different composers from a wide range of musicals. If this were a CD it might be called "Now That's What I Call Broadway, Vol. Whatever"

Prince backed a TON of über famous shows in his illustrious career including Phantom of the Opera, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret... you name it! None of the musicals sound alike so there's little hope of cohesion in the show. Wisely Prince of Broadway  doesn't try to create a "story" from these disparate musicals in a career that stretches all the way back to 1950 (Prince is 89 years old and directed this production).What they've come up with instead is much less intrusive even if it doesn't totally work...

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