My latest from The A.V. Club! Most of the movie musicals of the past decade have had moments of tran
My latest from The A.V. Club! Most of the movie musicals of the past decade have had moments of transcendence, like Jennifer Hudson’s “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” in Dreamgirls or Anne Hathaway’s “I Dreamed A Dream” in Les Misérables. But there’s also a certain artifice to musical theater that can feel jarring on-screen, especially to those unfamiliar with the genre’s conventions. Swirling around Hudson and Hathaway’s honest Oscar-winning performances are flashy numbers, large ensembles, period settings, and a whole lot of unexplained singing. While The Last Five Years has plenty of the latter (it’s almost entirely sung-through), its intimate focus and contemporary setting remove a level of that musical theater falseness. Jamie and Cathy aren’t following the beats of some epic romance, they’re having sex, attending book launches, Skyping over long summers spent apart, and bitterly arguing about their differing priorities. They may be singing about their problems, but those problems are instantly relatable, which means that even if you don’t like musicals, you might like The Last Five Years simply because it feels so different from the movie musicals that have come before it. [Read the full article] -- source link
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#musicals#musical theatre#broadway#anna kendrick