Musical Monday: And 5, 6, 7, 8!

Alright kittens, just to confirm that we're homosexual down to our very marrow, we're going to talk about something very near and dear to our hearts which is also not coincidentally very, very gay.

Musicals, darlings. They're like cinematic crack to us. No matter how bad or busy our day gets, there is no amount of stress that can't be eliminated by watching a big dumb musical. Give us Ann Miller in a ridiculous costume vibrating her legs like a grasshopper and we're in gay nirvana.

But it's not all camp value with us. Even though we can poke fun at the silliness of it all, we love musicals as an art form as well and we bristle when we hear so many people dismiss them as ONLY silly or as relics from another time. In fact, the one thing that will guarantee us getting all huffy and puffy is when someone utters that tired old line about them being "unrealistic."

Puh-leez, bitches.

Movies aren't realistic by their very nature - ALL movies. As an audience member, you always approach a movie on its own terms and passively accept the constraints of the genre or the medium. Whether it's science fiction or your basic romantic comedy, none of them are realistic and if they're good, the audience never really has a problem with that.

Here's something to remind yourself when watching a musical. It's something audiences in bygone eras understood implicitly, probably because they were only one generation removed from vaudeville. What is it? Simply this: the characters aren't really dancing and singing.

What? Is that shocking? Do thine eyes deceive thee? Really, it's true. Liesl isn't really singing and dancing with Rolf; she's flirting with him. The Jets and the Sharks aren't really pirouetting through the streets of Manhattan, they're threatening each other. Barbra isn't really singing that she's the greatest star, she's fast-talking her way into an audition. Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron aren't really dancing their way through works of famous French artists; they're falling in love in the most romantic city in the world.

See kittens, the singing and dancing is merely a way of expressing emotional states or advancing the plot. It's a form of window dressing crucial to the genre and you're supposed to laugh and clap and be swept away by it, but not for one minute are you supposed to "believe" that the characters all broke into song at exactly the same moment. There is of course an exception to be made when talking about certain "stage door" musicals, where all the singing and dancing is done by characters who are performing on a stage, such as Cabaret. Even so, in most of those instances - and most especially in Cabaret - the songs are still meant to tell the story or reveal the characters.

We are always happy to see Hollywood trot out the form for another go 'round (see Dreamgirls), but we have made it our life's work to make people understand how much value lies in those big technicolor extravaganzas of years past. If you really want to know about the social norms of the forties, fifties, and sixties, you could do a lot worse than to start by looking at the musicals of the period. Because classic musicals almost always have at their hearts, the idea of utopia. A perfect world through song and dance and color.

So! To further your education and to have a little fun, we're introducing Musical Mondays here at T Lo. Each Monday, we give some classic musical the patented GayBoy treatment, replete with bitchy screencaps. As penance for our sin against St. Judy, we thought we'd start off with another icon, so on Monday, life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter, bitches because we are taking on Funny Girl.