In a first for the ever-intrepid Team Vintage Sand, we devote an entire episode to the exploration of the history of a single genre. Thus we present Episode 37: A Pocket History of the Hollywood Musical. From its clunky beginnings at the dawn of sound through the unexpected brilliance of Spielberg’s "West Side Story" remake last year, we take a deep dive into this most deliberately artificial (and therefore most polarizing) of all film genres. Rather than going decade by decade, we divided this history into six “movements” that provide a lens to view the rise, steep decline and startling rebirth of the musical over the last century. After a brief mention of such important early works as the Best Picture-winning "Broadway Melody of 1929" and King Vidor’s first foray into sound, the daring and dazzling (if problematic for contemporary audiences) "Hallelujah!"(1929), the movements we lay out are as follows:

I. The Warner Brothers musicals of the pre-Code 1930’s, which confronted head-on the difficulties of life during the Great Depression and gave the world its first glimpse of the lunatic genius of Busby Berkeley

II. The RKO musicals of the mid and late 1930’s, featuring Astaire and Rogers, silly escapist story lines and music by some of the greatest composers of American popular song

III. The Golden Age, a quarter century dominated though not exclusively limited to MGM, which is bookended by "The Wizard of Oz" in 1939 and "The Sound of Music" in 1956. This is the age of Vincente Minnelli and the Kelly/Donen team, of "Singin’ in the Rain" and "The Band Wagon", of larger budgets and production values and, at its height, a rapidly increasing artistic ambition

IV. The decline, which starts in the late 1960’s with horrors like "Doctor Doolittle" and "Thoroughly Modern Millie". With the notable exception of "Grease" and the uniquely odd success of "Rocky Horror", the live action musical is essentially moribund from the 70’s through the end of the century. However…

V. …we argue that the traditional Hollywood musical is kept alive by whoever it was at Disney that had the vision, after having seen "Little Shop of Horrors", to hire Menken and Ashman to revive their animated musical division. The run of successes that Disney had from "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast" through Ashman’s untimely death halfway through "Aladdin", and up through 1997’s "Mulan" showed that the Musical hadn’t died; it had just morphed into cartoon form for a while

VI. The unlikely revival of Musicals in this century, sparked out of nowhere by a most unlikely film: Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 "Moulin Rouge". The genre’s return was cemented by the choice of "Chicago" for Best Picture the next year, and it has been going strong ever since

As a final note, we also posit our Grand Unification Theory of the Hollywood Musical—that the greatest among these films were ones originally created for the screen rather than adaptations of Broadway shows. Yes, there are exceptions, but for every "West Side Story" (particularly the 2021), there are a few dozen films like "South Pacific", "Camelot", "A Little Night Music", "Rent", "Cats" and "Dear Evan Hansen". So come and meet those dancing feet as we take you on a whirlwind tour of a century of supreme artistry and epic fails, with stops at just about every point in between.

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