That’s Entertainment!
Letting my kids have totally free rein to watch whatever they want would be akin to letting them write the household dinner menus. A small serving of Chicken McNuggets goes a pretty long way for me, and the same goes for Barney the Dinosaur, Thomas the Tank Engine, and all of their peers and minions. Things that are designed to be kid-friendly today too often seem designed to be hostile to adult appreciation. What all of this blubbering is getting around to is that during the past five years or so, my attention has turned with some frequency to that genuinely swell American art form, the musical.
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Musicals come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are just pasted-together excuses to introduce a bunch of new songs, but the best are incredibly sophisticated blends of drama, song, and choreography that tap deep into the essential sap of the American experience. Watching and rewatching films like The Music Man, Oklahoma!, West Side Story, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is satisfying on all kindsa levels: visual, intellectual, visceral. I have discovered, however, that what the kids are hooked by is the singing and dancing parts. Unless there are a bunch of kids or other non-adults on the screen (for example, in The Sound of Music, The King and I, The Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins), they don’t give a tinker’s cuss for the story. They’re into the sheer sensory overload provided by a screenful of dumbbells hoofing and hollering like there’s no tomorrow. To cop a phrase from a source I can’t remember, they like their movies to cough up one damn thing after another. It was no surprise, then, that my little critics reacted very favorably to the three films in the “That’s Entertainment!” series, which splice together song-and-dance highlights from the classic era of MGM musicals (defined by MGM as 1929-1958). They have given a similar thumbs-up to the six-CD set that Rhino Records has just issued, anthologizing those movies’ sound tracks and then some. There is no song in this remarkable collection of mainstream cud that you couldn’t safely play for the Republican grandparents, and the orchestral arrangements are far from avant-garde, but the material does capture an unabashedly American zeitgeist.
There is no meaningful way to be critical of composers like George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, Richard Rodgers, or any of the others whose work appears here. Nor is it possible to fault the work of the MGM orchestra (whose musicians go regretfully uncredited). And who but a curmudgeon could speak ill of the singing talents of Judy Garland, Jimmy Durante, Lena Horne, Groucho Marx, and their ilk? I mean, what’s not to like? There may be more examples of Garland’s vocalese than you imagine you can bear (I counted 23)–but hey, you don’t have to listen to them consecutively. There may be a few too many sappy ballads for your taste, but the musical as a form during the Golden (pre-cynicism, mostly pre-Sondheim) Era was so drenched in sentimentality that griping about it is about as worthwhile as complaining that your grandma’s cooking is fattening. It is possible to argue with the text and subtext of many of the lyrics in terms of our current social situation, but to do so at this point would be an exercise in pseudo-intellectual onanism.
