Movie Musicals

Dear Evan Hansen, today’s going to be an amazing day and here’s why.

- Evan Hansen (Ben Platt), writing to himself in the opening of Dear Evan Hansen

When I was in university, I stage-managed a kick-ass production of the musical Oliver! It was exciting. I thought constructing a column about movie musicals would be easy and exciting. Foolish thought. From an original draft list of 47 I watched or re-watched 16—not all of them all the way through. Several of the classics I merely sampled to see if my original impressions still held true. Movie musicals are an odd, artificial lot. Even when musical plays work effectively on the stage, few survive a transfer to the big screen, where they inevitably are re-cast with Hollywood stars and made bigger, longer, and badly cut. Here are a few that I think are worth seeing on the big screen. A couple of these are stage-to-screen transfers but two are originals created specifically for the screen. No, not La La Land!