Musical movies are dominating the big screen box office – here's why we can't get enough of all-singing films

Words of wisdom: In times of trouble, musicals provide a welcome escape

Last summer I learned an important lesson in the art of self-care. Did I lie in a bath full of rose water, counting my breaths? Did I walk through a forest chanting “You are enough”? Did I get a Rupi Kaur poem tattooed onto my forearm? No, I went to see Mamma Mia! 2, on my own, at the cinema.

What took me there? It could have been Trump’s tweets, the nauseating helter-skelter ride of Brexit, the continued prevalence of gender inequality or the fact Love Island had ended. Whatever it was, I felt a deep understanding that nothing else could make me happy like a film that combines ABBA songs with a woman’s unapologetically laissez-faire attitude to contraception.

There I sat by myself, and for 114 minutes I felt euphoric. I will probably tell my grandchildren about this day, because when the world is falling apart we should all cling to the things that bring us joy. Even if it is secondary male characters singing ABBA songs as a way to get women to sleep with them.

That simple formula has served me well in times of need. And it turns out this fail-safe strategy has gone global: musicals are everywhere and audiences can’t get enough of them. Musical films have already earned £1 billion at the box office this year, with Rocketman, Yesterday, The Lion King and Aladdin packing out cinemas. There’s more to come. The Cats trailer might have left us with more philosophical questions than Jean-Paul Sartre, but I’d bet 10 tonnes of Whiskas that it’s going to be one of the year’s biggest hits when it arrives this Christmas, along with Frozen 2.

That may top 2018’s global box-office record of £34 billion, which was helped along by A Star is Born, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and The Greatest Showman. Other big ones still to come include Brit hit Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (with Richard E Grant, Sharon Horgan and Sarah Lancashire signed up), Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and the big-screen version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. Despite our straitened times, musicals are ruling the West End too. According to the Society of London Theatre, attendance at London musicals hit almost 9.5 million last year, a rise of 8.2 per cent on 2017, making more than £500 million in revenue (a 15.4 per cent increase).

That looks set to continue with the arrival of Broadway exports such as Frozen, the Tony Award-winning social anxiety musical Dear Evan Hansen, and a revival of Sunday in the Park With George starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Even Sir Paul McCartney is getting in on the act: he recently announced he’s writing his first musical, an adaptation of Christmas film classic It’s a Wonderful Life, alongside Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall.

How to account for our musical obsession? Robin Baker, head curator of the British Film Institute National Archive, suggests history could be repeating itself. “Historically, the movie musical has flourished in times of political and social anxiety, experiencing its other golden ages during the Depression, with Busby Berkeley-choreographed hits such as 42nd Street, and during and after the Second World War, when MGM took us away from our woes with Meet Me in St Louis and Singin’ in the Rain.”

The BFI is even hosting a major season of events at the end of this year to celebrate the magic of movie musicals, which Baker is programming. He adds: “We’re living in troubled and uncertain times, so it’s little surprise that audiences are flocking to see musicals on the big screen in search of an escapist, emotional and uplifting experience.”

Judy Craymer, producer of Mamma Mia! from its infancy on stage, points to the fact that these films have been particularly popular with women. “Mamma Mia! the movie reinvigorated a cinema audience, and in particular a much-neglected female audience. It was escapism, it was joyful, fun and feel-good. It wasn’t just a musical experience, it was a virtual holiday. That trend for escapism has continued.”

That’s what I’ve found. On an uncomfortable long-haul flight, Mary Poppins Returns distracted and delighted me. When I’d been stuck in my flat all day I went to see A Star is Born and wept copiously — an experience that took more out of me physically than a 5k run. And when I had the Sunday blues, I stuck on The Greatest Showman. It had men in waistcoats arguing about the circus through song; it made me feel like I could accomplish anything.

And yet, musicals remain divisive. I’ve seen many a face crinkle with disgust at the mere mention of the M-word. People who hate musicals like to make sure you know they hate them, lest they turn into a singing cat and can only communicate through Andrew Lloyd Webber songs for the rest of their lives. The genre can be ripe for parody because, when it gets it wrong, it can be cringeingly heavy-handed and formulaic. But when they’re good, there’s something transcendent about them — that involuntary shiver you get when emotion is conveyed through music in a way dialogue alone can’t express.

15 best musical theatre songs of all time

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The way the pain and pleasure of existence is captured in Stephen Sondheim’s belting finale song in Company, Being Alive; the unspoiled bravery and optimism of being a child, shown like no other in Tim Minchin’s Matilda soundtrack; the joy and delight of first love in West Side Story’s Tonight; the broken but not beaten pain of And I Am Telling You from Dreamgirls.

Rather than play the Les Mis soundtrack on loop to the haters like a kind of contrapuntal harmony waterboarding, I’ve tried to understand the critics’ psychology. The most common complaint is that musicals require too much of a suspension of disbelief, when people continually break out into song (and sometimes they are animals). But we have a narcissistic tangerine for a US President, the planet is dying and Brexit has turned the news into Groundhog Day (also turned into a musical in 2016). Being able to suspend your disbelief is now a valuable skill.

Escapist they may be but let’s not forget: musicals are not just some jazz-hands utopia where bad things never happen. They’ve been written about some of the worst things in the world, from revolutionary slaughter to poverty in the shadow of Aids. Even beneath its tap-dancing-on-the-highway veneer, La La Land is essentially the story of two lost artists being unable to navigate long-distance relationships and selling out to capitalism.

Right now, though, the magic of such shows is that they transport us from the most difficult moments in our own lives — and return us to a time when we had none.

I think back to one of my earliest memories: begging my mum to put on our old LP of The Jungle Book soundtrack, when we’d dance around the living room together with wild abandon, singing without self-consciousness, consumed by total, reckless pleasure. Thinking about that, even on the darkest day, makes me want to break out into song.

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