A Foot And A Half A Second

The musical is a heightening of reality; we, after all, do not live in a world of musical cats vying for resurrection, trains battling for affection-on rollerskates!- rap-battling Founding Fathers (or indeed singing Presidents, superheroes, Che Guevara etc), all number of poorly transferred novels, films, and even occasionally videogames, and whatever the hell Jerry Springer: The Opera was. Whilst the cinematic musical often leans into the qualities of its medium by creating moments that live theatre cannot, the trend in adaptions of tentpole musicals-Tom Hooper's 2012 adaption of Les Miserables and 2019 adaption of Cats, for example-is to lean into a realism that defeats the very purpose of musical theatre. This, I must confess, is part of my recalitrance against cinematic musicals; they are so often, except in the world of animation, a shallow imitation of what the theatre brings us by the very act of imagination, of leaving behind the outside world and allowing sets to become ...