One of the areas where I changed a bit over the years and grew from my initial distaste of musicals to liking several of them. Part of that stemmed from the whole Disney years of those being the main musical films that you would see for the most part, as beyond that you had the heyday of musical films from the early 60’s and prior to that. Though there are moments I like with some of those, there’s a whole lot that I flat out just can’t find anything to connect with in any way, which keeps me from really enjoying them.
Thankfully, musical film (and occasionally musical TV episodes) have grown a lot over the years and have found ways to present them as compelling pieces to modern audiences. Some have been delightful for me, like Moulin Rouge and the guilty pleasure that is Rock of Ages. I’m also a huge fan of what Across the Universe did in bringing the Beatles catalog to life, which is also why I really love the absolute fun that is Mama Mia.
But for me, the favorite musical film is the one that I had latched onto when I was at my youngest. With my mother being into musicals and music in general, whereas my father was tone deaf and pretty much just liked Doris Day, I spent a lot of my single digit years being fascinated by the 8-track for Jesus Christ Superstar. I had tried to figure out how to reconcile the words of it with what I was learning in church and CCD classes, but finding it hard because there was such a sense of things from the musical version that brought it to life in a very different way.
So when I eventually got to see the film on VHS in my early teen years, it made a huge impression. The film, working off of the Broadway play of the same name by Andrew Lloyd Weber and Time Rice, was not what I expected. Most religious depictions in film or TV at the time played it “reverential” with what it did. A 60’s inspired rock opera? I knew the music was different, but seeing the way it was adapted as college kids putting on a performance in the desert with all sorts of guerilla style design was captivating. I’ve rewatched it many times over the years and in the last several years it’s become yearly viewing as we get into the final months of the year. And each time I watch it, I hear new things, see new things, put it together in a different way that shows and reflects how I’ve grown as a person.
The film was also one that naturally garnered a lot of controversy, and I got to hear about it secondhand from my mother, who talked about what it was like during the Broadway portion of it that she knew from being a young woman at the time and spending a lot of time at the theater seeing plays. There’s a lot of interesting aspects to it and watching as each viewing reshapes it is endlessly fascinating to me. In it becoming a yearly tradition, my kids began to start watching it with me last year after knowing I was doing it but having little interest in musicals themselves. Now they’re talking about it becoming a tradition for them, alongside our yearly viewing of Love Actually. Go figure.