Encore Magazine Likes Singing a New Tune

Another review for Singing A New Tune, my Applause study covering the "new" movie musical format (and featuring detailed interviews with Sir Alan Parker, Todd Haynes, John Cameron Mitchell, Joss Whedon, Keith Gordon, Todd Graff and others...), just came in.

This one arrives courtesy of Encore, "The Performing Arts Magazine," which covers various performing arts venues throughout the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area (on web and in print magazine), so this is great. Especially because the magazine likes it...

The review reads, in part:

"Movie musicals reached their zenith with Busby Berkeley (42nd Street) and the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Post-war, Americans were past the point of fantasy. Yes, there were gems like The Sound of Music and West Side Story, but after Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz in 1979, successful film musicals were few and far between. By the late 1990s, filmmakers were creating movies with musical numbers that defied the old conventions.

Muir delights in the creativity of South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, an animated movie musical that combined political parody with a musical send-up. And that was just the beginning. Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, a hallucinogenic tour of a 19th-century Parisian hot spot—and Nicole Kidman, too—came in 2001....Muir lovingly details the genre’s hits, flops and near misses—from the kitsch of Xanadu to the overblown Phantom of the Opera. Forget the groaners....For movie lovers, Singing a New Tune is the literary equivalent of Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”