Search And Destroy: Musicals

"race records", hillbilly music, jazz from that era is incredible and was popular albeit not chart-topping - and I don't think it's popularity reflected any shift in the American psyche akin to some kind of facile "omg I can't DEAL WITH FANCY LYRICS anymore! cuz WW2" reading, those forms represented an expansion of the industry beyond the rich white guys that were largely running shit prior.

I haven't read that book (I'm assuming you have?) but the author doesn't appear to make that argument you posted based on that Atlantic article.

geez i don't have time to read books about MUSIC

ok here is the specific piece on NPR i heard re that angle

Ben Yagoda: There was a change in popular taste. The soldiers who had come back from World War II didn't seem to be as interested in the more complex, challenging kind of popular song, the more jazz-based song. Sentimental ballads and, yes, novelty numbers, suddenly was much more appealing.

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/23/379086600/when-pop-broke-up-with-jazz

goodbye ILM

among other problems those arguments universalize (and also homogenize) the experience of WWII vets

i don't think sentiment has ever gone out of fashion

goodbye ILM

we should be so lucky :)

I don't know how you would even begin to quantify or back up that assertion

xp

Never saw Lin Manuel-Miranda "In the Heights" onstage, but just saw the movie and it was ok. The music and dancing was fun (although not amazing) but the plot story lines took so long to unfold and were kind of frustrating when you did figure them out. Why didn't the girl leaving Stanford just try to transfer to another school rather than letting her dad sell his business to pay for tuition? And yeah, I see Miranda has now apologized for having so many of the characters being light-skinned Latinx rather than Afro-Latinx.

Poor phrasing on that last item, but its referring to the choice of the actors and actresses.

"In the Heights" was never really renowned for its book, which doesn't have a huge amount of conflict or a big arc (the movie did actually change quite a lot from the stage version, though). it's more the characters, the music, and the choreography that really sold that one.

that said I really enjoyed the movie, but I ventured to NYC to see the original in 2008

the biggest change in the movie is that Nina's mother is alive in the stage version and butts heads with Nina's dad a lot and removing her took a lot of that dynamic away

Yeah, good songs, blah story, too long. Don't know how long the original show is but this felt like they didn't want to cut anything from it (though I see from Neanderthal's comment, they did)

there were two full-fledged songs cut from it, yet the length was still about the same, weirdly

I imagine cutting songs when adapting musicals to screen is done very carefully for fear of risking fan backlash

one of the songs cut was like a powerful second act song that many people used as like audition pieces/etc. was very surprised.

weirdly, no songs were added, either, which is usually a ploy to become Oscars-eligible for Best Original Song. almost all movie musicals have at least one song added (Hairspray had several)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/arts/dance/in-the-heights-dance.html

Scott, who comes from the street dance world of Los Angeles and is not Latino, worked with a team of associate choreographers who specialized in a range of styles, including Latin dance, hip-hop, ballet and contemporary dance
...
His team of associate choreographers is solid: Eddie Torres Jr. for Latin dance, with Princess Serrano as assistant Latin choreographer; Ebony Williams for ballet, contemporary dance, Afro and dancehall; Emilio Dosal, a popper who is versatile in many styles and brings the hip-hop element to the film; and Dana Wilson, who had a hand in everything — like all of the choreographers — but specifically worked with the actors to help them nail the physicality of their characters.

Above NY Times article is on the dance aspect and not the songs as referenced above