Musicals
I'm watching Easter Parade at the moment, since it was on TV this morning and looked like a fun film to watch on my Good Friday alone. It's reminded me just how awkward I find musicals. I certainly not against them per se. I love Singin' in the Rain and Calamity Jane and West Side Story (oh how I sobbed when first I saw it, aged 16 or so!) and Moulin Rouge, to name but a few. But there's always a sense of strangeness about them. My brain just can't quite cope with the fact that these people act like normal people for most of the time, but suddenly burst into song whenever they feel any strong emotion. Attempted song, I could cope with, but this is finely crafted song. There are no pauses as they struggle to find a rhyme. There are no aborted lines as they realise that the sentiment they wanted to express doesn't fit their metre. It bothers me. As someone who does their filking by wandering along for hours, deaf to all human contact and muttering distractedly to themselves, it bothers me. I tell myself just to accept it and go with it, but it bothers me.
(It bothers me in Tolkien, too. When Aragorn and Legolas sing their lament for Boromir, for example, I can only cope with it by, A, telling myself that Tolkien has drawn a veil over the two hours in which they muttered to themselves as they slowly composed their verses and desperately chased their rhymes, or, B, by telling myself that they are not made of common stock like us lesser Men, and the ability to create perfect rhymes at the drop of a hat is a skill that has been lost to us in the latter days.)
Opera I can cope with. In opera, they sing all the time, so I can just about accept the fact that these people come from a race that defaults to communicating in song. It helps when it's not sung in English, when you can imagine that they're singing glorious sentiments. I still haven't quite recovered from the experience of seeing La Boheme in English, and realising that certain lovely phrases of sonorous Italian actually said something like, "are you with me so far?" and "Yeah. Carry on!"
I've only once gone to the ballet. Ballet I just couldn't cope with. I could accept that someone might sing when overcome with love, but I couldn't accept that someone would show their neverending love for someone by picking them up and twirling them around while sticking their leg out at ninety degrees while wearing sparkly tights. But, then, I was 17 at the time, and I sang in a choir, but had yet to discover dancing. Maybe it would be different now.
(It bothers me in Tolkien, too. When Aragorn and Legolas sing their lament for Boromir, for example, I can only cope with it by, A, telling myself that Tolkien has drawn a veil over the two hours in which they muttered to themselves as they slowly composed their verses and desperately chased their rhymes, or, B, by telling myself that they are not made of common stock like us lesser Men, and the ability to create perfect rhymes at the drop of a hat is a skill that has been lost to us in the latter days.)
Opera I can cope with. In opera, they sing all the time, so I can just about accept the fact that these people come from a race that defaults to communicating in song. It helps when it's not sung in English, when you can imagine that they're singing glorious sentiments. I still haven't quite recovered from the experience of seeing La Boheme in English, and realising that certain lovely phrases of sonorous Italian actually said something like, "are you with me so far?" and "Yeah. Carry on!"
I've only once gone to the ballet. Ballet I just couldn't cope with. I could accept that someone might sing when overcome with love, but I couldn't accept that someone would show their neverending love for someone by picking them up and twirling them around while sticking their leg out at ninety degrees while wearing sparkly tights. But, then, I was 17 at the time, and I sang in a choir, but had yet to discover dancing. Maybe it would be different now.