Unconventional musicals sing a different tune
Chuck Crisafulli

LOS ANGELES—Music is in the air — especially the air surrounding current moviegoers, whether they find themselves in art houses or multiplexes.
A surprisingly varied blast of music-based features has pumped through theaters this year, from revivals of the traditional movie musical form such as “Hairspray” to rock-driven tales such as the Joy Division biopic “Control.” Perhaps most striking is a group of films that resist easy classification — movies that are music-centric but don’t follow the established conventions of the classic song-and-dance picture: Call them the maverick musicals.
Films such as Fox Searchlight’s “Once,” Sony’s “Across the Universe” and “Romance & Cigarettes,” the Weinstein Co.’s “I’m Not There” and Warner Bros.’ November 21 release “August Rush” all feature music at the core of their stories and include musical performances by their actors, but all take decidedly unconventional approaches to the creation of a movie musical world.
“Once” is the rare musical that requires no suspension of disbelief, with its music stemming believably from the “real” world its characters inhabit. “Across the Universe” turns the songs of the Beatles into a soundtrack for a story that sets young love against a pop-cultural history of the 1960s, while “I’m Not There” deconstructs the music and persona of Bob Dylan with a lead character split among six actors. “August Rush” unfolds as a sophisticated fairy tale in which characters are defined by the music they perform, and “Romance & Cigarettes” creates an urban fantasia in which the actors’ performances of pop songs reveals the private soundtracks for their characters. “I think it’s great to be exploring some new approaches to the form,” says John Turturro, who wrote and directed “Romance & Cigarettes,” which made the festival rounds last year and had a European release before a U.S. release this fall.
“If you look at literature or painting or almost any other art form, there’s not just one way for things to be presented,” adds Turturro. “But movies get stuck and do the same thing over and over again. I think it’s OK to ask the audience to use a little imagination, and if you have a great story to tell, they’re not going to mind if you take some chances and do things differently.”
SINGING TO JAMES BROWN Turturro credits the work of Dennis Potter (1981’s “Pennies From Heaven”) as a strong inspiration for his approach to music in “Romance & Cigarettes.” In the film, a cast that includes James Gandolfini, Kate Winslet, Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken sing along with tunes by everyone from Engelbert Humperdinck to James Brown, with production numbers working as a kind of window into characters’ motivations and desires.