All musicals are bad -- they can't tell a decent story because they keep busting out songs that barely relate to what's happening, and they don't provide a decent listening experience because they keep stopping to talk about a badly paced story.https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/1065275609432043521 …
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Only to the extent that Shakespeare's soliloquys are. Properly done, a music and dance number strongly amplifies the emotional impact of the plot development or character expression it encompasses. (Pygmalion is great play, but My Fair Lady clearly sold the story more strongly.)
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Arguably that's the difference between a musical and the random musical interludes dropped into,e.g., Marx Brothers movies. Those do seem like an interruption. (Though clearly there was a place for that sort of thing in the culture between vaudeville and the variety show.)
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maybe also worth mentioning how early mickey mouse cartoons were almost perfectly plotless visual adjuncts to a piece of music and animations with characterization and narrative were an evolution from that. form has to be allowed to evolve to keep up with content
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musicals are usually just kind of annoying to me because half the time the musical bit feels like it's happening for no good endogenous reason & just bc "it's a musical and that means we have to put a song here"
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That's a problem of bad craft in any form. (Sub "superhero fight", "space battle", "love scene", etc.) Though fans will be more forgiving of (or even actively appreciate) gratuitous scenes of things they like, whether it's a ballet scene or a martial arts display.
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true but the degree of fit or conflict between what you want to do and the conventions of the form you choose to do it in are always a factor too & some are more tightly constraining than others
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Sure, but constraint isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's probably easier to do a competent sonnet than free verse. That said, every poem shouldn't be a sonnet, and pace classic Bollywood, every play and film shouldn't be a musical.
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oh, completely agree it's not necessarily bad, but tbqh really not that interested in summary judgement or constraint or lack of it as "good" or "bad" anyway -- it's just an aspect of how and how well any given form is fit to a given purpose
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. Banned in Sweden. SubGenius, Zhuangist, white-hat troll. Defrocked mathematician. Brain problems.