Are musicals Hollywoods comeback kids?
The American movie musical may be reinventing itself once again, in forms that Fred Astaire, Busby Berkeley and Vincente Minnelli would scarcely recognize. Consider these films, all released within the past six years: “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” centers on an East German drag queen who survived a botched sex-change operation along with a vestige of her original manhood. She tells her story through flashbacks and rock cabaret performance. “Dancer in the Dark,” really more of an anti-musical, features a heroine who works in a factory and makes music in her head from the industrial rhythms around her. When she is arrested for murder, the songs that break out in the middle of a scene become her escape from a bitterly cruel life — just like in the movies. “South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut” features the foul-mouthed kids from the animated TV series in a clever spoof of censorship that includes hilarious musical parodies, one of which (“Blame Canada”) actually got nominated for an Academy
