Newsies, Rent: Best Modern Musical Movies
Steve Martin in Pennies From Heaven & Disney's Beauty and the Beast
Aug 15, 2008
Pennies From Heaven
The oldest film on the list, 1981’s Pennies From Heaven, based on Dennis Porter’s groundbreaking BBC miniseries and starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters is a fascinating look at the Great Depression and its place in film history. At the time, light-hearted movies, such as musicals, were intended as escapist entertainment. This film purposely juxtaposes the optimistic, golly-gee music of the time with the tragic lives the Depression-era people lived. It therefore presents a sad storyline broken up by happy songs which ironically comment on the proceedings. Each time a character breaks into song (or in this case, lip synchs a popular song of the time), he or she can for a few short moments escape and pretend that everything’s going to be okay. Pennies From Heaven is a dark, compelling, and forgotten masterpiece.
Newsies
Although it flopped at the box office and was a critical failure, over the years, Newsies, Disney’s live-action musical about the newsboy strike in 1899 against Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, has grown into something of a minor cult classic. Starring a young Christian Bale as the unlikely leader of this gang of misfits and orphans, this film boasts a beautiful score by Alan Menken and offers an interesting look at a historical event that today seems almost as overlooked as this film is.
Beauty and the Beast
A cartoon it may be, but Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is one of the all-time great screen musicals. Boasting a near-perfect score by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, the film sounded as if it were written for Broadway, and, in fact, soon after came to inspire Disney’s first foray onto Broadway, when it was adapted for the stage. The show, however, doesn’t quite capture the (no pun intended) simple beauty of the fairy tale on film, which has earned its title as a true classic.
Rent
In 1996, Rent, Jonathan Larson’s epic rock opera about the lives and loves of a small group of Bohemian friends living in the Alphabet District of the East Village in New York City, opened on Broadway. Months before, Larson, a young man, had died of an aortic aneurysm, the night that it opened off-Broadway. That year, it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award, among other things. Ten years later, Chris Columbus assembled nearly the entire original Broadway cast for his film version, which, although it isn’t a perfect translation and for that reason has drawn the ire of many of the show’s fans, is a beautiful and fitting tribute to Larson and his work. For every minor clunky moment the film has, it has a dozen more beautifully executed scenes that capture the spirit and heart of Rent, making it nearly as powerful a production as the stage show that preceded it.
