Making a Song and Dance About It

I have an aversion to musicals.  It all comes down to a childhood trauma.  I had the misfortune, at an early age, to see the opening of the film version of Oklahoma when it premiered on TV.  Being a child, I just assumed it was a western and settled down to enjoy the usual combination of gun play, horses, brawling and cattle-rustling.  Imagine my shock and horror as this cowboy rode toward the screen and started singing!  Needless to say, I watched no more of it and have refused to watch musicals ever since.  I mean, they're bloody ridiculous, all those people bursting into song for no reason at all.  I can't think of a single musical that couldn't be improved by the removal of the songs.  However, the trend seems to have gone the other way, with perfectly good films, books and plays being turned into musicals by the addition of asinine songs.  Not that it is a new phenomena: the sixties and seventies brought us My Fair Lady, (how remiss of George Bernard Shaw was it to omit to put any songs into Pygmalion?), Goodbye Mr Chips, (which, as well as allowing Peter O'Toole to sing, unwisely updated the story to World War Two) and, worst of all, Lost Horizon, (not even the promise of immortality would make me stay in Shangri La if it meant putting up with those bloody songs). 

Anyway, to get to the point of this post, last night in the pub a friend of mine announced that he was appearing in an amateur production of one of the most famous (infamous?) of the recent trend of turning non-musicals into musicals:  Mel Brooks' The Producers.  Personally, I find this one of the most offensive examples of the genre.  Not only did they take a perfectly good and very funny film and put in tedious and unnecessary songs, but then they turned this bastardised version into a film, with the result that there are people out there who think that it is the 'real' film of The Producers and don't even realise the original existed.  Getting back to the 'narrative' - having vented my spleen - my fiend is apparently playing a tap-dancing Nazi.   Although that's not the point of this post - just an incidental observation.  The point, such as it is, is that we got to discussing which other classic films and TV series could be adulterated in a similar fashion.  The popular choice was Dad's Army - it's obvious really, when you think about it, each main character has at least one catch phrase which could form the basis of a whole song and dance routine.

Take Corporal Jones, for instance - you could have a whole number involving people running around in a frenzied fashion as he sings 'Don't Panic'.  Then, later on the platoon could fix bayonets as Jones leads them in 'They Don't Like It Up 'Em', as they mime thrusting their rifles upwards to impale imaginary parachuting 'Fuzzie Wuzzies' on their bayonets.  Then you could have Captain Mainwaring singing 'Don't Tell Him Pike!' as the German prisoner takes it down in his notebook.  See, this stuff just writes itself.  Personally though, despite the undoubted merits of Dad's Army when it comes to unnecessary musicalisation, I still have a hankering to see a musical version of Patton: Lust For Glory, although I think that would have to be an opera to do full justice to the subject matter.  Can't you just see Placido Domingo in the title role belting out 'You God Damn Sons of Bitches'?  Maybe they could get Gio Compario from the insurance ads to be Field Marshal Montgomery.