Movie: The Musical: The Movie

Somehow, a discussion about the movie "Hairspray" came up. Not the musical adaptation staring a "way too comfortable in drag" John Travolta, but rather the John Water's classic. Although I don't know how we started on the topic of that movie, I know where it led: my bewildering confusion as to the sudden glut of stage musical versions of popular, non-musical films.

I have to admit outright that I don't like musicals. Nothing against the art form, but I can't wrap my head around the concept of people randomly breaking out into song to advance the plot. Awesome knife fights are made a lot less awesome when two rival gangs have to do a bunch of pirouettes before they can stab each other. And if anything can kill an otherwise good episode of "The Simpsons", it's a lavishly animated musical number shoehorned in for no reason.

Who's responsible for this crap?!

Whenever a popular movie gets re-imagined as large-scale musical productions, a little part of me dies inside. Maybe, in my head, there's this small clique of people with whom I have a connection on the flimsy basis of simply having enjoyed the same movie. Then the musical version comes out and suddenly my film discussion lunch table is being invaded by armchair theater critics and wine-tasters. I don't know if I'm comfortable with someone who's not socially awkward going around quoting Monty Python due to the success of "Spamalot". Furthermore, we should find the person who had the original idea of turning the already shrill "Legally Blonde" into an even more shrill musical so we can bring him or her up on torture charges.

Simply maintaining a constant distance of a few football fields from the theater district at all times does not help. Every year, snippets of these new musicals based on films are performed at the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It's not even spread across the celebration. Instead, it's done rapid-fire style - so much so that the lead from "Xanadu" will accidentally twirl into the chorus of "The Producers" and knock them into the Children's Television Workshop float, sending Elmo tumbling off into the blood-thirsty crowd of children. Then, the cast of "Rent" will croon about the number of minutes in a year and I've lost my appetite for cranberry sauce. It's the worst Thanksgiving ever, always!

Also making it hard to avoid is the fact that they sometimes create a film version of the musical based on the film. Why rent the superior original version when you can have singing and dancing take over everything you loved about the movie in the first place?

Maybe Broadway needs to admit that they are all out of ideas when they're forced to scope the shelves of Blockbuster Video for inspiration. I suppose after singing cats, there's not much left in the well of inspiration. Perhaps it's time to produce sequels to successful musicals. How about a follow-up to "Grease" with the gender roles reversed and a rousing song-and-dance number about the game of Bowling? Oh wait...