This next post is something a bit different, as it’s about sing-a-long musical movies. I haven’t been to that many but the first time I saw a sing-a-long movie at the cinema was our trip to see ‘The Greatest Showman’ at Dundee Odeon in February 2018. We had seen a regular (packed out!) non sing-a-long showing in Arbroath in January that year and I guess we must have liked it to go again so soon! As the movie was still pretty new when we went to the first sing-a-long, it wasn’t quite the big phenomenon yet so people weren’t really singing along or anything. We had gone along expecting to belt out the big tunes and were a bit surprised at the sedate audience and lack of atmosphere. Therefore, it was a definite contrast when I went along to the Whitehall Theatre in Dundee in March 2019 with my Mum and our lovely friend, Steph, to watch a second sing-a-long version of the (by now much more well-known) circus-based musical. At this event at the Whitehall, people of all ages were dressed up and using props and going wild for the songs and shouting and singing along before the songs had even started. In fact, there was a fire alarm halfway through but no one in the audience barely even seemed to notice and it felt like the already loud volume on the film just increased (although that could have been the woman near us who was ‘giving it laldy’ as the Scots phrase goes, climbing on the seats etc.) We’d never really been to anything like this before and it made all other theatre and movie trips seem pretty tame and calm in comparison (well, apart from the Footloose show we saw in Aberdeen where the crowd shrieked every time Gareth Gates, playing Willard, came on stage - review of that show here).
To carry on with ‘The Greatest Showman’ and Whitehall theme, Mum and I also went to the Whitehall in Dundee to see a local production of ‘Barnum’ put on by the Downfield Musical Society in May 2019, just two months after the sing-a-long. ‘Barnum’ is a musical which opened in 1980 and was written by Cy Coleman, Mark Bramble and Michael Stewart and tells the story of 19th century entertainer and showman, PT Barnum, who Hugh Jackman plays in the 2017 ‘Greatest Showman’ movie. ‘Barnum’ is less well-known than ‘The Greatest Showman’ these days but, so I have read, it provides a slightly more realistic portrayal of PT Barnum (showing a less likable and darker side to him) and I have also read that this Barnum is more true to the real man than Jackman’s character. For instance, one of the songs from ‘Barnum’ is called ‘There is a sucker born ev’ry minute’, which already gives the idea of a much more cynical and less friendly or feelgood portrayal and story than ‘The Greatest Showman’. The title of the song is a phrase that is often associated with Barnum but it is not confirmed whether or not he actually said it. I’ve never heard about any other productions of ‘Barnum’ but we performed ‘One brick at a time’, which is one of the songs in the musical, in one of our Song Shop productions back in Montrose in something like 2016.
The songs in ‘The Greatest Showman’ were written by Pasek and Paul and the film stars Hugh Jackman, Zendaya, Zac Efron (who will always and forever be known as Troy Bolton), Michelle Williams and Rebecca Ferguson, although unusually for a modern movie musical, Ferguson didn’t actually sing her big number ‘Never Enough’ as singer-songwriter, Loren Allred, sang it instead (with Ferguson miming.) The music in this film has become so famous and beloved and it includes massive songs such as the anthem for self-acceptance that is ‘This is me’, ‘A million dreams’, ‘Rewrite the stars’, ‘Never enough’ and ‘Tightrope’ ( Michelle Williams sounds so amazing on this track.)
This isn’t related to ‘Barnum’ or ‘The Greatest Showman’, but in February 2020, we went back to the Whitehall to see a ‘Grease’ movie sing-a-long and while it wasn’t quite as wild as the ‘Showman’ one, everyone still went all out with wigs and props. It was interesting to see how beloved and important ‘Grease’ is for a lot of people, forty-three years after the movie was released (an earlier post about 'Grease' can be found via this link). Also, as it was just one month before the first lockdown, it was one of the last times we went to the cinema or to watch any kind of musical with an audience, so it will always be quite memorable for that reason too.
