What Should Recorded Musicals Do?

One dreary weekend this past December, I decided to fight back the winter gray with the color and vibrancy of musical theater. I routed myself not to Times Square but to the closest AMC, which was screening the recorded live performance of the 2023 revival of Merrily We Roll Along. 

If you just shuddered in horror at the thought of seeing a recorded play or musical as a movie, wait, hear me out. Before I had ever seen one for myself, I assumed that a live theater performance put to film would offer the worst of both forms. As a bonafide theater-lover, I was skeptical of film’s ability to capture the magic of a live performance, and thought a static screen would flatten the energy and dimensionality of the stage. 

But then I saw one. It was 2017 in Montreal. Together with a friend, I had shuffled through the downtown slush of snow to my local movie theater to see the 2016 revival of Falsettos, an incredibly spare show that included just seven cast members and a set of gray, modularly designed stage furniture that the cast manipulated to form settings like a kitchen counter, a chess table, or a shrink's couch. The effect was stunning, even for a movie theater audience. We could see how the show’s scenes scaled to hold pomp or intimacy, or how the smallness of an actor juxtaposed at times with the largeness of the stage. The camera, with its powers to zoom in and out, could frame each setting in a way that heightened the viewer’s sense of immersion while staying faithful to the spirit of the show. I entered the movie theater a skeptic, but I left a believer.