La La Land: A Consummate Musical (feat. David McNeill)

What are the tenets that make up the genre of musicals, and why do people have an aversion to this hyper expressive, and otherwise magical genre of storytelling? We discuss this and more in this week's episode, alongside Zeroindent's David McNeill.

You can read an excerpt and listen to the full episode below.

Michi: Musicals are a weird medium. You either have people that love them or people that hate them, but you don't have anyone in-between.

David: Like an antipathy.

Michi: Yeah, and why is that? It's obviously because most of the people I speak to about this movie, they're like "aw I f***ing hate it" and I ask them why and they say, "because its a musical".
And I ask, "Ok why don't you like musicals?" and it's because people break out into dance all the time, and sure that's creative, like you said Pat, but people hate that because it doesn't feel realistic. People watch films and they want to be immersed in emotion. In this case, its a romantic movie, and so they want to be immersed in the idea of love, and a bittersweet ending of a life that never was. Integrating all this singing and dancing breaks you away from that, and it's disillusioning, and that's why some people don't like musicals.  

David: I noticed for the first time ever from watching a musical, that I periodically found some of the music overwhelming, for the first time in my life. I was like "wow this is almost too much for me"

Michi: Like emotionally overwhelming?

David: Like sensory and emotionally, both. I think those things go hand in hand in a musical, which is what you were alluding to before, where people are used to dialogue and action being two separate things. A musical is like a blending of those delivered via music. It's like the action and the dialogue are fused together through the medium of a song.
You need to be in the right headspace to consume that much noise. Not in a bad sense, but in a literal sense, just the amount of information you're consuming is a lot at once.

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