While Broadway’s show-stopping tunes, dancers and stars might seem to determine this film genre, the Hollywood musical has a more complex social and cultural history. At times, it has dutifully translated Broadway success into lavish new productions, reaching audiences far from Manhattan. Hollywood also has widened the scope of music, dance and story, creating magic with mice, mermaids and Astaire, using music to underpin or label the action rather than move it along, and targeting new audiences.

The Hollywood musical responds to the Hollywood silent, which actually relied on accompanying sound. In addition to filming existing musicals, operettas and Vaudeville acts, Hollywood explored backstage comedies (42nd Street, Warner Bros, 1933), biopics (The Great Ziegfeld, MGM, 1936). Filmed dancing showed elegance defying physics and human limits in choreography (Busby Berkeley’s directing, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing at RKO Studio), especially when MGM polished the film. Whether audiences escaped the Depression or explored new techniques of sound and vision, 1930s musicals defined a first golden age, including children’s classics like Shirley Temple movies, The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939) and Disney’s animated Snow White (1937).

Above all, these were consummate products of a studio system able to marshal legions of stars to sing and dance. Theme songs and associated music also developed in this era for dramatic and comedic films.

Musicals went to war in the 1940s with a relentlessly cheery and patriotic face (e.g.

Yankee Doodle Dandy, Warner, 1942). This also set the stage for a renewed golden age, stretching to the 1960s, when mature stars and new talents meshed in bigger and bigger productions that would begin to crash in the late 1960s. Characterized by an overall “niceness,” even when dealing with race, class, gambling or selling a soul to the devil for baseball glory MGM and other studios produced a string of classics like Singin’ in the Rain (MGM, 1952), which recast the story of musicals themselves, An American in Paris (MGM, 1951) and The Kïng and I (Twentieth Century FOX, 1956), with stars like Gene Kelly Julie Andrews, Leslie Caron and Rex Harrison. Musicals, in fact, captured an unprecedented five Oscars for Best Picture after 1958’s Gigi (MGM): West Side Story (1961); My Fair Lady (Warner, 1964); Sound of Music (FOX, 1965) and Oliver! (Columbia, 1968). In 1964, in fact, musicals swept the major categories, drawing in Julie Andrews for her performance in Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) as well. By the late 1960s, success gave way to larger and ponderous failures like Paint Your Wagon (1969) and Mame (1974). Star power also became a point of conflict as non-singing (or nondancing) stars were dubbed into parts in ways that disconnected them from fundamental action and brought the genre to a long dry spell from the 1970s onwards, broken by stellar exceptions like the work of Barbra Streisand or Cabaret (1972).

But Hollywood musicals also looked beyond Broadway. Disney, for example, has its own tradition of animated musicals translated into Broadway after the success of Beauty and the Beast (1991) and The Lion Kïng (1993). Recording artists and appeals to teenage audiences were also important from roles showcasing Sinatra in the 1930s and 1940s to those that followed Elvis in the 1950s, the Beatles in the 1960s and “soundtrack” musicals like Saturday Nïght Fever (1977) or The Big Chill (1983), where music moves the action but surges from the stereo or background to do so. Whitney Houston’s romantic role in the diva-pic The Bodyguard (1992) also underscores the integration of the musical, although African Americans were sometimes trapped in all-black stories not so far from Broadway segregation (Cabin in the Sky, 1943; Carmen Jones, 1956; The Wiz, 1978). Meanwhile, the centrality of movie themes and scores (marketed with blockbuster movies) creates yet another domain of musical entertainment.