DREAMGIRLS (2006)

Originally published August 3, 2007

(Colour, 2006) 130m. / Directed by Bill Condon / Music by Henry Krieger, Lyrics by Tom Eyen / Starring Jamie Foxx, Beyonce Knowles, Eddie Murphy, Jennifer Hudson, Danny Glover, Anika Noni Rose (DreamWorks / Paramount)

The musical that eventually became Dreamgirls began its existence as a vehicle for Nell Carter, who had earlier appeared in The Dirtiest Show In Town for writer Tom Eyen and composer Henry Krieger.  In 1978, a workshop was held for the Public Theatre’s Joseph Papp, and Carter was joined by Sheryl Lee Ralph and Loretta Devine, but ultimately Carter became unavailable when she joined the cast of the daytime drama Ryan’s Hope.  The project became renewed with the interest of Michael Bennett, who saw in the show a perfect vehicle for his film-like direction and choreography.  The history of Bennett’s involvement with the show and its subsequent workshops and drastic re-workings through to the triumphant opening night are well documented, and would take up too much space to recount here with any accuracy.  Gospel singer Jennifer Holliday  was eventually persuaded to take on the role of Effie (after the part was expanded to suit her), and the show opened on December 20, 1981.

For Dreamgirls, Michael Bennett engineered the show to utilize his trademark fluid staging and the almost intuitive-seeming choreography of his earlier work (most especially evident in Follies, Company, and A Chorus Line) and here Bennett created a truly near-cinematic experience.  Massive moving light scaffolds onstage were incorporated into the choreography, enabling scene changes and, in one case, a full costume change in mid-scene, to mirror the effects of fade-outs, camera moves and cuts.  The evening was almost entirely through-sung, and Bennett’s dynamic staging kept the show in constant motion, only stopping for intermission.

In its initial run, Dreamgirls ran 1,521 performances and scored a whopping 13 Tony nominations, taking home wins for Best Book (Tom Eyen), Best Actor (Ben Harney), Best Actress (Jennifer Holliday), Best Featured Actor (Cleavant Derricks), Best Lighting Design (Tharon Musser) and Best Choreography (Michael Bennett and Michael Peters).  The 1981 season was also the year of another choreographer/visionary, and Tommy Tune’s production of Maury Yeston’s Nine, a musical based loosely on Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, ran away with the awards for Best Musical, Best Score and Best Director, among others.  Other musicals in the running for the major awards of note that year were  Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and the flops The First (with a book by film critic Joel Siegel) and the abortive 14th century-set rock opera Marlowe.

In both its stage and screen incarnations, Dreamgirls is the story of the rise of the girl group The Dreamettes, led by the outspoken Effie White (Holliday), backed by the beautiful Deena Jones (Sheryl Lee Ralph) and their friend Lorrell (Loretta Devine).  After losing the amateur night contest at the Apollo Theatre due to the machinations of Cadillac salesman Curtis Taylor, Jr. (Harney), the girls get their big break singing backup for soul singer James “Thunder” Early (Derricks).  The show tracks the rise of the girls as they break off to become a solo act and, due to Taylor’s desire to “cross over” onto the mainstream pop charts, force Effie to cede the microphone to Deena.  After a tumultuous scene which culminates in the rafter-rattling declaration “I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Effie leaves the group, now called The Dreams, and the second half of the show follows the leads as they pursue their own dreams of career and relationships.

Song List:

I’m Looking for Something, Baby

Goin’ Downtown
Takin’ the Long Way Home
Move (You’re Steppin’ on My Heart)
Fake Your Way to the Top
Cadillac Car
Big*
Steppin’ to the Bad Side
Steppin’ to the Bad Side
Party, Party
Love You I Do**
I Want You, Baby
Family
Dreamgirls
Press Conference
Heavy
Walkin’ Down the Strip
It’s All Over
And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going
Dreams Medley
I Am Changing
Vogue Sequence
When I First Saw You
Patience***
Ain’t No Party
Perfect World**
I Meant You No Harm
The Rap
I Miss You, Old Friend
One Night Only
One Night Only (Disco Version)
Listen****
I’m Somebody
Hard to Say Good-Bye
Dreamgirls (Reprise)

*The intro recitative and opening lines of “Cadillac Car” have been reduced to a jazzy background instrumental.

** Lyrics by Siedah Garrett

***Lyrics by Willie Reale

**** Additional music by Scott Cutler & Beyonce Knowles, and lyrics by Anne Preven

BLUE indicates Broadway songs removed for the film version; RED indicates songs altered considerably from their original form; GREEN indicates songs added specifically for the film version.

The long-gestating film version of Dreamgirls finally started to become a reality in the wake of the popular and critical success of the film version of Chicago (2002).  Producer David Geffen, who had been involved with the original Bennett production (and who historically has received the brunt of the criticism for producing the savagely-cut original cast recording), was reportedly holding out the go-ahead for the film until he found the right vision for capitalizing on the show’s possibilities.  There had also been long-circulating rumors that Diana Ross, who rose to fame as the lead singer of The Supremes and was supposedly angered at the parallels between her story and that of the musical, was using her considerable influence to ensure that Dreamgirls would never reach the screen.

Geffen found his creative voice in the screenwriter of Chicago, Bill Condon, who had also directed the respected and moderate successes Gods & Monsters and Kinsey.  A name-brand cast of prominent actors was quickly lined up, with Jamie Foxx as shifty Cadillac dealer-turned-manager Curtis Taylor, Jr., former Destiny’s Child singer/aspiring actress Beyonce Knowles as Deena, Tony-winning actress Anika Noni Rose as Lorrell, Eddie Murphy as James “Thunder” Early and Danny Glover as his long-suffering manager/friend Marty.  A much-ballyhooed talent search went underway to find the “perfect” Effie White, a search that finally ended when the most commercially-obvious choice was made.  The part went to Jennifer Hudson, who had achieved popularity (if not the prize) on television’s insanely over-watched celebration of musical mediocrity, “American Idol.”

Dreamgirls was well-received critically, and was a moderate box office success, but was hardly the breakout hit that many industry insiders had predicted.  The film received eight Academy Award nominations:  Supporting Actor (Murphy), Supporting Actress (Hudson), Best Costumes, Best Art Direction, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Song nominations for “Listen,” “Patience,” and “Love You I Do.”  But the film walked away with only one win, for Hudson.  Despite some talk of a backlash against the film and its hard-hitting Oscar voting campaign, the general consensus (even including Condon, according to comments he made to The New York Times) was that the film got what it deserved.  Many believed that Murphy, who had seemed a sure thing going into the awards, sabotaged his own campaign by allowing his upcoming release Norbit (featuring the actor in grotesque drag) to be heavily promoted during the voting period.  In the end, Dreamgirls, which had been eagerly awaited by theatre lovers for over twenty years, played in cinemas and was quickly relegated to home video.

To anyone who has experienced the stage version, Dreamgirls offers a number of difficult challenges to adaptation, and perhaps no film version save one involving all of the original talents combined could have come close to recapturing that same experience on film.  Unfortunately, at the time the show was packing the aisles every night, the American movie musical was truly on the skids, having suffered a string of high-profile disasters in the wake of the phenomenon that was Grease.  Eager studios, hoping to cash in on what they hoped would be a wave, instantly crippled the genre with disco duds and theatrical misconceptions like The Wiz, Grease 2, Stayin’ Alive and Xanadu.  Not that these films are without merit, but their failure at the box office could hardly have been misread.  

After Chicago scored with both movie audiences and critics, however, the hunt was on for the next big-budget class act musical, and Dreamgirls would, on paper, look to be a most obvious candidate.  Particularly attractive to producers still uneasy about how a true musical (with spontaneous integrated singing and dancing in a non-performance setting) might be perceived by modern audiences is Dreamgirls’ mostly stage-bound story.  With every character existing either onstage or backstage, there seemed little risk in “opening up” certain aspects and keeping the musical moments strictly tied to realistic performances by the characters.  Hence, the Dreamgirls finally got their shot at the big screen.

Condon’s Dreamgirls hits major snags right out of the starting gate (not including the error of allowing the treacly DreamWorks logo music to open the film instead of the show’s distinctive cowbell).  The stage show opens with the “legendary talent contest” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and our three heroines are late because they have missed a train from Chicago.  For the film, we are at the fictional Detroit Theater (in, one assumes, Detroit), and the girls are late because Deena couldn’t sneak out until her mother fell asleep.  This renders Effie’s complaint about being tired not only completely nonsensical, but also plays into the Deena-centric version of the story the film is going to run with for the next two hours.  Which also raises another point:  on stage, Effie’s diva-like behavior and huge personality dominated the show, even though she remains off stage for a good portion of the second act.  In the film, when Effie is off-screen, she is forgotten.  

With the introduction of Marty (Glover) chasing the fleeing backup singers for “Thunder” Early (Murphy), the film tosses out the first of the musical score’s through-running recitatives and musical dialogues, all of which offer a counterpoint to concurrently performing “on-stage” moments.  Here Condon lays out the track he intends to follow for this adaptation – rather than offering us the “wall of sound” approach of the stage play, where all of the musical moments overlapped and fed into each other, Condon will stop the music and drop in straight dialogue scenes as exposition for what even on stage seemed a bit hackneyed and clichéd.  

This approach to Dreamgirls leaves the film wide open to the two very valid criticisms leveled against it:  (1) this is not a new story (see the vibrant, low-budget Sparkle, for one example of how this tale’s been told before) and (2) these songs in no way approach the authentic style and resonance of their true-life Motown counterpoints.  What made these scenes and songs work onstage was not the quality of the music (which is fine), but the energy and flow of the performances, which hardly stopped except for a handful of dialogue moments.  Condon threatens to echo the fatal errors of Sir Richard Attenborough’s depressingly misguided adaptation of another Michael Bennett triumph, A Chorus Line, which also relegated musical moments to the background in order to “flesh out” the most obvious and least interesting bits of dramatic action.

This decision also introduces new flaws into the musical as a whole, in that Condon has now denied a musical voice to a major character, that of Curtis (Foxx).  Reducing him to a purely speaking presence obliterates anything remotely appealing about a character who exists only to cause conflict between Effie and Deena, and also makes for an awkward moment late in the film when he must (because there’s nobody else who can) inexplicably sing “When I First Saw You.”  The opening lines of “Cadillac Car,” and what makes the number a galvanizing experience, are boiled down into tedious banter, and the number’s big laugh, the co-opting of the song by a white bubblegum pop group, comes across as an afterthought.

With Knowles the top-billed actress in the cast, Condon is forced to unwisely shift the focus (especially during the flaccid second half of the movie) toward Deena, and the film attempts to ennoble her character in order to make her more sympathetic to the audience.  Ironically, this robs Knowles of the chance to create a more interesting (i.e., flawed) character, and spoils what is arguably her finest performance to date by letting her run away with the film just when the audience’s focus should be entirely on Effie’s plight.

These are just a few examples of why the film never truly takes flight.  Murphy delivers a strong and moving performance as Early, but his musical through-line of predestined tragedy has been removed, along with the haunting “Show biz… that’s just show biz” refrain that runs through the Broadway score.  Rose, an outstanding performer who won a Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her work in Caroline, Or Change, is robbed her big emotional moment, the pay-off to her unfulfilled relationship with Early (and a guaranteed show-stopper) “Ain’t No Party,” and all she’s left with the hollow single refrain from the song:  “Lorrell and Jimmy are through.”  Hudson, the film’s newcomer, earned media attention for her powerhouse vocals as Effie, no big surprise to anyone who had seen her television performances.  But Hudson never truly inhabits the character, and when she is left adrift in speaking scenes, the lack of direction given to her acting performance (of which this is one of her first) is impossible to ignore.

It is here that I want to digress a bit to discuss a trend that's been emergent in movie musicals post-Chicago. In adapting Kander and Ebb's retelling of the Roxie Hart story, the decision was made to confine all the musical numbers to a stage environment, whether actual (the nightclub of the opening sequence) or imagined, as various characters imagine the songs as part of their own respective star turns. Having musical numbers that expressly take place inside a character's imagination is hardly a new innovation (a notable early example of this is the sprawling "Broadway Melody" sequence of 1952's Singin' in the Rain). Ken Russell's film of Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend makes extensive use of the device, giving us reinterpretations of what's being performed in the ramshackle titular production through the points of view of many of the performers, as well as a Hollywood movie director in the audience.

In these earlier instances, this was being used for narrative novelty, providing added variety and production value to numbers and to justify unusually expansive staging beyond the parameters of the established scene. Nowadays (to borrow an expression from Chicago), this sort of storytelling gymnastics is being used to underline a more troubling trend, which marks the emergence of what I like to call "the apologist musical."

The apologist musical sprang into existence as a result of nervous studio executives, clinging valiantly to the poor box office returns for The Wiz, Xanadu, et al. as an example that audiences "can't relate" to musicals any more, and find them "unrealistic" or stupid. They still want to make money off these properties, but hopefully without too much singing. Musicals like Dreamgirls and Les Miserables have made tons of money worldwide on their stage productions, and feature films offer the sweet promise of having that bankable show run forever with the same peerless cast-- all the studio has to do is reissue it again in every new media format that appears, but only if they can figure out a way to make them more realistic.

This concept, as mind-boggling as it is, explains the guiding force behind the decision to reduce Dreamgirls to a drama with some songs in it. It ignores the fact that what makes a show a hit is its ability to create its own world, with its own rules, including music that may or may not seem to come out of nowhere. Watching a musical tie itself into knots to justify the very existence of a song can be a tortuous experience, while a genuine musical embraces its own nature -- that's why nobody questions the validity of, say, something like South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut's "Mountain Town" opening number.

Which is all by way of saying that all of the omissions and hollow dialogue replacements are symptomatic of Dreamgirls being reduced to an apologist musical.  Once again, we are faced with a musical embarrassed of its own nature, awkwardly couching its musical moments into some sort of "realism" and cowering from the suggestion of any inner life.

The carefully orchestrated musical tapestry of the show has been cut away, leaving only a string of songs which can do nothing except reveal how sub-par they are to any audience inherently familiar with the true Motown sound.  The irrelevant “Patience,” a song devised to soften up Deena’s character even more, seems like something that might have been tuned in from the theatre next door, rather than anything relating to what should be the story of a girl group of the 1960s or 1970s.

This makes it sound as if there’s nothing to appreciate, musically, in the score for Dreamgirls, which is anything but the case.  The score is run through and through with the appropriated rhythms and beats of the sounds of the era, and several numbers (“Steppin’ to the Bad Side,” “I Am Changing,” “Hard to Say Good-Bye” and “One Night Only”) are exceptional in the way they serve as the characters’ performance songs and simultaneously comment on the action.  The songs are all fine Broadway songs, but no one will ever mistake them for anything the Supremes ever recorded.  This is why the score suffers without its supporting musical context; as a whole the show is a musical fable, and the film literalizes the score to a dangerous degree.

In the end, Dreamgirls is a serviceable film, with admirable talents involved in translating the story to the screen.  What it is not, however, is a great film musical.  In skirting the trappings of the genre and playing to perceived notions of what an audience will or will not accept from a musical, the movie fails to bring what was best about the show to life.  There is one moment, though, early in the “Fake Your Way to the Top” number, that hints at what the film could have been.  Early bangs out the intro to the song on a piano as the Dreamettes gather around to learn what they are going to have to perform.  As they’re rehearsing, the camera swings around them and suddenly they are on-stage, in front of the cheering crowd, performing.  It is a magical moment, serving the song and the story.  The scene then dissolves into a montage sequence of the girls on the road with Early, and we’re back to traditional film language again… but oh, for that moment, there were no apologies necessary.