I’d like to think that I am well versed in the world of musicals or musical theatre for that matter. My mother was a theatre director and teacher for most of her entire life and as a kid I was raised on West Side Story and Oklahoma. I credit it to being the reason I’m a hopeless romantic and a reason why I love movies. It’s always the music that draws me to enjoying a musical, but it’s also a matter of production, and spectacle that makes a movie musical the complete experience of cinema. Ryan Murphy takes his swing with his newest venture- The Prom, which is a mixture of Mama Mia and the Trolls movies, and if that sounds terrible it’s because it is. The cast is big- Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, James Corden, Kerry Washington, and more- but what The Prom does not have is a single tune to hum. In fact, this is a musical with so much sparkle and flash injected into the sets that it’s more inspired by the Las Vegas strip than anything Stephen Sondheim gave us.
