ABSTRACT
Musicals are often, wrongly, regarded as a globalized art form of effortless innocence that is designed to bring simple pleasures to its audiences. What musicals truly offer their audiences are complex interdisciplinary creations that allow their creators to articulate the audience's deepest fantasies, fears, and anxieties through a subversive presentation of song and dance'. Musical comedy films have a long history of lifting America and the rest of the world out of depressing political and social times and it seems that once again this light-hearted yet substantial film has certainly ticked a lot of boxes even amongst non-traditional musical theatre fans. There are musicals such as Dancer in the Dark and London Road that have entirely revolutionised the film musical genre. The recent trends of singing live on camera, non-musical celebrity casting, raising audience expectations, deviations from the canon norm and the introduction of performance of 'the self' have shaped contemporary appreciation and experience of film musicals.
