Music critic Terry Teachout salutes Tim Burton and Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd as "easily the most innovative movie of its kind to be made since Bob Fosse’s 1972 Cabaret" and "the best and most artistically serious film ever to be made from a Broadway musical." As Teachout points out, in the early days of al-singing, all-dancing Hollywood musicals, Hollywood routinely raided Broadway for songs and stars and even the titles of hit shows, but generally came up with their own stories for the movie versions; what worked on stage was understood to be different from what worked on screen. "In a Broadway musical, fictional characters sing and dance in everyday situations. On stage, this improbable convention is readily accepted by audiences, since the performers are physically present in the theater and can thus be seen to be 'real,' just as an actor who steps out of the onstage action of a play to address the audience directly does not thereby compromise our sense of his reality. For this reason, stage musicals need not be firmly based on a realistic plot and can make use of non-naturalistic 'presentational' techniques But the live-action sound film, consisting as it does of photographed movement, is essentially a realistic storytelling medium. . . These constraints necessarily caused golden-age film musicals to make use of conventionally naturalistic plots and, typically, to include fewer songs than did stage musicals of the same period. . . Moreover, the songs were far more likely to be performed in settings that 'explained' why the characters were performing them."

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