It’s not that I hated Chicago; it’s just that I’m getting tired of hearing the stars talk about how hard they worked.  And, I’ll admit, I’m put off by the number of people I hear buzzing about how surprised they are at the actors’ musical skills.

I feel like grabbing people by the collar and saying, “It’s a MUSICAL.  They’re SUPPOSED to be able to sing and dance!”  Instead, people are responding as they once did to a famous animal act:  it’s not how well they performed their trick, it’s the fact they could do it at all. 

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.  After all, the amateur has really come into his own in the new millennium, what with American Idol, Star Search, The Bachelor, Fear Factor, and other so-called reality shows dominating prime time television...not to mention Jackass. 

But if amateurism is embraced, it stands to reason that people have lost their respect for professionalism.  In fact, they may have forgotten what the word means.  

Gene Kelly and Van Johnson go into their dance in Brigadoon.

The word that comes to mind to describe their work is effortless.  That was the magic of Kelly and his peerless contemporary Fred Astaire.  You never saw them sweat.

Today, that quality might not be appreciated, or even understood, when so many

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performers subscribe to the Liza Minnelli look-how-hard-I’m-working credo.  Or to put it another way, more is more. 

Director Rob Marshall seems to feel that way, judging from the lack of modulation in Chicago.  Every number can’t be the closing number!

Marshall is also infected with MTV-itis , the inability to linger on a musical performer for more than a second or two at a time.  Richard Gere may have learned how to tap dance for Chicago (I’ve certainly heard enough about it on talk shows by now), but you’d hardly know it from the movie, which barely gives us a chance to see for all the cutaways. 

Fred Astaire famously demanded that the camera always show his full figure, head to toe, so audiences could see not just his nimble feet but his entire body in its graceful moves.  And that kind of presentation wasn’t restricted to dancers.  Watch Judy Garland sing “The Boy Next Door” in Meet Me in St. Louis and you’ll notice that it’s one continuous take, lasting several minutes.  Director Vincente Minnelli (Liza’s dad) cuts away just once, during a musical bridge in which Judy dances around the room, before returning to her window to complete the song. 

I’m not saying that modern filmmaking should revert to the way it was fifty or sixty years ago, or that ingenious editing has no place in musicals.  But I despair that the people who make music videos—and musical movies, apparently—have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

I’m sure there are singers and dancers today we wouldn’t mind watching for a couple of

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minutes at a time.  Catherine Zeta Jones does a fantastic job in Chicago, revealing her experience in stage musicals.  But even she, like her less musically gifted costars, is reduced to an MTV distraction. 

I would love to see more movie musicals, and I hope Chicago inspires some copycats to do just that.  But I also hope that producers seek out great talents who can sing, and dance, and command the screen, not because it’s so surprising or novel to see them in that mode...but because they’re great at what they do.