Last weekend my husband took me to see “Singing in the Rain” at Hope Box Theatre in Kaysville, Utah for our Valentine’s Day date night. The show was spectacular. I was able to watch a few of my friends perform and was dazzled by the performances of many others I don’t know personally yet. If you get the chance to go see the show I highly recommend it. We were on the first row and didn’t even need ponchos for the usual “splash zone” that typically happens with the rain rigging required for the titular number.
Watching the show reminded me of a couple of things:
#1 How much I love the show “Singing in the Rain” where the lines are hysterical and almost every musical number is entertaining and memorable.
#2 How much the topic of the show has shaped entertainment history and my career
For those of you who don’t know, “Singing in the Rain” is a show that takes place during the late 1920s when most movies were silent pictures. The actors would act out a story on film and there would be frames that wrote out what they were saying like subtitles. The film would then be set to music played by an accompanist that was present onsite at the showing of the film. It wasn’t until the release of “The Jazz Singer” in 1927 that the film industry began adding sound to the picture.
Broadway had been around for a few years by then and Vaudville preceded it, but until the film industry took hold of talking motion pictures, the only way to make a living as a singer was on stage or in a nightclub. Now, the most entertaining form of sound was music and not just music, singing. Can you imagine your favorite movie without anyone singing? Think about it, even dramas and action films have at least one pop song in their soundtrack.
I am grateful for the impact that sound has made on the film industry and the music it has made accessible for generations since.
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