Of the sadly many dwindling artforms whose slow (or rapid) declines we’ve been mourning over the years, the original musical is high on my list of sorrows. Broadway struggles to launch successful new works — meaning, ones not based on a movie we’re nostalgic for, or built around the jukebox catalog of a beloved artist — and they’re practically non-existent on film, save for some arthouse stuff like Leos Carax’s Annette or Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End. We’re starved for new stories set to new songs. Culture has also been doing some fretting about the state of the movie star, as one class ages into their golden years and not terribly many…
