"Critics the world over have often loudly lamented that the movie musical is a dead art form - all "laid out to rest" with its hands across its chest, to paraphrase Oklahoma! However, while it is true that the musical no longer occupies the cherished place of prominence in American cinema that it once did, the old razzle-dazzle has had a comeback." "Author and film expert John Kenneth Muir faces the music in Singing a New Tune, a study that traces the rebirth of the film musical from the dark days of the early 1990s - when all but one of the musical numbers were cut from the film I'll Do Anything due to preview audience hostility - to the current heyday of Moulin Rouge, Chicago (Academy Award winner for Best Picture 2002), and Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera." "Examining over a dozen musical films from the last decade, Muir explains how first-class artists have marshaled everything from spectacle (Evita) to humor (South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut); tragedy (Dancer in the Dark) to Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost); and even psychology and sexuality (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Singing Detective, Chicago) in an all-out campaign to revive a toerapping art form that no longer remains precisely, to quote The King and I, America's "cup of tea."" "He charts its revival in the independent film movement of the 1990s and also chronicles the recent history of original television musicals, including an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Muir paints for readers a picture of a genre in transition, a great modern, musical mutation."--BOOK JACKET.