Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost and the Return of the Hollywood Musical: Song of the Living Dead

The recent suggestion of a revival of the movie musical as a major genre is both tantalizing and dissatisfying. On the one hand, the movie musical does seem to be reemerging-or struggling back via various routes into mainstream filmmaking and audience consciousness. On the other hand, if Raymond Williams is right about nostalgia, then like all revivals this one too will inevitably fail to live up to the utopia of childhood memory. Thus when Branagh conjures the aura of the classic movie musical in his screen adaptation of Love's Labour's Lost (2000), the result exhibits both the attractions of the genre to contemporary filmmakers and its likely irretrievability. In the critical light of such very different responses as Katherine Eggert's and Michael Friedman's, Branagh's LLL might best allowed to fade into oblivion. But Woody Allen's Everybody Says I Love You (1996), a nostalgic critique of the genre that simultaneously lays out the impediments to its resuscitation, reveals why the movie musical will likely persist-the generic equivalent of the living-dead. An exemplary instance of this zombie genre, Branagh's Shakespearean foray into the movie musical constitutes a strange episode in its ostensible reemergence-a case in which the re-creation of film history is meant to modernize Shakespeare even as the 'Shakespearean' is meant to underwrite a cinematic revival.