  urlLink Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera The trailer for the Christmas 2004 release of the musical Phantom of the Opera was released today. I find the trailer to be very choppy and not a great piece of advertising. The choppy editing in the trailer could mean a bad movie musical - which by is unacceptable.
The editing is perhaps the more important in a movie musical than in any other type of film. Here's why: In the MTV age where music videos are edited with abrupt jumps and cuts, this is a noticeably common problem in the recent outcrops of new movie musicals. Filmmakers feel audiences are kept on their toes when watching such editing. But musicals tell much more of a story through the music and dance than a pop video. The STORY must come first, cuts and edits should be made at shifts in emotion, thought, verse, sequence, NOT "as fast and as often as possible. " Choreographer and Hollywood director, urlLink Busby Berkley , was one of the first that pioneered cinematic techniques that highlighted choreography. Rob Marshall was HIGHLY successful with urlLink Chicago , utilizing cinematic editing to effectively tell the story.
Unfortunately, the awful made-for-television tragedy (as a result of poor editing), urlLink Meridith Wilson's The Music Man will be airing this Sunday, July 4th. Let's keep our fingers crossed for the Cole Porter biopic urlLink De-Lovely , which opens this weekend, and the movie version of the popular stage musical urlLink The Producers , in theaters Christmas 2005. However, the latter will feature Will Ferrel as Franz Liebkind, which is bound to ruin that... 
