By Ella Kemp
In 2003, The National’s frontman Matt Berninger promised a girl he would ‘love her to ribbons’, and sang of ‘her pretty little name’ – a similar agenda to that of Cyrano de Bergerac in Joe Wright’s romantic new film Cyrano, for which the band wrote the soundtrack. On ‘Murder Me Rachael’, from The National’s debut album Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, Berninger sings: ‘I sew it in my skin/She’ll never go away.’ It’s the kind of tragically romantic writing that announced the band as contemporary masters of heartbreak – desperately, and perhaps sometimes reluctantly, attuned to just how searing every day can feel when you’ve just fallen in love but can already anticipate disaster.
It’s the kind of extreme emotional whiplash tailormade for the movie musical, a genre that can sometimes be impossibly over-the-top while still requiring a degree of subtlety to land as well as its stage counterpart. A number of the catchiest and most popular showtunes (the likes of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s back catalogue, from Dear Evan Hansen to The Greatest Showman) favour direct, formulaic patterns to get a point across, and struggle to survive away from the physical presence of those performing them.
