You'll believe a man can fly. You'll buy Tim Allen as Santa and Tom Cruise as Vlad Jr. You'll put faith in werewolves with receding hair lines, digital dinosaurs and aliens who phone home.
But will you believe something quite so fantastic as a young couple swept up in the swells of love spontaneously breaking into song?
Try to remember . . . if you can.
"This is not an attempt to redesign the musical for the '90s," announces director Michael Ritchie between takes for his new picture on a Hollywood sound stage, headphones lowered around his neck, sights high. "I really do want to bring back the old-fashioned movie musicals, where the characters sing their thoughts and feelings to one another." He chuckles, as if to acknowledge and dismiss the inherent idea that this might be just a little anachronistic.
Against just about all odds, Ritchie has a full-scale, traditional, major-studio movie musical in the improbable making: "The Fantasticks," being prepared by United Artists for a Thanksgiving release.
Along with original lyricist Tom Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt, Ritchie is adapting the film from a show that has been running for 35 consecutive years in the same Off Broadway theater and, with nearly 20,000 registered productions in the United States alone, has established itself as the century's most oft-produced musical.
In theatrical circles, the show's endless run is a running joke, its very title a kind of kitschy shorthand for the mysteries of eternal life. But dramaturgic immortality was little guarantee that a movie version was at all likely, especially now. For at least a quarter-century, of course, Hollywood has equated the live-action film musical with benign viewer neglect and agonizing box-office death.
Ever since Sir Richard Attenborough botched "A Chorus Line" 10 years ago, few have had the temerity to put into production a major picture based on an established theatrical musical property. The scant recent-memory attempts at creating an original film musical from scratch have either bombed ("Newsies") or been aborted ("I'll Do Anything").
But with Ritchie's determination not to let the genre go gentle into that good night, the final death knell appears not to have quite yet rung on America's most uniquely indigenous film form.
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Ritchie is in high spirits as production moves into its final weeks of the shoot, which has been filming in central Arizona and around Los Angeles, and he comes still nearer to realizing a 3 1/2-decade-old dream.
"This is not an attempt to do what Bob Fosse did with 'Cabaret,' where you were in a theater and Joel Grey was singing performance numbers to an audience, and the plot wasn't moved forward by the singing," he says. "And I think if Jim Brooks' 'I'll Do Anything' existed with even the remote possibility that the musical numbers could be taken out and the story would still make sense, it wasn't really a musical.
"To me, the musical is defined by, say, 'My Fair Lady.' If you take out 'The Rain in Spain' or 'I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face,' there is no story. After all, Henry Higgins would never say what he really felt to Colonel Pickering or anybody else; he would only say it in a sort of soliloquy. And 'The Fantasticks' has four or five of those very revealing moments in song."
Suggested by an Edmund Rostand play, Jones' slightly surrealist coming-of-age story concerns the plot of two farmer fathers to make their contrarily minded teen-agers fall in love. The dads' co-conspirator in matchmaking, a mysterious, possibly sinister impresario named El Gallo, ends up indoctrinating the kids in the chillier realities as well as the rosier hues of romance.
In the '60s, the show produced hits in the form of "Try to Remember" and "Soon It's Gonna Rain," which for a while was Barbra Streisand's signature song. Still, there is the nagging fear that today's core audiences, weaned on grittier fare, may take a look at all this post-Higginsian singing and dancing and collectively utter, \o7 By George, I don't think I get it\f7 .
On a bench outside the sound stage, 23-year-old lead actress Jean Louisa Kelly slips off the pointe shoes she has been wearing for the "Abduction Ballet" dance, takes a deep breath, and allows herself to worry a little that her peers might indeed be past the point of no return.
"I think it's difficult now for audiences to let go of reality," Kelly says. "When they're watching musicals, I've heard people say, 'That's not realistic! Why would they just start singing?'
"But," she adds with a slight, sweet smile, "I think they can believe it if they \o7 try!\f7 I mean, science fiction requires a suspension of disbelief, but people allow themselves to sit back and enjoy it anyway."
