Any of you have the balls?
The main reason why most film and TV musicals are backstagers is simple: it provides a ready-made excuse for people to sing. Just like a movie such as 42nd Street, Smash is a musical where most of the original songs (by the Hairspray team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman) are performed either as part of the show within a show, or as fantasy sequences where the characters imagine themselves performing. “I always think of backstage musicals as musicals for people who don’t have the balls to make a musical,” says classic film historian Scott Eyman (author of Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille).
– excerpt from MacClean‘s on NBC’s Smash
Postscript: If backstage musicals are “for people who don’t have the balls to make a musical,” then those folks in the Freed Unit (as well as my man, Gene Kelly) were packin’. 
(Also, here’s me on NBC’s Smash.)
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Professor of film and Shakespeare. Advocate of social media. Lover of popular culture,