OSCAR PERFORMANCES: Dreamgirls (2006)

Not all passion projects are created equal…

Dreamgirls, on paper, ought to be a home run movie. It’s a landmark musical with an almost entirely black cast, led prominently by three female characters. It was a runaway hit on Broadway and won 6 Tony Awards in 1982. Yet many who went to see this movie in 2006 were completely unaware of its past history. Enter Bill Condon, a fan of the original run of the musical who had been pushing for years to make this film? He got a dream cast with a mix of incredible singers and great actors. And then Bill Condon just completely botched the movie. This is one of those cases where the captain of the ship has literally no idea what the course is, and runs the whole thing aground. Which is doubly frustrating, because this film had such potential to be its own landmark production. Instead, it’s a hackneyed mess that sucks all of the life out of this fantastic story.

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Intro music taken from the Second Movement of Ludwig von Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Hong Kong (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 HK) license. To hear the full performance or get more information, visit the song page at the Internet Archive.