Joker 2: Musicals That Could Influence Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn

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The movie is about Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli), a mediocre cabaret singer in 1931 Weimar Germany who’s there at the eve of the Nazis’ rise to political power—the story is based on Christopher Isherwood’s real life accounts of Berlin as it descended into the abyss. Sally thinks she is going to one day be a great star of the stage, but she’s really just deluding herself while killing time with a green tourist/writer (Michael York in the Isherwood role) and her other paramours. Few of them can even bother to notice Hitler Youth singing in the biergartens or how their charismatic but depraved Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey) is beginning to slip horrifying Antisemitism into the cabaret numbers.

I’ll eat my hat if Gaga doesn’t get her own version of a “Mein Herr” number from this film, which was added for the movie to show off Minelli’s voice and Fosse’s gift for choreographing physical movement. It was subsequently put into all future stage productions. However, more than just the soiled grandeur of Harley imitating Sally Bowles, the film’s vision of a culture so disengaged from the decadence and decay of their society feels very on brand for Phillips’ vision of Gotham, and indeed the last six years or so of our reality. As does Joel Grey’s Oscar winning performance as the M.C. The way Grey’s M.C. comments on the events of Cabaret in song like a Greek chorus of devils could be an influence on how Phoenix’s own Joker could carry a showtune, if only in his own head.

All That Jazz (1979)

Another 1970s Fosse musical that feels like it could fit the world of Joker like spoiled peanut butter and molding jelly is Fosse’s other big screen masterpiece, All That Jazz. This Palme d’Or winner was co-written and directed by Fosse after his first brush with death and open-heart surgery. Here he casts Roy Scheider (yes that one from Jaws) as his onscreen doppelgänger, an award-winning Broadway director and filmmaker who’s the most arrogant narcissist who’s ever dared to challenge audiences’ sympathies. Fosse also casts his real-life girlfriend and muse Ann Reinking as Scheider’s paramour in the movie, plus a wider supporting cast who play figures from his own life, including Jessica Lange as the literal angel of death and the protagonist’s fantasy BFF.

The film would go on to predict Fosse’s own demise eight years later as Scheider’s Joe Gideon refuses to change his ways after his first heart attack and continues to consume copious amounts of drugs, booze, cigarettes, and women while having nightmarish delusions of musical grandeur on death’s door in which classics from Fosse’s youth are given a macabre glow-up: He imagines his loved ones pleading with him through song and dance as he falls further into madness, and closer to Death Herself. If you don’t think there won’t be fantasy numbers in Arthur Fleck’s asylum taken straight from this approach, well you obviously don’t know the power of jazz hands!

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979)

Many film lovers today might think of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp when they hear the title Sweeney Todd, but any good fan of Stephen Sondheim knows it was originally the musical genius’ grandest and most tragic epic. And we can count Phillips among Sondheim’s admirers since he includes the Sondheim song “Send in the Clowns” (from the 1973 musical A Little Night Music) twice in the first Joker film; it is initially heard when some finance bros unconvincingly know all the words while picking a fight with the sad clown on the subway. It’s heard again via Frank Sinatra’s cover during the end credits.

So it seems like a good bet Phillips probably owns the original Broadway cast recording of Sweeney Todd, featuring Len Cariou as Sweeney and Angela Lansbury as his scheming landlady Mrs. Lovett. In that musical Sweeney is a figure of operatic tragedy when he returns to 19th century England after spending 15 years in the Australian penal colony for a crime he didn’t commit. After discovering his wife is dead and that his daughter has been raised as the ward of the corrupt judge who framed him, Sweeney gives into nihilism and goes on a serial killing spree—Mrs. Lovett, ever the enterprising go-getter, doesn’t let the opportunity go to waste and begins cooking the remains of Sweeney’s victims into her apparently flavorful meat pies. The two soon became the toast of working class London, lovers and lunatics.

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