Let's put on a show!

There is a convention in musical movies, and now, musical TV shows, in which two or more of the performers decide to sing a song together. They jump up on the stage (there is usually a stage) and start singing, and a verse or two in, it becomes glaringly, embarrassingly apparent that this is no spur-of-the-moment performance. Without so much as a nod or a hand gesture, they trade lines back and forth, then break into perfect two or three-part harmony, to the delight of the assembled audience.

It always helps move the plot along, and we accept it as we watch, (in the same way we accept the dial-tone on the other end of the phone when the movie caller hangs up) but I've always found that it takes me out of the story. Does this happen to everyone, or just people who have experience performing music? Do non-musicians assume that real musicians are so talented they can just jam out a complex arrangement based on telepathy? Face it, the most realistic depiction of an impromptu vocal performance in the history of cinema is in "Spinal Tap" when the lads try to sing "Heartbreak Hotel" at Elvis' grave. And don't get me started on the band behind the singers...not only do they play every song in every key, they all know where that surprise modulation in the middle of the song is coming.

It happened in all the old musicals, you expected it when you saw Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby or Danny Kaye. But it persisted through The Sound Of Music, innumerable beach movies and right into the 90s, when musicals became almost exclusively the domain of animated children's fare, and the unacknowledged rehearsal ceased to be an issue. Now we have a slew of musical TV shows thanks to the technological breakthroughs that allow TV producers to bang off a half dozen professionally recorded and choreographed songs per episode, and the magically perfect improvs are back. (I'm going to excuse "Nashville" from this accusation, because outside of some over-perfect songwriting scenes, they've largely kept it pretty real)

So what would a real-life unpremeditated musical collaboration look like? A couple of weeks ago this circulated on social media, and we found the answer. There's no reason this couldn't happen, and it really looks like it probably did.