Sweeney Todd
In recent years the musical has seen it's popularity sore with the likes of Hairspray charming the box office and Chicago going on to win the Best Picture Oscar.
And 2008 has seen this trend continue as a string of musicals have hit the big screen, enjoying a varying success.
And the year kicked off in fine style as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street arrived in cinemas with Johnny Depp in yet another Tim Burton production and it another slightly bizarre role.
Benjamin Barker is a simple barber with a beautiful wife and child. But he is falsely imprisoned by Judge Turpin who has an eye on Barker's wife. Fifteen years later Barker returns to London under the guise of Sweeney Todd. Recognised by pie maker Mrs Lovett Todd is informed that he wife is dead and his now teenage daughter is Judge Turpin's ward.
Together they devise a plan of revenge, with Todd practicing his murderous barbering skills on an unsuspecting general public, with the remains made into meat pie filling by Mrs Lovett.
On paper this movie should not work a tale of betrayal, murder, revenge and passion all set to Stephen Sondheim's music, with lead actors who have never sung before, is a concept that Ed Wood would have come up with.
But it's the Depp/Burton partnership, now into it sixth film and eighteenth year, that makes this picture so success.
Depp is quite simply fabulous as the ghoulish villain Todd, and a surprisingly good singer. While he is no Pavarotti, and he doesn't try to be, he seamlessly blends the lines between singing and acting making it appear the musical is a genre that he is very comfortable with and for his performance he bagged yet another Best Actor Oscar nomination.
For all the teeny boppers out there High School Musical fever once again took hold this autumn as the surprise success franchise finally got a big screen motion picture with all of it's original cast returning.
The core cast are on the verge of graduation and Troy and Gabriella face going separate ways as they both go to different colleges. The film stormed to the top of the box office, grossing a mammoth $42 million in it's opening weekend in the States.
But the musical that everyone has been talking about in 2008 has been Mamma Mia, the adaptation of the hit stage show starring Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan.
An independent, single mother who owns a small hotel on an idyllic Greek island, Donna (Streep) is about to let go of Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), the spirited daughter she’s raised alone. But Sophie has plans of her own as she invites three strangers to her wedding in a bid to find her father.
Seeing Meryl Streep belting out Super Trooper in a spandex may not be what we have come to expect from this Oscar winning actresses film but it's what you get with Mamma Mia.
And Streep's desire to participate in such a project further highlights her versatility as a performer as well as her ability not to take herself too seriously - and who would have known she was hiding a rather impressive set of vocal pipes.
While the younger members of the cast Amanda Seyfried and Dominic Cooper, who play love birds Sophie and Skye, are clearly a little more trained in the vocal department than their older co-stars and work well together but it is the likes of Streep, Walters, Brosnan and Firth that really do steal the show.
The film became the biggest grossing British movie of all time in the UK grossing almost £67 million and it has since gone on to become the fastest selling DVD of all time, beating the record held by Titanic.
Music movie Shine A Light, which documented The Rolling Stones' concerts at The Breacon Theatre in New York by martin Scorsese, was also a success.
However it was well worth it as Jagger and co are a shining example of everything that is sex, drug and rock and roll, I suppose in a way it’s a miracle that any of them have survived their excessive lifestyle but survived it they have and lost it they haven’t as they are as good now as they were thirty years ago.
But the musical looks like it's not going to go away as Fame, Follies and Nine are all expected to be released next year and High School Musical 4, Hairspray 2 and Footloose are all in the pipeline.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw