All Singing, All Dancing (aka Last Night At La La Land)

When "All Singing, All Dancing" (aka episode 5F24) first aired on January 4th 1998, it was the fourth installment in what, at the time, looked to be an established tradition of Simpsons clip shows. By now it seemed an accepted wisdom that these things were going to show up every other season or so (whether the fans appreciated them or not). In actuality, "All Singing, All Dancing" would prove to be the penultimate specimen in a doomed lineage - after this, clip shows as a practice just faded out, resurfacing briefly for a final hurrah (if you could call it that) with Season 13's "Gump Roast". It's well-documented (since they bring it up in every pertinent DVD commentary) that the production staff were not fond of the format and only made them out of executive obligation; in the case of "All Singing, All Dancing", it is perhaps a testament to how little they thought of the end-product that they trotted it out at a time when viewers might have been too preoccupied with getting the new year in order after the barrage of seasonal hangovers to worry terribly about that week's lack of original Simpsons content.

"All Singing, All Dancing" dropped midway through Season 9, a very patchy transitional period for the series consisting of holdovers from the Oakley-Weinstein era, the early days of Mike Scully's reign of terror and guest appearances from former showrunners Al Jean, Mike Reiss and David Mirkin (the last of whom oversaw "All Singing, All Dancing"). It's no secret that I don't much care for Season 9 as a whole; there's a lot I could say about the various missteps that were made that pushed the series off of course, but for now I'll just sum up my number one grievance -  this was the first season in five years not to feature an appearance from Sideshow Bob. Season 9 was an upsettingly Bob-free experience - Seasons 2 and 4, which had no actual Bob episodes, at least had the decency to give him non-speaking cameos. The sole acknowledgement he received in all of Season 9 was a very fleeting shout-out in "This Little Wiggy". Didn't that just jinx things good and proper?

The DVD cover art, though, is precious.

Being a clip show, you can bet that "All Singing, All Dancing" is seldom rated as one of the higher points of a wobbly season. There is, however, a valid sentiment underpinning this oft-maligned, music-driven mash-up - which is to say, hasn't The Simpsons yielded some legitimately brilliant sonic compositions over the years? "Who Needs The Kwik-E-Mart?" and "The Monorail Song" are both diabolical in their infectiousness. And face it, the only reason you rate "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" as highly as you do is because of Burns' "See My Vest" number (cards on table, is there really anything else about that episode that sticks out to you at all? Aside from maybe the Shar Pei?). It seems a waste, really, that The Simpsons Movie contained no comparable song and dance sequences - one can only imagine what they might have accomplished working within a theatrical scope - something I can only attribute to the animated musical being considered the trough of fashion in 2007.

The episode opens with Homer returning from the video store with the family's evening entertainment; Marge had requested Forest Whittaker's Waiting To Exhale (1995), starring Whitney Houston, while Lisa's heart was set on the back-up option, Douglas McGrath's adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma (1996), starring Gwyneth Paltrow. Both are disappointed by his actual choice, Joshua Logan's Paint Your Wagon (1969), starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, which Homer assumes will be a regular carnage-filled shoot-em-up western. But then, as we'd already seen in "Fear of Flying", Homer is a poor judge when it comes to deciphering the nature of a movie from its cover and title. He's appalled to discover that Paint Your Wagon is actually - get this - a musical, and that the characters solve their problems through singing and dancing instead of gruesome bloodbaths. Homer expresses his disdain for the picture by ejecting the rented VHS tape into the trash and denouncing singing as "the lowest form of communication", whereupon Marge and Lisa (who'd rated Paint Your Wagon as toe-tappin' fun) try to convince him of the powerful musical streak that runs deep throughout the town, backing up their point by referring to various euphonious interludes from previous adventures. The grand and inevitable irony being that this entire argument takes the form of a song.

Although these Simpsons clip shows are something that I've covered in the past with disproportionate passion (bolstered by the knowledge that nobody else on Earth is likely to share that passion, so if I don't provide them with such fawning, drawn-out analyses, who will?), I will state upfront that I never had any intention of extending that devotion to "All Singing, All Dancing". By the time we get to this one - and even more so with the final clip show, "Gump Roast" - I find my that my patience is somewhat tested and my opinions start aligning with the majority, which is to say that I'd sooner be watching a regular episode. I did, however, have a slight change of heart which made me want to go back and examine this one a little deeper. Out of sheer curiosity, I'd gone to look up the AV Club's review of "All Singing, All Dancing" and, after quite a bit of double-checking, determined that no such item existed. To the contrary, the AV Club has reviews for every Simpsons episode from Season 1 to 9 except this one lonesome pariah, which they appear to have very deliberately and stealthily skipped over, leaping directly from "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" to "Bart Carny" with no acknowledgement of all the musical fruitiness sandwiched in between. Odd, because they deemed all three previous clip shows worthy of their own individual write-ups. Did they really consider it such an impossibly daunting task to have to spin out a few paragraphs on this one? What was it about "All Singing, All Dancing" that made it so especially exasperating that the AV Club were compelled to throw in the towel, completism be damned? I felt as though a gauntlet was being extended to me, to delve in and see if this episode could withstand any kind of protracted probing. I guess the AV Club's omission awakened some deep protective instinct in me - which might not be enough to actually bring me around to "All Singing, All Dancing", mind, but I'm willing to give it a fair shake.

While I consider it somewhat brazen that they skipped it altogether (if you're going to be undertaking that kind of rigid, episode-by-episode analysis, then I'm not sure you're really in a position to be differentiating between worthy and unworthy episodes), I can sympathise with the AV Club's trepidation. "All Singing, All Dancing" is a gut-wrenching episode to anybody looking to say anything at all substantial, and at length, because it hinges on quite possibly the thinnest premise the series had boasted up until this point. There's very little plot linking the clips together - once we get past the Paint Your Wagon opening (which is really good), the family just discuss (in song form) how much they love/hate singing, between "music videos" culled from previous episodes. The selection of clips itself is honestly pretty solid - if you just want to review a collection of musical highs from the series back-to-back, then "All Singing" mightn't be too offensive - but judged as a Frankenstein entity on its own terms, there is a certain frothiness about it, as liable to irritate as to disarm. Overall, I think that most of the entertainment value I've derived from "All Singing, All Dancing" comes not from the content of the episode itself, but from how two members of my own family each related to it:

1. For a while (possibly still) this was my brother's pick for the prestigious title of Worst. Episode. Ever. He had no profound objection to any of the previous three clip shows, but took tremendous issue with this one. Which largely seemed to be on account of Bart's line, "Springfield swings like a pendulum do!" That line REALLY pissed him off. Not that I can blame him - those are some pretty atrocious lyrics.
   
2. Generally speaking, my dad hates musicals, and would no doubt sympathise with Homer's stance therein. There are, however, two musicals for which he's willing to make an exception - the stage version of Les Misérables (the less said to him about the 2012 film adaptation the better) and...I shit you not, Joshua Logan's Paint Your Wagon. I don't think he's ever seen this particular episode, but I recall him being somewhat disappointed to learn that it was sent up on The Simpsons. Of course, it goes without saying that the footage we see here is pure pastiche (like the version of Alive Marge watches in "Fear of Flying"), and that the real Paint Your Wagon isn't exactly like this (for one thing, the plot of the film does not actually revolve around the painting of a wagon) - although if you came to it expecting something more along the lines of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, you were in for a rude awakening. Also, as per some backstage accounts, Lee Marvin was perpetually drunk and violent during the making of the film.
   

The gimmick of having the family sing their connective dialogue, making the episode a mini-musical in its own right, while distinctive and ambitious, is not particularly successful. The reason why it doesn't work honestly has very little to do with the quality of the music itself. Arguably, the episode is hamstrung in the sense that none of the original musical sequences (with the possible exception of the Paint Your Wagon number) are half as enjoyable or as memorable as the material from which it's pooling, but one particularly abominable "pendulum do" line notwithstanding, I'd say they're perfectly serviceable from a strictly sonic standpoint. No, the real limitation that this show nosedives right into and never overcomes has to do with the staging. The Simpsons spend the entirety of the episode inside their living room, meaning that "All Singing" doesn't exactly have a great deal to work with in terms of bringing these new interludes to life. Bart performs the occasional stilted jig (expect nothing as grand as his fancy foot work in "Homer vs Patty and Selma") and at one point Lisa does a big dramatic slide across the floor, but overall there is a conspicuous lack of visual energy and imagination behind the musical sequences. Got to keep those production costs down, I suppose. It's true that "Another Simpsons Clip Show" also restricted most of the "original" action (a lot of which was redubbed from recycled footage anyway) to the family's breakfast table. But then "Another Simpsons Clip Show" was never attempting to be anything so showy or elaborate as a 22-minute musical. By its very nature, we would expect a musical to engage in a little kinetic amplification, to present the family's world from a different, more stylised perspective and to elevate itself above the humdrum - something obviously well beyond this cost-cutting project's resources. It's a problem that I fear had always doomed "All Singing" to failure.

The best the episode can do to enliven the situation is to have Snake (the only supporting cast member to appear outside of the recycled footage) intermittently jump in through the window and threaten the family with a shotgun. And, to give credit where it's due, the first time this happens it is genuinely startling and unexpected. Unfortunately, Snake's involvement amounts something of a gigantic fake-out - when he first appears, he suggests a darker impending plot development that never materialises. Instead, it becomes a running gag that Snake shows up before every ad break, only to abruptly disappear as soon as the episode resumes. Still, this is the most playful that "All Singing" is willing to get with the concept, and one can only imagine how much livelier it could have been had it managed to get the Simpsons out of their living room and interacting with more of their neighbours.

As a musical, "All Singing" feels deficient. As a clip show...what it's lacking is the same degree of self-criticism, or at least malaise that made its predecessors so compelling (in my books, anyway). The most we get on that front is a rare instance at the end in which the family straight-up break the fourth wall (something seldom done outside of Halloween episodes) to rally beneath a banner explicitly advertising the episode as "The Simpsons Clip Show #4", having proclaimed that "It really does blow...when a long-running series does a cheesy clip show!" All of the Simpsons clip shows contained some obligatory reference to what an inherently cheap and tacky concept the clip show be ("138th Episode Spectacular" was less explicit on this point than the others, but its hokey set-up and the presence of Troy is more than substitute enough), but the pointed acknowledgement of the show's established longevity is the only inkling we get of the series expressing any kind of winking unease about its own status.

The most intriguing thing that "All Singing" has going for it as a clip show is the aura of suspicion that it might have been forced into production for even more dubious reasons than its predecessors. This is all purely speculation, but a lot of fans theorize that the musically-themed collage was conceived as a marketing tool for the series soundtrack album, Songs In The Key of Springfield, which had been released only the year prior. Now, Songs In The Key of Springfield had hit the shelves in March 1997, whereas "All Singing" first aired in January 1998, so we did have the better part of a year's gap between the two (also noteworthy: Songs In The Key of Springfield only covers the first seven seasons of the show, and "All Singing" does include one track that came after - "We Put The Spring In Springfield" from Season 8's "Bart After Dark"). Most die hard fans who wanted the album would presumably have noticed and acquired their copies by then, so at best "All Singing" was going to speak to more casual viewers who might have forgotten how infectious some of the show's original music could be, if they hadn't heard it in a while. A sequel, Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons, later followed, but that was still the better part of two years away. Heck, The Yellow Album wasn't even seeing the light of day until the opposite end of the year. So if the raison d'etre of "All Singing" was indeed to maximise the sales of tie-in shiny discs, then it wasn't strategically issued to line up with a period of peak hype for Simpsons music. The timing is still close enough to raise eyebrows, however, and I personally do find it hard to believe that there wasn't some connection, even if it's as basic as the (moderate) success of Songs In The Key of Springfield convincing the writers that there was an exploitable theme here.

I say that, of course, as if clip shows in general aren't elongated commercials, albeit not always with the intention of selling you something so tangible. The key reason such episodes exist in the first place is because they're cheap and easy from a production standpoint, and in the pre-DVD/streaming age, they might even have been welcomed by viewers impatient to wait until the next re-run to revisit a favourite scene (although weren't you setting your VCR for these things? - see below). But they do serve an additional function as show reels for the general series, enabling you not only to relive favourite moments but to also glimpse what else you might have missed the first time around, with the hope of enticing you into watching those re-runs. And yet there is something about "All Singing, All Dancing" that feels particularly disposable, which might have to do with the lack of any kind of compelling or meaningful conflict at the story's centre (is it really such a big deal if Homer doesn't like musicals?). Erik Adams, in his review of "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" on the AV Club, described that installment as a "glorified DVD extra", and I feel that goes double for "All Singing, All Dancing". All you need are onscreen lyrics and some Simpson-ised equivalent of a bouncing Mickey Mouse head (bouncing doughnut, perhaps?) and you'd have yourself a pretty neat analogue to those Sing-along featurettes that Disney used to churn out regularly during the VHS era. 

Although, speaking of VHS, there is another small yet critical element of "All Singing, All Dancing" that sets it apart from all previous clip shows, and that's that this is the first occasion in which the family have actually dredged up archival footage on tape, under the pretense that it comes from their home movie collection, rather than reminisce purely from memory. Apparently, Marge has VHS recordings of the musical sequences from "Homer's Barbershop Quartet", "Bart After Dark" and "Boy Scoutz 'N The Hood" that she could just conveniently pull out and show to Homer and Bart as proof of their respective melodic inclinations (she doesn't even have to scroll through the tape to find the footage she needs). This aspect honestly strikes me as way more hokey and far-fetched than the central premise of the family singing, as it hinges on the dubious notion that somebody at the time just happened to have a camera and was recording the whole thing - and isn't it uncanny how the perspective of this invisible, in-universe cameraman also happens to match everything we saw in the episodes proper, frame for frame? Which of course plays entirely knowingly into the artificial nature of clip show and musical alike. The episode hangs on an underlying thread of fourth wall breaking (subtler than the explicit instance that occurs at the end), with Marge's "family videos" being a sly nod to the series itself, and the family relating to it as their viewers do - not as collection of personal anecdotes springing from organic reminiscence, but as a series of archival recordings to be rewound and revisited at any time (very few of the featured episodes were commercially available on VHS at the time - certainly, none were in the US - but I'm sure most of us long-term viewers had built up our own extensive home recorded libraries by now). This compliments not only the contrivances of the clip show, but also the make-up of the clips themselves. For there is another reason why Marge couldn't plausibly possess home recordings of the overwhelming majority of the featured clips - most of them were non-diegetic. Meaning that it makes zero sense for the family to be reminiscing about them, period. That is the tremendous irony at the heart of "All Singing, All Dancing" - there is no singing, and no dancing. Okay, that is something of an exaggeration, as we do find the occasional diegetic track in here. But most of what we see is, in Homer's words, "fake and phony and totally wrong."

Before pursuing this point any further, it is necessary to make the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic audio, for The Simpsons has spawned ample musical content over the years that could be divided into both camps. In a nutshell, diegetic audio refers to any sound that occurs with the reality of the characters' world, whereas non-diegetic refers to audio that exists purely for the viewer's benefit and one would assume is not actually part of the characters' experiences in-universe. So, for example, whenever Lisa blows on her saxophone, it's diegetic - she has the physical instrument, and the characters in the vicinity are hearing and responding to the sounds coming out of it. Danny Elfman's scores, on the other hand, are non-diegetic - there's no reason to believe that the characters can hear them. Likewise, I would presume that Sideshow Bob isn't actually broadcasting a certain Bernard Herrmann leitmotif wherever he goes. When it comes to musical numbers where characters randomly burst into song and everyone conveniently just happens to know all the words and choreography, it gets a little less clear-cut - we might assume that if the characters are doing the singing, then they can hear themselves in-universe. Yet the very contradictions that make the musical sequence so appealing (or repellent, if you take Homer's view) - the sleight of hand through which freshness and spontaneity can be suggested from what would, in actuality, require hours of painstaking orchestration and rehearsing - inevitably calls into question the reality of what we're seeing. It seems fair to conclude that such sequences represent an idealised or exaggerated version of the participants' lives, rather than the lives they're actually living. Asking how the characters happen to know all the words and where the music is coming from is about as futile as asking to whom the artless monologuers in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads are actually talking - in both cases, I think we can accept that this is all a theatrical device for representing the characters' inner voices. So the singing is non-diegetic in the sense that the characters presumably aren't really doing it in context, but rather temporarily shifting into a kind of fantasy space where they get to flaunt their emotional states to the fullest (remember what James L. Brooks, when discussing his ex-musical I'll Do Anything, said about how musicals, despite their inherent artifice, bring you closer to  the truth).

Of the nine musical clips featured in "All Singing, All Dancing", only three could be considered truly diegetic - "Baby on Board" (from "Homer's Barbershop Quartet"), "Send In The Clowns" (from "Krusty Gets Kancelled") and "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (from "Bart Sells His Soul"). In those three instances, there were clearly established circumstances under which the characters were performing their respective tunes in-universe. "We Do" from "Homer The Great" is more of a grey area - it's possible that the Stonecutters really do have this obnoxious club chant that they belt out as part of their evening ritual, but with no obvious source for all that highly-orchestrated music that goes along with it I am compelled to put this on the at least partially non-diegetic pile. The remaining five all occupy that weird limbo between reality and non-reality, which we might as well call La La Land. In the case of the "Springfield, Springfield" sequence from "Boy Scoutz 'N The Hood", this particular visit to La La Land was intended as a signifier for Bart and Milhouse's sugar-addled state (itself a family-friendly shorthand for an acid high), so definitely not the kind of objective reality that any Springfieldian was going to have captured on tape. So think about what actually is going on in this episode - the Simpsons aren't embarking on a nostalgic journey through authentic family memories, but are instead witnessing embarrassing projections of their own inner psyches, visualised and laid bare for all to see. For a seemingly frivolous clip show, it delves into some seriously twisted Black Mirror-esque nightmare zone. The idea would be every bit as at home in a Halloween show.

The Simpsons itself has a proud history of deliberately blurring the barriers between the diegetic and the non-diegetic for comic effect; several of the featured sequences had punchlines in their original forms, in which the characters made some kind of immediate callback to the song and to its improbable placement within the narrative progression, although only the punchline from "Who Needs The Kwik-E-Mart?" of "Homer and Apu" appears intact in "All Singing, All Dancing". This particular track, possibly the most insanely catchy in the Simpsons repertoire, was really all an elaborate set-up to a gag mocking the glibness behind the theatrical convention of implying emotional and narrative closure through an upbeat song and dance number. We learn that, contra everything expressed in the sequence, Apu is pining for his old job at the Kwik-E-Mart - to the chagrin of Homer, who despises being lied to through song. A similar gag occurs in "Bart After Dark", where the artifice of the musical number is once again used to convey a kind of narrative insincerity; the very idea communicated in "We Put The Spring In Springfield" is obviously bogus - double entendres asides, this random burlesque house that we've never seen before nor have any any real emotional investment in is blatantly not the nexus of the community we've been tracking for the past seven years - but the real punchline of the sequence follows right after, when Marge, who was absent during the performance, has a hard time comprehending why her fellow moral guardians would do a complete 180 on the basis of a song. She asks the townspeople if they can sing it again, only to be told by Ned that, "it really was one of those spur the moment things."

Compared to the full tracklisting on Songs In The Key of Springfield, the selection of songs in "All Singing, All Dancing" can't help but feel a little lopsided. You can only cram so many tracks into into 22 minutes and have time for a vague framing story, but it does strike me as a glaring omission that we get no examples of Lisa and Marge's individual singing talents among the featured clips - in fact, Lisa's only contribution, outside of the framing narrative, is her single line in "Who Needs The Kwik-E-Mart?" (Marge does marginally better, in that she also gets a line in "The Monorail Song"). You know what I happen to think is one of the greatest musical sequences in Simpsons history? Lisa's rendition of Carole King's "Jazzman" in "Round Springfield", which was definitely the track that got the most attention on my personal copy of Songs In The Key of Springfield. Yeardley Smith's performance is delightful; she brings a strength and a vulnerability to the song that's purely Lisa. So what's the reason for its exclusion here? Is it because it's not an original song? Possibly not, since neither are "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" or "Send In The Clowns" (although Krusty's version of the latter does use mostly modified lyrics - I do love me some Stephen Sondheim, and A Little Night Music is one of my all-time favourite musicals...but I can't tell you how disappointed I was when I first learned that the actual version of that song does not contain the words "schmaltz by the bowlful"). Was it a bias towards the more comedy-orientated tracks? More than likely. On Marge's side, I feel aggrieved on behalf of the entire "Oh, Streetcar!" songbook.

You might also notice that the oldest clip featured in "All Singing, All Dancing" is "The Monorail Song" from "Marge vs The Monorail" of Season 4, meaning that the earliest seasons get completely snubbed. That much I'll put down to the fact that the kind of heavily stylised, Broadway-esque numbers on which "All Singing" predominantly hangs its hat didn't really seep into the series' DNA until around the fourth season, when the show adopted a much more flexible sense of reality. The early seasons had no shortage of musical interludes, as such Lisa's duet with Bleeding Gums Murphy in "Moaning Lisa" and Lurleen Lumpkin's repertoire in "Colonel Homer", but these tended to be mostly diegetic in nature. For a while, the track that had the most fun on the diegesis-blurring front was probably Tony Bennett's ode to an unidentified capital city in "Dancin' Homer". At the beginning of Season 4, the aforementioned "Oh, Streetcar!" musical from "A Streetcar Named Marge" enabled the series to do a fully diegetic parody of the conventions of musical theatre (complete with a horrendously, albeit infectiously glib wrap-up song). The point at which it became acceptable for Springfieldians to spontaneously burst into song and prance around as though their lives obeyed the same rules as musical theatre...I'm not 100% certain, but I think that "Marge vs The Monorail" might actually have been the first of its kind in that regard. There, it wasn't entirely left of field, in that the entire set-up of the episode was derived from a Broadway musical, The Music Man, with "The Monorail Song" being a nod to a specific number therein, "Ya Got Trouble". And that's just as true for many of the non-diegetic musical numbers that followed in its footsteps - they're there because homage permits it. The central conflict of "Bart After Dark" was taken from another musical, The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, so I guess it made sense for the climax to take the form of a song and dance number. "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" was The Simpsons' affectionate take on Disney - mostly One Hundred and One Dalmatians, but Burns' unsubtle pilfering of the melody to "Be Our Guest" from Beauty & The Beast still goes along with the general theme. In all cases, it's evident that the production team had a tremendous amount of admiration for the subjects they're spoofing, and it's on these terms that "All Singing, All Dancing" is probably best understood - as a testament to what a fabulous collective love letter The Simpsons has been to the musical form throughout its run. That inconsequential frothiness I've picketed against - well, maybe it does ultimately play into the basic territory of the musical. The family spends most of the episode in La La Land, where they go to re-examine memories that would otherwise be inaccessible to them, and the outing has an appropriately ephemeral quality about it. It's something that happens within its own fanciful space before immediately evaporating into thin air, and that's arguably a pretty accurate replication of the evanescent nature of the non-diegetic song and dance number. I still feel that the episode's boxed-in scope does it no favours, but perhaps it's as lightweight as it is by cunning design, and I've been underestimating it all this time.

Finally, something the series had started experimenting with all of a sudden come Season 9 was the concept of having the characters interact with the closing credits - they'd already trialled this a few episodes previously with "Bart Star", which had Homer dismissing the various names in the credits and finally rebuking the "Sshh" lady in the Gracie Films logo. "All Singing" contains a variation on that gag, where Snake gets irate whenever the music gets too loud for his liking and fires off his gun. Which takes us into this episode's other really notorious element. Personally, I am weary of this whole "Simpsons predicted it" bandwagon - I think a lot of these so-called "predictions" amount to either vague coincidences or instances of history tiresomely repeating itself. Nevertheless, I (like everybody else) can't help but shudder upon hearing Snake fire his gun just as Phil Hartman's name appears on screen. There are two shots, which to my morbid brain registers horribly as signifiers of the individual bullets that killed Hartman and Omdahl respectively. It's almost poetic, in the most distressing possible way.