Real Life vs the Hollywood Musical

Matthew notes

The tragedy of the "real world" is that, unlike in movie musicals [or at least, unlike in Hollywood movie musicals], there's no unseen, otherwise non-existent orchestra on hand to accompany those moments of our lives in which we randomly find ourselves "bursting into song". For this reason, we can never fully experience the type of delusional joy that the characters in, say, Singin' in the Rain (1952) are able to, because we're ultimately unable to express ourselves on that ultimately higher [somewhat purer?] level. And that's a very sad thing, I think.

Maybe so, but we can always remember music we've heard before, like Gene Kelly did in Xanadu.