Melody and Memory in the Dark

This Is Your Brain on Showtunes

By Clayton “Tiger” Hulin, R.N.,

The lights drop, the screen flickers, and before the first scene is even underway, something in us stirs. It is not just Hollywood gloss on the wall, it is melody and memory sneaking past our guard. The orchestra hits harder than we expect, a surge that drowns out logic. Simba takes his place on Pride Rock as the chorus thunders, Elsa belts into the storm, and our brains give in. Our lacrimal glands flood and the world goes cloudy, but prettier. Skin prickles, and we remember: music heals, story keeps us alive.

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The Biology of a Showtune

Music does not ask permission to enter. It slips past logic and speaks directly to the limbic system, the part of the brain wired for emotion. A soaring chorus or a trembling solo triggers dopamine in anticipation and oxytocin in connection. This is why a single sustained note can undo us. Our survival once depended on responding to cries, calls, and lullabies. Showtunes hijack that same circuitry, and we willingly let them.

Even our senses conspire in this surrender. The smell of popcorn drifting through a movie house can carry you back to another night, another film you forgot you attended, as if memory itself is hiding in the air. The body remembers in ways the mind cannot, and a song makes use of every doorway back inside us.

I think my own first exposure to showtunes was The Music Man and then Annie, thanks to my old music teacher, Rose Jennings. She had a way of making those songs feel larger than the classroom, as if the notes were carrying us somewhere beyond the cinderblock walls. To this day, I hear those melodies and I am transported, proof that the circuitry was laid down early, stitched into memory with her guiding hand.

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Memory in Melody

Long after the credits roll, the song remains. The hippocampus binds story and melody into something permanent. This is why we can recite lyrics from decades past but forget what we went into the kitchen for. When a reprise returns, that familiar melody wrapped in new context, it is like memory itself walking back into the room. We weep because the song has become us.

Neuroscientists call this pairing of music and memory “emotional tagging.” When the amygdala, the brain’s emotional alarm bell, fires alongside the hippocampus, the memory locks in with greater force. This is why a love song can still smell like the perfume she wore, or why a single piano chord can return you to a hospital waiting room you thought you left behind. Music recruits more real estate in the brain than language alone ever could. It is not just remembered, it is re-experienced.

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Letting the Mind Unclench

To experience a musical fully, you must let the mind unclench and the heart take lead. It is not about gullibility but about grace, a willingness to step aside and let wonder carry the weight for a while.

Too long the Lin-Ray Theatre sat silent on Main Street in Wellsville, a movie house of plaster and brick watching the world move on without it. Yet when neighbors gather to imagine it alive again, they are not just restoring a building. They are rehearsing belief. They are choosing to see the possible rather than the ruin.

Just as a showtune bypasses skepticism, the Lin-Ray bypasses despair. It asks a town to breathe in rhythm again, to imagine the glow of the screen returning, audiences leaning forward in the dark, sharing gasps, laughter, and tears. That is what cinema and theatre both do, whether in Times Square or Allegany County. They open the backstage door of the mind to let the impossible walk in.

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Cynicism’s Kryptonite

Story alone can be resisted. Music alone fades into background noise. Together, they overwhelm our defenses. The combination disarms even the most jaded audience member. A skeptic can scoff at a monologue, but add a harmony that carries grief or joy and resistance collapses. It is the brain’s gracious glitch, reason yielding to rhythm, cynicism dissolving into connection.

And yet, even knowing this, I sometimes find myself thinking, Man, I wish someone would do something epic. A good old-fashioned Cecil B. DeMille kind of spectacle, a bringing-together of talent so sweeping and ambitious that disbelief would have no chance at all. The kind of event that overwhelms not just our defenses but our very sense of scale. Something that reminds us that art is still capable of being larger than life.

Even comedy showtunes can catch us off guard. One of the best modern examples came not from Broadway but from Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West. “If You’ve Only Got a Moustache” is staged like a vaudeville interlude, complete with chorus and swagger. It is absurd, it is catchy, and it makes you laugh because it takes the tradition of the showtune seriously while simultaneously poking fun at it. (Fair warning: the film around it is loaded with foul language, but the song itself is worth the watch.) In its own way, it proves the same point: music can bypass our defenses, whether the goal is tears or belly laughs.

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The Collective Heartbeat

In London, researchers from University College found that audience members at a West End play experienced synchronized heartbeats and breathing rhythms. Strangers sitting shoulder to shoulder, without a word exchanged, began to share the same physiological patterns as the story unfolded. Science had proven what artists always knew: a performance can make many bodies move as one.

If this happens in a playhouse, it happens in a movie theater too. The medium is different, but the brain does not care whether the light comes from a spotlight or a projector. A score swells, a kiss lands, a character dies, and suddenly the room breathes together. Mirror neurons fire as we watch another’s anguish or joy. Our pulses rise with crescendos, our breath catches in unison at the turning point of a scene.

Think of the first time you saw a Harry Potter film in the theater. The music was not just background, it became the atmosphere itself. When Hedwig’s Theme floated out of the speakers, you could feel the whole room lean forward. Kids clutched popcorn, parents smiled at their wonder, and goosebumps spread in waves. The story was familiar from the books, but paired with that score it felt larger than life, alive in the body. A screening is more than entertainment. It is ceremony as old as firelight, reborn in flicker and song. We are never alone in the dark because our bodies keep time together.

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Why We Keep Coming Back

Musicals give us permission to feel what life teaches us to hide. We cry in the dark not because we are weak but because we are safe. And when the curtain call arrives, the applause is not only for the cast. It is for ourselves, survivors of an emotional pilgrimage.

That is the gift of performance on stage, but a movie theater like Wellsville’s Lin-Ray holds its own magic. It is where stories arrive larger than life, wrapped in light and sound. The act of showing up, of sitting in that dark, of letting disbelief fall away, is the act of choosing humanity over numbness. It is choosing to feel.

And if the Lin-Ray finds new life, I look forward to the sounds as much as the lights. The hush before the first swell of a film score, the collective intake of breath as the story turns, the laughter breaking loose, the tears that slip out unbidden. A movie house like that is more than brick and plaster. It is a vessel waiting to be filled again with voices, with music, with memory. To hear it alive once more would be proof that stories still matter, that in the end the heart has its own reasons to keep beating in time with the song.

Clay “Tiger” Hulin is a Franklinville resident, registered nurse, family guy. You can reach him anytime, claymation_88@yahoo.com

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