Why all of this boo-hooing over shows based on movies? That's nothing new. Ghost the movie came out 22 years ago. More time between All About Eve's release and the Broadway porduction of Applause; Smiles of A Summer Night/A Little Night Music; The Apartment/Promises, Promises. etc. etc.
I believe the underlying issue is actually more about technology that the source material. Plenty of folks on these boards mention the overblown stagecraft as much or more than "what they're based on" (which is a vague, ambiguous grounds for critique). Subject matter? Quality of source material?
Plus, it's a tenuous reason. In different hands, GHOST, LEAP OF FAITH, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN or SUNSET BOULEVARD would have been very different shows.
I'm going to play devil's advocate. The great majority of Broadway musicals are based on other media. The Broadway musical has found inspiration in novels, plays and films from SHOW BOAT to ONCE.
If movies are a much more likely place to turn these days than novels or plays, I would suggest it is because there are fewer contemporary plays and novels that would seem to lend themselves to musicalizing. I don't mean to imply that they don't exist (they do and I would like to see more investment in finding and developing those that would lend themselves to the musical form), but today's novelists and playwrights usually don't write the kinds of works that would seem to have the ingredients for a great musical, contrasting them to Edna Ferber, Sholem Aleichem, Ferenc Molnar, George Bernard Shaw, Christopher Isherwood, Thornton Wilder or James Michener. Alice Walker and Brad McGuire are among the exceptions that prove the rule, how ever one feels about Broadway's WICKED and THE COLOR PURPLE, the novels had a great deal to recommend them as foundations for musicals.
And it shouldn't be forgotten that Pygmalion was not only already a great film by the time Lerner, Loewe and Hart approached it, but the screenplay's famous romantic modification is what made the musical's libretto workable, let alone enormously successful.
And if we turn to the novels and plays of the past that would seem to be good sources for musicals, often they have already been made into famous movies (Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, The Light in the Piazza etc.). This is nothing new (The Time of the Cuckoo preceded Summertime which preceded DO I HEAR A WALTZ?). Of course there are a great many which have not, but those are often obscure works which are not going to suggest a name recognition profit. There is nothing obscure about La Boheme, true, but RENT's mammoth success probably doesn't owe much to the audience's familiarity with the opera (much of the audience probably had no familiarity with it at all). As such, RENT may well be an example of adaptive ingenuity. On a related note, no doubt when Puccini turned to La Vie Boheme and Verdi turned to Schiller and Shakespeare, they did so with an understanding that people knew and were interested in the source material, as well as an understanding that the material was well suited to opera. If movies were around at the time, no doubt they would have attracted Puccini and Verdi as well. WICKED and THE COLOR PURPLE have big name literary recognition or underlying literary pedigree, but they also have instantly recognizable cinematic sources.
Finally, there is no reason to belittle film as a choice for musical adaptation, or to treat film as a lesser form from which to adapt. Truly great movies have inspired musicals: SUNSET BOULEVARD, A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC, NINE, PASSION, APPLAUSE, DESTRY, GRAND HOTEL, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, SWEET CHARITY, PROMISES, PROMISES, THE PRODUCERS, ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, WOMEN ON THE VERGE etc., etc.) The ultimate success of the adaptation in question is a different matter entirely.
The issue isn't that Broadway is turning to Hollywood. The issue is how effective the results are.
Curiously, Isherwood conceded that he not only likes ONCE (albeit a modest appreciation), it seems he liked it much more than he did the movie (which he considered walking out of). In the case of ONCE, no doubt, it may have well been a preexisting high quality score rather than a crossover profit motive that inspired the show.
Bottom line: There was nothing wrong with Broadway turning to LEGALLY BLONDE, WOMEN ON THE VERGE, THE PRODUCERS, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, etc., films which justifiably seemed ripe for musicalization (how well they were musicalized is a different question entirely - it is the important question). I look forward to BULLETS OVER BROADWAY (although it should have a new score not a recycled one) and I would welcome - at least theoretically - musicals of, for example, TRULY MADLY DEEPLY, EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN, A SPECIAL DAY, WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?, HEAVENLY CREATURES, FLIRTING WITH DISASTER, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, PASSION FISH, MIDNIGHT RUN, RUTHLESS PEOPLE, SIDEWAYS (based on a novel,vyes but much more famous as a movie), DOLORES CLAIBORNE (ditto), JUNO, MIDNIGHT, CHILDREN OF PARADISE, GODS AND MONSTERS etc.).
I think the point is more about the paint-by-numbers formula approach to most of these projects. We can all make a list of things we would love to be turned into musical but if it doesn't "sing", it never will.
Someone mentioned Pygmalion. My Fair Lady has a FANTASTIC development story (probably fodder for a musical). Rodgers & Hammerstein tried and wisely gave up on it. There should be challenges in adapting a project, but not everything a good musical makes.
"Leap of Faith" is a really good example of an impossible pet project. Clearly either the creative team was ill-equip or it was just impossible.
Point is you can't just slap things together, tacking songs here and there.
Good grief. Someone actually writes a well-thought-out, articulate response to a post and gets slammed for it because it's not "three lines or less"?
And what "endless namedropping"? Henrik isn't saying that he knows the people he's writing about. He's writing about them to make his points. I, for one, found it an interesting post and well worth the time it took to read it.
I found Isherwood's article to be interesting and mostly true. It was the quality of the movie source that bothered him, not the fact that the source was a movie per se. And of course it greatly matters how it was adapted to the stage. Original works of musical theatre are few and far between. THE MUSIC MAN comes to mind, especially with yesterday's thread on the great Robert Preston. Let's see what happens to next season's REBECCA, a great novel AND a great Hitchcock movie, and a great 4 part Masterpiece Theatre years ago.
Of course good musicals have come from movie adaptations; Isherwood acknowledges that in the article.
What he bemoans are examples where third-rate creative teams take a famous and popular film and plop it on the stage with a few fourth-rate songs plugged in, with no new approach to the story, and call it a "new musical" (like Shrek, Ghost, Legally Blonde, 9 to 5, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, etc., etc., etc.), in a lazy attempt to squeeze more $$ out of a brand.
This is the rotten part of Broadway - the lack of imagination in a lot of these weak projects.
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joined:2/9/04
Posted: 5/10/12 at 10:40am