Arts & Entertainment
Say Hello to Hollywood
As the studios chase profits all the way to Broadway
ccr215@nyu.edu
Grab your popcorn before heading to Times Square, because Hollywood is taking on Broadway. Film has always inspired and influenced musical theater- but nowadays movie studios are moving into the lead.
Since Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast took Broadway by storm in 1994, crowd-pleasing films have been increasingly adapted to the New York stage. The Lion King, which opened on Broadway in 1997 after the success of the film, won a Tony award for best musical, and recently beat its own box office record for the fourth time. Tarzan, despite withering reviews, shattered box office records in 2006. Disney’s newest star, Mary Poppins, opened in November and joined the million dollar club within a week.
It looks lucrative, so other major Hollywood studios are piling in. USA Pictures did High Fidelity, New Line Cinemas staged The Wedding Singer and Portrait Films produced Grey Gardens.
“It’s about giving a sense of familiarity to ticket buyers,” said Matt Windman, theater critic for the free daily AM New York. With Broadway tickets costing as much as $250, people want a guarantee that they are going to enjoy the show, Windman said.
The formula doesn’t automatically score: The Wedding Singer ended in December after 235 performances, and High Fidelity after just 13.
And not everyone is a fan.
Chelsea Dawn, a 21-year-old New York University student from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, was turned off after seeing The Wedding Singer and Mary Poppins on Broadway.
“Producers are depending on people who liked the movies to see the staged adaptations, and it seems too obvious and commercial to the point of nauseating,” Dawn said.
Nor is the original musical dying out.
“As long as there are people with ideas, there will be original musicals,” argued Seth Christenfeld, a Broadcast Music, Inc. Musical Theatre Workshop student. “It’s just a very difficult thing to do.”
Hard work paid off for such original productions as Avenue Q, Putnam County Spelling Bee, and most recently The Drowsy Chaperone, which received 13 Tony award nominations last year.
Still, Windman predicts that the movie musical trend will keep growing, given the copious supply of movies to adapt.
Future MGM projects include Weekend at Bernie’s, Moonstruck, Desperately Seeking Susan, Mermaids, Rain Man and Midnight Cowboy.
The musicals are hardly as profitable as Hollywood megafilms, though. Only 21 percent of the 65+ movie-based musicals of the last 40 years made money, according to entertainment reporter Bridget Byrne of E! News. Notorious flops include the 1988 Broadway show Carrie: The Musical, which ran for just five performances and Big: The Musical, which lasted for five months and lost $10 million.
Christenfeld, who is adapting the popular film Big Fish into a musical, thinks the adaptations are natural.
“We are at a point in our cultural history where films are the most influential art form we have,” and thus the largest pool to borrow material for adaptation, he said.
And films tend to be easier to adapt than novels, which require intense editing, or plays, which are usually so brief that adding music can stifle the action, he said.
Films also offer “characters that we can relate to, that have a certain amount of passion, drive and joy that translates into song very well,” said Joe Langworth, casting assistant with Bernard Telsey Casting, Inc., which cast Tarzan, The Wedding Singer, High Fidelity and Grey Gardens.
Actor Cara Cooper, who performed in The Wedding Singer, said she didn’t feel creatively stifled by working on an adaptation. The production team was “intent on creating well-rounded characters [and] making each character’s journey from beginning to end engaging and honest,” she said. “The actors involved had a lot of input into how this came to be, and the writers were always open to new ideas and takes on the characters.”
But stage productions are inevitably compared with the movie.
Chelsea Dawn’s favorite movie is The Wedding Singer. Absent the iconic performances of Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in the movie, the staged version, in her view, fell short.
“Movies like The Wedding Singer are so identifiable because of their strong characters,” she said. “Unlike Shakespeare, which can be performed and interpreted several different ways, this film demands an Adam Sandler performance to be successful.”
Cooper, who also appeared in the Broadway adaptation of the 1980 Hollywood classic Urban Cowboy, rented The Wedding Singer for research, but never “felt that I needed to recreate anything,” she said.
As one who depends on the prosperity of Broadway for her livelihood and cares about the future of her art form, she suggested that the source of the material mattered less than that audiences are being entertained, and supporting the arts.
Banking it twice. Moviemakers try to clean up on Broadway, too.
Photo by Elvira Veksler