ENTERTAINMENT Live, on stage . . . from the screen
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THURSDAY, JAN. 2, 2014
EVEN THE MOST HIGHBROW COMPOSERS CAN’T RESIST THE FILM-TO-MUSICAL CRAZE
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ABOVE: Continuing a craze for adapting movies into musicals, the Kennedy Center in Washington is presenting ‘Flashdance: The Musical,’ an expansion of the hugely popular movie, on its Eisenhower stage. Jillian Mueller re-creates the role of Alex Owens made famous in the 1983 film. BELOW: Popular films ‘Big Fish,’ ‘Far From Heaven’ and ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ (shown here, at Second Stage Theatre) all lifted their newly musical voices lately in New York. Big musicals due on Broadway in 2014 include Disney’s ‘Aladdin’ and ‘The Bridges of Madison County.’ BY NELSON PRESSLEY ADVOCATE NEWS SERVICES
that gauntlet down, you find yourself doing it.” Menken argues that movies are a natural source for musicals, just as books and plays were for so many standards written in Broadway’s Golden Age, from My Fair Lady to South Pacific. “Most of those hit shows were based on things they read, or based on plays,” Menken says. “We’re in a different culture,” he adds, wondering if adaptations of TV series will be next. Elf composer Matthew Sklar suggests that The Producers in 2001 was a turning point. The tidal wave of 1980s and 1990s megamusicals finally crashed, and The Producers reintroduced the world to musical comedy. “After 9/11, I think people wanted to laugh,” says Sklar, whose musicals with lyricist and book writer Chad Beguelin include a short-lived 2006 Broadway musical of the Adam Sandler comedy The Wedding Singer. But it was Disney and the 1994 Beauty and the Beast that really unlocked Pandora’s Box. That
show ran 13 years and paved the way for The Lion King, which has been an unrelenting smash since 1997. The first week of this December, The Lion King grossed nearly $2 million for its eight performances on Broadway alone, filling 93 per cent of the 1,597 seats in the Minskoff Theater and averaging $155 a ticket. National and international tours continue, sweetening the pot. Even though Menken asserts that the lure of Hollywood dates to Gershwin and Irving Berlin, the aggressive theatrical arm of Disney in the 1990s plainly paved a new avenue for Hollywood execs to tread. Film studios increasingly opened their own theatrical divisions after the Disney hits and the next decade’s successes of The Producers, Hairspray and Wicked. “Now you literally have heads of studios coming in wanting to be deeply and directly involved,” Menken says. “By film standards, it’s practically dirt cheap to put up a musical.”
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Looking by Norm Foster
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WASHINGTON — How extreme is the craze for adapting movies into musicals? Consider what’s singing out at the Kennedy Center: Elf the Musical, based on the 2003 Will Ferrell hit, is currently hopping through the Opera House. Flashdance — The Musical, an expansion of the hugely popular 1980s movie, is also running in the Eisenhower. Last month, a tour of Sister Act wimpled through. That undeclared mini-festival is just the tip of an iceberg that may be sabotaging ingenuity in one of America’s proudest native art forms. And while the run on Hollywood titles may suggest a gold rush, the formula for success is inscrutable. Offbeat triumphs were nabbed by minor movie titles such as Once, Kinky Boots and Grey Gardens, while such Hollywood blockbusters as Ghost and Catch Me if You Can — the latter by Hairspray songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who would seem to know how these conversions work — flamed out fast. The one sure thing: Like a Netflix menu, the titles keep coming. Big Fish, Far From Heaven and Little Miss Sunshine all lifted their newly musical voices lately in New York. Big musicals due on Broadway this winter and spring: Aladdin, The Bridges of Madison County (a successful novel made even more popular by the Clint Eastwood-Meryl Streep film), Bullets Over Broadway and Rocky. Just announced for off-Broadway in March: Heathers. The fad is international: American Psycho, The Bodyguard, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and From Here to Eternity are all running in London’s West End. Coal Miner’s Daughter is in the works. So is Dirty Dancing (now on U.S. tour, and playing in London), Ever After, Honeymoon in Vegas and even King Kong, a rock spectacular that has already conquered Australia and stars a one-ton gorilla puppet 20 feet tall. Even the most highbrow composers can’t resist the lure of musicalizing movies. The property Stephen Sondheim kept saying he’d like to get around to in the past decade or so but never did? Groundhog Day. And what has Light in the Piazza composer Adam Guettel been working on since the plug was pulled on his unfinished version of The Princess Bride? Days of Wine and Roses and the 2004 Danny Boyle movie, Millions. Michael John LaChiusa’s Giant, which made its debut at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va., several seasons ago, finally made it to New York (briefly) last year. That LaChiusa worked from the Edna Ferber novel is moot, marketing-wise: Audiences hear Giant and think Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. Likewise Signature’s premiere musical next spring, based on the Iris Rainer Dart novel that became the Bette Midler screen smash, Beaches. Isn’t this dependency on Hollywood-branded titles strangling Broadway’s originality? According to the composers of the musicals scrolling through the Kennedy Center, it ain’t necessarily so. “With Sister Act, I was resistant,” says composer and uber-adapter Alan Menken, whose first stage hit was 1982’s Little Shop of Horrors and who owns eight Oscars for songs and scores of the movies The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas and Aladdin. He helped convert Mermaid and Beast into stage hits, and his new musical of Aladdin just opened in Toronto en route to its first Broadway performances in February. Last year Menken won his first Tony with Newsies, adapting his own score from the 1989 Disney film; a January workshop is scheduled for Menken’s new musical of the Disney film Hunchback of Notre Dame. “People were saying, ‘Oh, my God, everything’s coming from film, it’s getting uncreative,’” Menken says by phone from his home in the New York area. “But I think it depends on where it comes from, and what you do with it.” The Sister Act title “felt tired,” Menken said, but he warmed to the challenge of revitalizing it for the stage. The 1990s story was relocated to 1970s, allowing Menken to pen disco songs and R&B tunes. In the end, he says, “I loved it. Once you throw