Musicals march to film

Tag : Men's Slippers

Mamma Mia! isn't a stage musical, it's an obsession.
At the finale, Baby Boomer bones creak as they dance in the aislesto the rhythms of Dancing Queen, Take a Chance on Me, Voulez Vous and the rest of the hits by the Swedish pop group, ABBA.
Mamma Mia's! stage fan base is more than 30 million strong. The box-officereturns are at $2 billion and growing. There are long-runningproductions still open in several cities, including one at theMandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas that attracts a huge Valley crowd.Tours continually crisscross the globe.
"Anytime it's available, we will bring it back to Tempe," saysColleen Jennings-Roggensack of ASU Gammage, where the musical haspacked the place on three visits.
"People love this thing."
So, with all that, who needs a movie?
The world does, apparently.
The film version of Mamma Mia! arrives in the Valley on Friday with Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan,Colin Firth and a supporting cast of exuberant, nearly naked20-somethings romping on a Greek island.
"At least the movie gets that part of the play right," late-nighttalk-shot host Jay Leno quipped recently.
It's the kind of comment that leaves the natives feeling restless.
"Oh, God, I'm so nervous," says Shelley Meier of Scottsdale "I lovethe show. What if they mess it up? Can Meryl Streep really sing?"
Meier is biased - she has seen the stage show seven times, twice inTempe, twice in New York and three times in Vegas - but maybe she'sworried for nothing.
Producer Judy Craymer, writer Catherine Johnson and directorPhyllida Lloyd, the people behind the stage success, are in chargeof the movie. If they drop the ball, surely it's not intentional.
They certainly haven't tinkered with the plot: It's still the storyof a girl who reads her mother's diary and discovers that threedifferent men could be her father. She invites them all to herwedding on the Greek island where her mother runs a taverna. Theguys accept, complications ensue and the happy ending is never indoubt.
And surprise, surprise. Friends say Streep is a good singer. NoBarbara Streisand, but no William Hung either.
The Times of London jumped the gun and managed to get staff critic HugoRifkind in to see a cut of the movie.
"They'll probably revoke my membership of the Straight Men'sSneering Association for this, but Mamma Mia! is actually rather wonderful. It is sharp, hilarious and sobeautifully shot that you can almost smell the AmbreSolaire(sunscreen)," he writes in the Times . Hits and misses
On the other hand, Meier isn't out of bounds with her concern.Hollywood can make a mess of Broadway's best and brightest. Anyonewho saw the stage and screen versions of Evita and The Producers can only groan at the latter. What happened in the transition of Dreamgirls from stage to screen is right up there with Amy Winehouse's lifeas a horror story.
In fairness, Hollywood gets it right on occasion. Chicago and West Side Story were superb. My Fair Lady , too. Cabaret was better on film than onstage. The Sound of Music and Grease took iffy material and polished it to a fare-thee-well.
Purists found fault with The Phantom of the Opera, Sweeney Todd and Rent , but these musicals, with rabid cult followings, put enough of theoriginal on-screen to make them worth seeing.
Yet Paint Your Wagon and Camelot were abysmal, even though they came from the same creators (AlanJay Lerner and Frederic Loewe) as My Fair Lady . Mame was a disaster, despite the Broadway show being based on a reallyfine Hollywood comedy ( Auntie Mame ). The great Rodgers and Hammerstein triumvirate - Oklahoma!, South Pacific and Carousel - were mediocre films at best, though it must be said that thepair's other masterpiece, The King and I , was made into a decent film.
Jesus Christ Superstar ? Please. Annie ? Excuse us, we're going to be sick.
The Fantasticks was so bad it sat on the shelf for years.
What causes some musicals-into-movies to get it right and othersnot?
"The great ones find a way of making the story work as wellon-screen as it did onstage," says director Jeff Calhoun, whose High School Musical recently made a stop at ASU Gammage. "A movie can bring you closerto a character through the use of close-ups. A stage characterdepends on body movements and intonation to establish a certainpresence; in film, the face can tell the story just as quickly, andmaybe more so."
At the same time, film is less forgiving of flaws.
"Onstage, you can hide something that doesn't make sense bythrowing a big musical number at it," Gerard Butler said during aninterview for the film version of The Phantom of the Opera , in which he played the Phantom.
"Film audiences aren't so easily fooled. They tend to ask, 'Wait aminute, what about . . . ?' "
Tricks for a good transition aren't closely guarded secrets, butsometimes they're difficult to put into practice.
"When a movie version of a stage musical works, it's because it'ssucceeded in making the audience forget that, in real life, peopledon't suddenly break into song and dance," says David IraGoldstein, artistic director of Arizona Theatre Company, who hasdirected a number of stage musicals that also are films, including My Fair Lady, The Pajama Game and The Pirates of Penzance .
"That's easier to make happen in theaters, where the sets arerecognizably stage constructions, than in a film where the actionis shot on a real location or on a backlot that has been carefullydesigned to look like the real thing."
To Matthew Wiener, producing artistic director of Actors Theatre,"All great plays succeed because they tap into the sort of emotionsthat take us out of our seats and into a different world. They makeus see things we might have overlooked or experience feelings thatwe haven't experienced before in quite that same way."
What does that mean? When Tony dies at the end of West Side Story or the Phantom walks away from Christine, something clicks insidethe audience that often leads to tears. Being intellectually awareof the horrors of the Holocaust isn't the same as being hit in thegut by Bob Fosse's staging of the prophetic Tomorrow Belongs to Me in Cabaret .
Can any father watch Tevye, the milkman in Fiddler on the Roof , say goodbye to his daughter, who is leaving for Siberia never toreturn, without feeling a lurch in his heart? Can any romantic notfeel the intense joy of the moment when Higgins says "Where thedevil are my slippers?" at the end of My Fair Lady ?
"I don't care if they happen onstage or on-screen, moments likethat are special," Wiener says. "They resonate totally with anaudience." Seemed like a good idea
Things can backfire.
When a movie tampers with a beloved story or miscasts an actor (orsimply doesn't cast the actor a lot of fans want, such as MichaelCrawford in Phantom ), no one is happy.
Despite its lavish budget, Hello, Dolly! came to life only once - when Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong duetedwith Barbra Streisand on the title tune, a number that could havetaken place in front of a blank wall and still have beentranscendent.
"Bad movies are bad because they either start with bad material orthey make a mess of what they have," says David Atkins, a graduateof the UCLA film school, who works at a video firm in Mesa.
"Musicals are such fragile things when they're put on film. So muchcan go wrong. And they're not forgiving of mistakes. You can walkout of Enchanted and say to yourself, 'That was silly, but I loved it,' and at thesame time, walk out of Dreamgirls and go, 'That was stupid. What were they thinking?' "
It's not just the plots and the performances that dictate athumbs-up, thumbs-down response. Musicals are virtually synonymouswith dance, and choreography on film is very different from itsstage counterpart, says dancer Jackie Marlin of Phoenix.
"When you're sitting in the auditorium at Phoenix Theatre, you getto see choreographer Michael Barnard's total concept for a musicalnumber in A Chorus Line . At the movies, you see that dance broken up into bits and piecesand interspersed with close-ups. I'm not saying the movies make abad choice. It would probably be pretty boring if you just plunkedthe camera down in one spot and filmed the dance straight on." Going Hollywood
One thing is almost guaranteed in the business of makingtransitions: Broadway's story is seldom good enough for Hollywood.Sometimes not even the music can make the cut.
When MGM filmed Rodgers and Hart's Babes in Arms , the studio not only jettisoned the plot but songs Johnny One Note, My Funny Valentine, I Wish I Were in Love Again and other standards. The Gershwins' Strike Up the Band contained only one song from the Broadway show. Hardly an echo ofLeonard Bernstein's great score remained in the film version of On the Town .
Can you imagine the reaction of a Phantom of the Opera fan?
When movies aren't adding to or deleting from plotlines and scores,they're miscasting the leads.
Peter O'Toole, Sophia Loren and James Coco would have been great ina straight version of Don Quixote , but Man of La Mancha ? Clint Eastwood singing I Talk to the Trees in Paint Your Wagon ? Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave trying to erase the memoriesof Richard Burton and Julie Andrews in Camelot ?
Hollywood hasn't seemed to notice that the most successful musicalfilms - The Sound of Music, The Music Man, Gypsy, West Side Story, Fiddleron the Roof , etc. - left the original plot alone. And the one that didn't - Cabaret , which dropped a crucial subplot, added romantic characters andincluded new songs - had a bona fide genius, Bob Fosse, for adirector.
"You don't achieve the kind of status that a Sweeney Todd has without doing something right," says Seth Reines, artisticdirector of Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre in Mesa.
"People come to the movie with a lot of expectations. If you'regoing to change something, you'd better have a good reason."
And even if it's a great reason, people still aren't going to giveup on the original, adds Kyle Klaphake, producing director ofArizona Broadway Theatre in Peoria.
"For many people, the stage version will always be better," hesays. "There's something about seeing it live that can't beduplicated in the movies."
Reach the reporter at kyle.lawson@arizonarepublic.com or 480-947-9673.