Time was that the West End play and Broadway musical was a fertile soil for film-makers looking for material to commit to celluloid. Now it’s largely the other way around. “You’ve seen the movie – now see it live!” seems to the motto. Even a 1989 Broadway play, A Few Good Men, that became a 1992 movie with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, now looks like it’s a stage version of a movie now that its belatedly made it’s West End debut at the Haymarket this week, thanks to a staging that is full of cinematic background effects and a movie star in the lead in the shape of Rob Lowe.
In a piece in the New York Times last Sunday, writer Jesse McKinley noted that “nearly half of Broadway’s 20 musicals were drawn from films, including two of last season’s hits, Monty Python’s Spamalot and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and such long-running successes as The Producers, Hairspray, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. (Now, if they’d just let you buy some popcorn. …)”
This trend – some people wittily call them “movicals” — is starting to look unstoppable. As Jed Bernstein, president of the League of American Theaters and Producers, comments, “The two-way traffic between New York and Hollywood has been a fact of life since Hollywood was invented. But the traffic has really intensified in the last five years.”
On tap for the new Broadway season are stage versions of The Color Purple, beginning previews next month, The Wedding Singer, and Tarzan (to be directed and designed by Britain’s Bob Crowley, for Disney),
Intriguingly, the shows can make more money than even the movies: “Between them, The Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King have grossed $3.3 billion worldwide,” reports the New York Times, against a combined estimated box office of the films of $1.6 billion (“And that’s before T-shirts, CD’s and souvenir books”, it adds).
Disney is also, of course, behind the current London hit Mary Poppins in collaboration with Cameron Mackintosh that is also surely Broadway-bound soon, and is also developing a stage version of The Little Mermaid; and it is Disney that is driving the current passion for studios to seek musical opportunities for their film properties.
Warner Brothers now has a theatrical production division that will launch next year with Lestat, based on Anne Rice’s vampire books and featuring the character in the 1994 film Interview with a Vampire. DreamWorks are partnering with Sam Mendes’ theatre production company, Neal Street Productions, to bring Shrek to the musical stage. Working Title Films are co-producer of the stage version of their 2000 film Billy Elliot in London.
And the trend doesn’t look like it’s going to stop anytime soon. Amongst other film titles being lined up to make the transfer to stage are two of the Pink Panther movies; Get Shorty; Weekend at Bernie’s; Network; Dr Zhivago; Batman; Legally Blonde; Cry-Baby; Ever After; Catch Me If You Can; and even Blade Runner. Frank Wildhorn, the composer of the Broadway musicals Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula, who has been chasing the rights to Blade Runner, believes it will be perfect for a musical: “There’s a lot of messed-up humans and androids in that movie. So there’s no shortage of opportunities to write songs.”
