I saw the original Michael Bennett production of Dreamgirls on my first-ever trip to New York in 1983, when it was still running at the Imperial Theatre – and it blew me away. I went back repeatedly over the next couple of years – and then saw it again when the 1987 touring production returned to Broadway. A couple of years ago I went down to Philadelphia for a local staging, but its one of the enduring mysteries of London theatrical life why this show never travelled to the West End – not even as a one-night concert version (which it incidentally most recently got on Broadway in 2001, when a celebrity charity gala was held of it).
But now London will finally see it, at least on the big screen rather than the stage, when the spectacular new film version arrives in our cinemas from February 2. I am back in New York right now, though, and straight off the plane on Thursday afternoon, I headed to a multiplex on 42nd Street to see it, and once again, it knocked me sideways. Though I ironically miss the cinematic fluidity of Bennett’s staging, it has been brilliantly reconceived as a film musical that makes sense on its own terms that, not since Martin Scorsese’s ravishing New York, New York thirty years ago, has provided such a heightened sense of musical reality with the songs emerging so effortlessly out of the action. And there’s a break-out performance from Jennifer Hudson – an American Idol runner-up – as Effie White that’s so spectacular that she’s become an instant movie star. But let’s hope the Effie curse doesn’t settle on her: Jennifer Holliday, who created the role onstage, was similarly acclaimed, but has never matched the intensity of that original role in her subsequent career.
Interest in transposing stage musicals to the screen again, as was once a Hollywood staple, has never been so high since the success of Chicago five years ago. Mamma Mia! has now been greenlighted, with Meryl Streep announced to play Donna. But surely a screen version of Wicked can’t be long behind. Like Dreamgirls did onstage, Joe Mantello’s production aspires to the conditions of cinema onstage in its constantly unfolding sense of spectacle and storytelling. It may be a little bloated and indigestible overall, but its no surprise that this phenomenal production has become such a phenomenon.
I have now seen it twice in two weeks – last week I saw it again in London when Kerry Ellis replaced Broadway original Idina Menzel as Elphaba, and last night I returned to it on Broadway, too, to see Julia Murney in the role. She is a Broadway-class performer whose sole Broadway credit before this was the short-lived Lennon in 2005, but I’ve been following her for years, ever since she played Queenie in the original off-Broadway production of Andrew Lippa’s version of The Wild Party at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2000 (It went head-to-head that season with another version of the same story on Broadway, composed by Michael John LaChiusa, that starred Toni Collette as Queenie). Murney has the most distinctive and dramatic Broadway voice since Betty Buckley’s, and she is not conventionally pretty which may make her difficult to cast; too, but here – as a woman with outsider status, as Murney must painfully know for herself having looked in on the Broadway arena to which she aspired for so long – she brings the richest emotional colours yet to her intense, soaring ballads like ‘Defying Gravity’, that turn it into the stuff of grand opera. It’s one of the greatest performances on the Broadway stage.
