A question of expectation….

As Stephen Sondheim has said regarding the difference between his work being seen as musicals or operas, “Essentially, the difference, I think, is in the expectation of the audience. Obviously, there are differences in terms of performers and how they approach singing as an art form. But primarily an opera is something done in an opera house in front of an opera audience. And a show, or whatever you want to call it — musical play, musical comedy — is something done in either a Broadway or Off Broadway theater, in front of that kind of audience.”

Opera audiences are used to silly stories (and the high-concept stagings that often go with them as directors try to overcome them), as long as the music and singing are good; and last night ENO’s new production of Candide, co-produced with the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris and Teatro alla Scala, Milan, honoured both sides of that equation, with director Robert Carsen and designer Michael Levine delivering an inventive tour-de-force concept that framed the entire action in a giant 50s TV screen, but also offering the music with the kind of massed ranks of full orchestra (conducted by Rumon Gamba) and chorus that conventional theatres, like the National and Old Vic who produced the last two London Candide’s in 1999 and 1988 respectively), simply could not afford to.

They’ve also judiciously borrowed from the theatre world, too, importing National Theatre regular Alex Jennings to play Voltaire and Pangloss, and it wasn’t just the fact that he’s previously played the title role of Peer Gynt (for the RSC) that reminded me yet again that Candide always seems to me like a musical theatre version of that Ibsen play in its story of a personal quest. But also, each time I see it, I also instinctively think of the solution that the title character of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita offered to solving the staging difficulties of Peer Gynt: “Do it on the radio”, she offers, and the same is true of Candide, which often works best in a concert hall instead, as it was offered as the opening concert of last year’s Edinburgh Festival.

But whilst the work, essentially, stays the same (apart from the different skill sets of the performers), whether a musical is done on the concert, operatic or musical stage, transposing something to the cinema requires not just a change of audience, but also a complete change in perception and treatment: the work has to be reconceived cinematically, so that the willing suspension of belief that is allowed in the theatre when people burst into song doesn’t seem jarring and false in the more realistic environs of the cinema.

That’s a tall order for most musicals; no wonder that Sondheim referred to last year’s screen transition of his 1979 Broadway show Sweeney Todd as “the first musical that has ever transferred successfully to the screen”. Evening Standard columnist Norman Lebrecht concurred: “In strictly categorical terms, he’s right. West Side Story, in common with most Broadway transfers, feels decidedly stagy on screen. And even the wide open beaches of South Pacific and Hitler’s favourite mountain peaks at Berchtesgaden cannot disguise the suspensions of plot when someone has to wash a man right out of her hair or teach seven children a diatonic do-re-mi. At those moments, the craft of movie making gives way to crowd-pleasing show-stoppers and the story grinds to a halt. In Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, there is no such respite - not even to include the delectable Kiss Me quartet.” Sondheim’s advice regarding the film was simply to “Think of it as a movie. Don’t think of it as a musical.” And ironically, that was achieved by the heightened theatricality of the highly stylized version that Burton did of it; movies can’t stop for applause breaks, of course, so Burton kept the momentum (and deaths) mounting up.

Mamma Mia!, on the other hand, tries to be both movie and musical. There’s the utter realism of beautiful Greek island location settings and turquoise oceans, and Catherine Johnson’s story about a daughter’s attempts to find out who her father is, while her mother is forced to confront her past, is still an engaging premise; but the transitions into songs - organically achieved in the theatre with a nod and a wink of spontaneous-seeming delight — now seems forced. The jump cuts from speech to song that you accept on stage now looks inevitably stagey on film, just as there are jarring cuts, too, between location and studio settings.

But at least seeing Meryl Streep’s Donna let her hair down, in every sense, and sing is a hoot; and the cast is mostly a treat, too, with Julie Walters (the original stage and screen Rita in the aforementioned Educating Rita and Broadway regular Christine Baranski delightful as her best friends, and fun contributions from the trio of Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård as her former boyfriends who may be the father of her daughter. While Sean Connery appeared in the original London production of South Pacific onstage, and Roger Moore was cast in the original production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love but withdrew during rehearsals, Brosnan is now an all-singing (and occasionally) dancing leading man.

The film, of course, has an opportunity to reach an infinite audience that the stage version, limited by the capacities of the theatres and the cities it is playing in, can’t. I am sure it will give pleasure to those who see it, especially those who have no prior experience of the stage version; but (and again it’s a question of expectation) as someone who has unreservedly and unashamedly loved it there, on stages from London and New York to San Francisco and Stockholm, on numerous occasions, it’s both not different enough in content, yet simultaneously such a different experience in terms of watching it in the cinema, that I want to run back to see it onstage now instead.