Movies-to-Stage. On Musical Adaptations
Tuesday, June 30, 2020 at 6:15PM Today we've turned the blog over to Tom Mizer, one half of the songwriting team Mizer & Moore...
Musicals have alwasy been adapted from non-musical material
by Tom Mizer
Can I admit something and you promise not to judge me? My writing partner and I are working on adapting some movies into stage musicals. If eye-rolling made a sound, I bet I would hear a thousand violent swooshes. “Not another movie made into a musical! Why can’t there be original musicals?”...
Here’s the deal: musicals have always been built largely on the foundations of other forms, whether adapted from novels (South Pacific, Show Boat) or straight plays (Oklahoma, My Fair Lady) or, yes, movies. Musicals are incredibly difficult to make work; there are so many moving parts that having the framework of a good story already in place can be an enormous advantage...
Secondly, and I’ll be blunt now, it’s difficult to make money writing musical theater. Unless you happen to be the writer of Wicked, even writers with shows on Broadway struggle to make ends meet from theater. But movie studios are actively attempting to monetize their vast catalogs of intellectual property by seeking writers to adapt properties for the stage. (I can’t tell you how many meetings we’ve been on with studios and we aren’t Lin Manuel Miranda.) In the process, the studios are serving as unintentional patrons of the arts by paying for drafts...helping writers eat while they work on ALL their projects.
Finally, in my best Mae West voice, it’s not what you got, it’s what you do with it. For us personally, we try to find properties with these three attributes in mind:
A story should have a reason for being told now.
Universal has hired us to write a modern update of Remember the Night, a Preston Sturges’ comedy about a road trip shared by a thief and the prosecutor assigned to put her away. It’s a delight to ride the rhythms of Sturges’ crackling dialogue (though terrifying to write new dialogue alongside his), but what really grabbed us is how contemporary the ideas felt. As Barbara Stanwick’s character in the film says:
“Right or wrong is the same for everybody, you see, but the rights and the wrongs aren’t the same.”
Doesn’t that sound like our current state of disunion?!
Musical theater is theatrical
(Hint: it’s right there in the name).
We’ve also been commissioned to write a musical version of an obscure noir called The Amazing Mr. X. It’s a terrible movie. No, really. It’s terrible. But the bones of the story, mainly three big plot twists, are so gasp in your seat fun, we took a second look. And what we found underneath absolutely screams to be on a stage—night clubs and magic tricks and seances and billowing curtains—-all things that can be more thrilling on a real, happening-right-in-front-of-you stage.
Some stories didn’t work as films.
Maybe they just needed to learn to sing. I get why people turn to successful films to make musicals, but perfect screenplays are perfect and are in exactly the medium they should be in. (And if you’re counting on a title to guarantee a hit, Broadway is littered with the corpses of name brand shows.) Our instinct is to find the films that are a little (or a lot) broken. Perhaps Remember the Night is so-called “second tier” Sturges because it needed songs. Certainly no one would go to see our Mr. X expecting to hear a famous line of dialogue recited for nostalgic buzz. We feel this gives us the opportunity to shake up the plots and throw out antiquated tropes and make something fresh in our voice.
Who knows if our shows will work, but try to keep an open mind before you dismiss another movie-to-stage project. It just might be a new classic like these five movie-to-stage adaptations that I wouldn’t want to live without:
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Little Shop of Horrors: One of the reasons I am a lyricist today, the smart, silly, heartfelt lyrics of Howard Ashman adapting a B-horror film with Alan Menken are a humanist wonder.
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A Little Night Music: Sondheim/Wheeler meets Bergman in a swirl of waltzes and romantic folly. Sophisticated and gorgeous.
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The Band’s Visit: Based on a 2007 Israeli film, this warm breeze of a musical manages to slow your tempo until you can clearly hear the quiet beauty of ordinary people and their longing. That’s the power of music.
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Once: I think the stage version actually improves upon the film, giving the characters higher stakes and making every moment lift with the magic of live, collective music making.
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Silk Stockings: There are plenty of others I could name but I’m going to cheat here. I have a strange fondness for the movie made of the stage musical adapted from the movie Ninotchka. It’s of its time and has some questionable casting, but those delightful Cole Porter songs and Cyd Charisse succumbing to capitalism in dance (!) are worth the price of admission.
all posts by Tom Mizer...
Childhood movie love
Oscar winners for Best Original Song
Filming Mrs Maisel's Musical Numbers
Movies to Stage -Musical Adaptations
Meeting Barbra Streisand
Reader Comments (14)
I loved the performance from The Band's Visit at the Tony's several years ago. Sometimes even a single out-of-context musical number can give you the feel of a whole show. (And for those of us living in the middle of a flyover state, that's all we get.)
This is such a great defense of movie-to-stage musical adaptations. Excellent, more obscure examples, too. A lot of stuff I've never thought of....such as keeping writers and artists paid!!!
Corey -- totally agree. I hadn't really thought before of how many musicals are not original. Even WSS the best ever is an adaptation of Romeo & Juliet.
Love these posts! My favorite musicals are the ones that have really good stories like Come From Away. But you’re right that not all well-received films automatically adapt into good musicals (I wasn’t keen on 9 to 5, Ghost, or Amelie) One exception though: Betty Blue Eyes was super charming and should have definitely retained its original movie title for name recognition (A Private Function). Your picks of Little Shop, Band’s Visit, and Silk Stockings are great.
I’ve always thought that The Lady Eve (even though it’s a perfect film) could be lovely as a musical, with some Anything Goes-type toe-tapping numbers, a swoony ballad from the Fonda character, a seductive What Lola Wants thing for Eve, and some funny songs for the supporting characters.
Good luck to you. I will be happily Be waiting for whatever you write next.
Nathaniel - It shocked me when I looked back to make sure I wasn't making up how many shows are based on existing material. Tony Best Musicals were almost ALL adaptations until the last twenty or so years. Even Sondheim and his collaborators, who are thought of as very "original," use source material for a majority of their pieces.
Pam - Thank you. So glad some of my scribblings are interesting! And I see what you see in Lady Eve but it is so perfect I wouldn't know how to make it better. You'd just be making it...longer. It's more fun to jump in and find where something is missing.
Lovely insights, thanks! In concur with you on The Band's Visit which I saw onstage and liked a lot. In a bit of meta casting, Sasson Gabai who played Tewfiq in the Israeli film also played the non-musical role of Tewfiq on Broadway. One can see the ease with which Gabai essayed Tewfiq in the stage version, and he had great chemistry with the charismatic Katrina Lenk. This is one instance where I thought the musical enlivened the film through introspective songs that added to the depth of the characters.I like songs that provide a window for interiority.
Once is one of my favorite films and the stage version was very good but I think it did not capture the overall feel of the endearing DIY sensibility that suffused the cinematic version. Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti were adorable and I love how they sang the same songs as in the film version and rendered them in a slightly different-yet-still tuneful reading. However, the 'amateur' talents of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová in the film were ultimately why they were touching and grittier and effective and heartbreaking.
Tom, thanks for the lovely, entertaining insights. I urge you to someday check out the obscure but ultra-charming RKO comedy "She's Got Everything'(1937) with Ann Sothern. It's available on DVD from Warner Archive and - for me - tops the list of films that cry out for a Broadway musical treatment.
Despite my affection for Lynn Bari I have to agree that The Amazing Mr. X is a lousy movie but I'm intrigued to see what can be made out of it with some reworking.
I'd dearly love to see new versions of South Pacific and Guys and Dolls. Loved both stage shows and hated both films.
I have no problem with movies to musicals adaptations and I'm glad that the movie studios are sharing a little bit of their wealth with "the creatives" (as they call it at my movie studio).
I'm still a little confused though as to whether the studios come to the writers with titles and ideas (or to their agents at least), or whether the writers go to the studios with their ideas? Or is it maybe a combination where the studio has 20 titles they want to explore and Tom & Curtis pick one or two that resonate with them?
Where I work, it's a little of both. Sometimes the remakes/sequels come from outside writers, but mostly they come from "executives' within the studio.
Nice food for thought here, Tom! My favorite in this category is probably HAIRSPRAY, which of course has the distinction of being a movie that got made into a musical and then back into a movie. (Are there any others? can't think of any offhand.)
Side note: This post led me to revisit the loveliness of A BAND'S VISIT - how gorgeous is that last singing number ("Answer Me")? So much quiet longing indeed.
Dave - It depends on the studio but, in general, we've been sent an enormous file with the catalog of ALL the titles in their library with maybe a line description (if you're lucky) and we go through it before a meeting. Hundreds and hundreds of titles going back to silent films. They clearly have some famous films in mind, but often those big titles are being shopped via agents to the A list.
Wow Tom, a personal reply! So it sounds like they want to use their titles but you get to choose what to work on. At my (former) studio, the famous titles have all been looked into repeatedly, but there are gems that remain that no one seems to know about. A Letter To Three Wives and Two For The Road are always getting looked at for example.
To me, it is difficult to choose between Little Shop of Horrors and Hairsrpay as the best movie to stage... however I am eager to see Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Spamalot and... Evil Dead. Yes, they also made a stage musical from it!
I always thought Greer Garson's ''Julia Misbehaves" would be great as a musical.