Stage 2 Screen

Leonard Maltin reviews Into the Woods. As often happens, I feel like I know what I'm talking about when my view of a movie is similar to his.

Leonard asks, "Can the movie adaptation of a Broadway show actually improve on the original?" Well, I'm sure some will disagree but I think a few come close but I think we need to clarify the question. Broadway shows change, especially when they're not on Broadway. There have been some terrible productions of My Fair Lady and obviously, the movie is better than some, worse than others.

But what I assume Leonard is asking is whether the filmmakers can fix things that were wrong or improvable in the script and staging of what is usually mounted for the stage…and yes, I think they can. I think Ernie Lehman's script for Hello, Dolly! makes a lot more sense than the script that's performed for the stage and in many ways, his script for West Side Story does, too. Those two adaptations aren't as good in some other ways, mostly relating to casting and in trying to cover too much scenery. (It always struck me that the "teenagers" in the movie version of West Side Story are all about 35 years old.)

A friend of mine who saw both used to say that the movie version of The Music Man was a cinematic twin of the original Broadway production (which he saw) but with better actors as Marcellus and Mayor Shin. So I guess he thought that was an improvement.

Then you have something like 1776, which I didn't see in its original Broadway incarnation. The book was largely unchanged when it became a screenplay. The "opening up" of the show (taking it off the stage into a more expansive setting) doesn't harm anything as far as I'm concerned…and we have the performances of arguably the best cast ever preserved on film. There's something lost in terms of immediacy in any stage-to-film transfer because you lose the "live" presence of the actors. But I could make the case the movie is as good as or better than the stage version and I could maybe even make it for Damn Yankees, which was improved just by being trimmed a bit.

If I had more time now, I'd think of other examples. Maybe Grease or The Sound of Music…but then I never cared much for either of them on stage.