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And you thought disco was dead. Saturday Night Fever returns as a Broadway musical, and this time it's the characters from Brooklyn's mean streets doing the singing.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 17, 2002
People tend to forget that Saturday Night Fever was not a musical. The 1977 movie was a gritty drama about dead-end kids in Brooklyn, and the disco hits were background music.
So when Nan Knighton was hired to adapt the movie for the stage, she had a pivotal decision to make. Obviously, the whole reason for making the musical was to exploit the popularity of the soundtrack's double album, which sold more than 30-million copies, but none of the characters in the film actually sang. That was left to the Bee Gees, Yvonne Elliman and the Trammps, among others.
"The one thing we did with the score that was different from the movie was we decided to have the actors sing the songs," said Knighton, who worked closely with director-choreographer Arlene Phillips on the adaptation. "That was one of the more radical things we did. We didn't know in the beginning if that was going to work. And then much to our delight, it did. About three-quarters of the songs just fell naturally into place."
As an example, Knighton points to one of the movie's most famous scenes, of John Travolta's Tony Manero jiving down the street to Stayin' Alive while the opening credits roll.
"In the movie you're primarily focusing on Tony on the street; in the stage show, Tony's right smack in the middle of it, but all around him are the street people, all singing together Stayin' Alive," she said.
Richard H. Blake stars as the white-suited Tony in the tour that comes to Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center this week.
Knighton, who also wrote the book and lyrics for The Scarlet Pimpernel, was well aware of the woeful track record of movies turned into musicals. Exhibit A: Big, the popular Tom Hanks movie that became one of Broadway's all-time biggest flops.
"People make the assumption that if it was a successful movie, it has an almost guaranteed formula for success on Broadway, and I don't think that's ever the case," she said. "I don't think there's a magic formula to what makes a movie work onstage. My own feeling is if you've got a really great movie, you're asking for trouble when you decide to put it on the stage. Why mess with a great thing?"
Certainly, that question applies to Saturday Night Fever, which was not a hit on Broadway, where it received no Tony Award nominations and ran just over a year. The show has been doing good business on the road, grossing a massive $1.5-million at Boston's Wang Center one week in January.
Robert Stigwood, the impresario behind Saturday Night Fever, insisted that the stage show follow the movie closely. That stipulation somewhat hampered Knighton, 54, she said from her home in New York City.
"It was difficult," she said. "Our initial idea was to try to come at it from a different angle, because we felt that on the musical stage you had to use a different perspective and couldn't be as naturalistic as the movie. But when it became clear that Robert really did want us to be that literal, we had to rethink it. The biggest challenge was to try to blend together all these different scenes -- in the car, on the street, in the coffee shop, in the dance studio, back on the street.
"Obviously that sort of thing fell into place more easily in dance scenes. The scenes in the disco, for example, were much easier to structure because there was an inherent fluidity to being able to bounce all around the dance floor with who was talking, who was dancing, who was singing."
Norman Wexler's brilliant screenplay was laced with profane street language. (There was even an "alternate" PG-rated version of the movie released that cut or altered some of the dialogue).
"One of the things I tried hard to do in the musical was to keep it raw without the harsh language," Knighton said. "One of my jobs was to keep the f-words to a minimum. Instead of the c-word, I use slut. But whenever I had to add dialogue or make a transition, I tried to keep the rawness. I felt that Wexler's language was so dead-on and had the rhythm of the street down to an art form."
As a business proposition, Saturday Night Fever was probably inevitable, given the shortage of fresh ideas in the world of big-budget musical theater. It's part of a trend to package pop songs in stage shows. A few have been successful, such as The Who's Tommy, which came from the the group's rock opera, but most (Footloose, Abba's Mamma Mia!) have been mixed bags at best. Musicals based on songs of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen are in the pipeline.
"I think it's terrible for legitimate theater," Knighton said. "The thing that's a little spooky for anyone working in the theater is when the majority of what you're seeing are revivals or adapted from movies or extensions of rock concerts. And there are so few new plays, so few original musicals."
Knighton's current project is writing the book and lyrics for a musical adapted from a French movie about a sculptor, Camille Claudel, with a score by Frank Wildhorn. It's intended to be a vehicle for Wildhorn's wife, singer Linda Eder. Kristi Yamaguchi skated to a song from the show, Gold, in the Winter Olympics opening ceremony.
Wildhorn has taken a critical drubbing for his musicals -- Jekyll & Hyde, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Civil War, Dracula -- and that gets his collaborator's dander up.
"It's one thing to criticize artistically; it's another thing to go for the jugular," Knighton said. "It just makes my blood boil when I see the way people have treated him with such meanspiritedness."
Saturday Night Fever opens Tuesday and runs through Feb. 24 at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Tickets: $20.50-$63.50. (813) 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045.