Same old show?

Hollywood has often found success by adapting plays, but these days, stories often move from screen to stage. Is Broadway playing it too safe?

By STEVE PERSALL

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 6, 2001

NEW YORK -- One of Broadway's hottest producers covets theater's latest craze six days a week. Twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

"I want everything I've always seen in the movies!" shouts Leo Bloom, played by Matthew Broderick in Mel Brooks' musical comedy smash The Producers.

All Leo needs to do is stroll down the street.

The Great White Way is more Hollywood than ever these days. The Producers, adapted from Brooks' 1968 film, is only its most sensational example. Billboards make Times Square resemble a megaplex marquee with Beauty and the Beast, The Full Monty and The Lion King on stage instead of celluloid. Saturday Night Fever and Footloose left the Broadway dance floor last season.

Judgment at Nuremberg, Gary Sinise doing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Gina Gershon vamping in Cabaret are current revivals that began life as theater pieces, but probably wouldn't be on Broadway if not for the Oscar immortality their film versions conferred. Rocky Horror Show Live time-warps again thanks to its cult-film following.

By 2003, producers smarter than Bloom will present at least 10 screen-to-stage adaptations including The Little Mermaid, Summer of '42, Hairspray and Moonstruck. Successful London runs of The Graduate and The Witches of Eastwick have backers dreaming of Broadway engagements.

New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley doesn't like what he sees on the neon horizon.

"Generally, I think it's a dispiriting trend in that it's Broadway producers being unwilling to take risks with the unfamiliar," Brantley said. "They think if they have something audiences already know, they'll be more likely to go, which is kind of grim.

"It indicates a lack of self-confidence in the theater. Of course, it used to be the opposite, when films were routinely made out of plays, when theater was a major source of inspiration for Hollywood."

Ah, the old days when middle America didn't venture to a Times Square district known for crime and prostitution, before Disney moved in with Beauty and the Beast and cleaned up the neighborhood with city assistance. Back then, Hollywood brought Broadway to the masses, especially with 1950s and 1960s musicals such as The Sound of Music, Oklahoma, South Pacific and West Side Story. Great theater became great cinema.

Today, Broadway producers see Disney World demographics strolling the avenues. Selling familiar brand names to tourists is easy. See the movie, see the play. Producers may succeed two ways, according to League of American Theaters and Producers president Jed Bernstein.

"For producers like Disney or the folks who own The Full Monty, the appeal is to extend the impact of your brand into other media," Bernstein said. "You have a valuable franchise in the idea and story, and you deliver it in a fresh new medium, thereby creating another revenue stream for yourself."

Bernstein believes adapting a film for the stage can also benefit the creative process.

"The appeal is that you have a tried-and-true story that has had whatever degree of success in another medium, and that gives you a pretty good head start. A great story and great characters is not a bad starting point when you sit down to write a musical. That is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success on Broadway."

Brantley generally hasn't been impressed with the results so far.

"We do have one glorious exception with The Producers," he said. "But that sort of breaks all rules, I think. Otherwise, there have been very few artistic successes when you think of things like Footloose and Saturday Night Fever. And, heaven help us, we have Fame and Flashdance coming, so I hear."

As Bernstein noted: "A bad adaptation, whether it's Broadway or Hollywood, is always a bad show."

The current Steppenwolf Theater Company production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is another variation of the screen-to-stage trend. People forget Dale Wasserman's adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel failed off-Broadway in 1963. Milos Forman's 1975 film version won five Academy Awards, rekindling interest in the play.

Steppenwolf co-founder Gary Sinise (Forrest Gump) chose it as the Chicago troupe's 25th anniversary production. Good reviews carried it to Broadway. Sinise makes the move legitimate, but cinema posterity makes a former flop bankable now.

Viewing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on stage is interesting from a moviegoer's perspective. Forman altered the play, and Steppenwolf emulates some of his ideas, especially in regard to casting. Sinise is closer in stature and abrasion to Jack Nicholson's R.P. McMurphy than to the brawny bully Kesey envisioned and Kirk Douglas played 38 years ago.

Sinise's accent is folksier, but his mad grins and hydraulic eyebrows are pure Nicholson. A fine performance, yet derivative due to either subconscious idolatry or easier audience identification. The latter seems likely since other "psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of society" strongly resemble actors who portrayed them on screen.

Making McMurphy the film's focus, rather than hulking Chief Bromden, is wise since Wasserman's second act bogs down with Chief's backstory. Tim Sampson displays the same haunted dignity his late father, Will Sampson, did in the movie. But the role distracts from a McMurphy focus Forman coached audiences to expect.

Such comparisons are inevitable. The movie is rarely better than the novel, the play is seldom better than the movie, and consumers on either side will be disappointed. Bernstein expects Broadway producers to keep trying to get it right.

"Hollywood and Broadway have been exchanging personnel and ideas for 70 years, ever since Faulkner and a bunch of others took off on a train for California," he said. "A great story can be told in many different formats if it's adapted brilliantly."

Borrowed by Broadway

Movie lovers can name plenty of Broadway hits adapted to film. But how many plays and musicals based on popular films do you recall? Here's a partial list of ideas Broadway borrowed from Hollywood in the past, and what's planned for the stage by 2003:

Past and current cinema-to-stage:

• Applause (based on All About Eve)
• Beauty and the Beast
• Big
• Carrie
• Footloose
• The Full Monty
• The Goodbye Girl
• Grand Hotel
• Kiss of the Spider Woman
• My Favorite Year
• On the Waterfront The Lion King
• The Producers
• Ragtime
• Saturday Night Fever
• Shogun: The Musical
• Sunset Boulevard
• Victor/Victoria

Coming up

• Birdy
• The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
• Hairspray
• The Little Mermaid
• Moonstruck
• The Night They Raided Minsky's
• Summer of '42
• The Sweet Smell of Success
• Thoroughly Modern Millie

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