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Cover Story

Everything Old is new again

by Jeff Rossen – July 29-August 4, 2010

“Welcome to the theater, to the magic, to the fun,” Margo Channing sang to Eve Harrington as the young actress hopeful was about to embark on a life on the boards in the 1970 musical “Applause.” But Margo could just as easily have been singing about the magic of musical theater, with its songs and dance, show-stopping production numbers and tender heartbreak set to music. And the magic that musicals possess sells tickets. The 10 longest-running shows in Broadway history are all musicals; in fact, of the top 25 on the list, only two are not musicals, numbers 15 and 16: “Life With Father” and “Tobacco Road.”

But as Broadway shows in general and musicals in particular become increasingly more expensive to produce, the creative and financial powers behind them look for ways to increase their chances of success. The same is true on the other side of the country, where the film industry in Hollywood looks for properties that have an appeal that will translate into box office dollars at movie theaters around the world. That’s why audiences are being offered second, third, fourth installments of proven hits and big-screen retreads of TV shows with familiar titles and familiar faces playing the roles on the big screen.

The powers behind Broadway musicals are no different; sure, there’s art and all that, but those theater folk want to make a buck just like their counterparts in the film business. So the security that Hollywood finds in the recognizable is attractive to Broadway as well, and they’ve been tapping on the shoulders of their friends in Hollywood for a bit of help ever since Margo welcomed Eve – and us – to the magic of musical theater.

“Applause” is based on the 1950 classic film All About Eve, in which a young, manipulative woman worms her way into the heart and world of a famous stage actress. In 1970, authors Betty Comden and Adolph Green joined with songwriters Lee Adams and Charles Strouse to bring the backstage backstabbings of All About Eve to the musical stage, and the result was a Tony Award-winning success that helped star Lauren Bacall forget about being snubbed for the film version of her stage hit “Cactus Flower” by winning her own Tony (in her first musical performance). It was one of the earliest entries in trend that continues today, as evidenced by the Chicago opening this past weekend of the national tour of “Shrek the Musical”: Movies into musicals.

The classic film All About Eve became the Tony-winning stage musical “Applause.”

 

In the weeks just before “Applause” opened on March 30, 1970 at the Palace Theatre, Broadway had seen two other attempts to bring film successes to the musical stage. However, “Georgy,” based on the 1966 film Georgy Girl, lasted a scant four performances, and the musical version of Lilies of the Field, “Look to the Lilies,” fared only slightly better with 25 performances, despite featuring a score by Jule Styne and Oscar winner and TV favorite Shirley Booth as its star.

During the 1970s, only a handful of musicals debuted that had their roots in Hollywood. The most successful in terms of awards and life after Broadway came in 1973 when “A Little Night Music” opened at the Shubert Theatre on February 23. Based on Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 comedy Smiles of a Summer Night, the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler adaptation ran for 601 performances and won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The current Broadway revival just reopened after a short hiatus, with new stars Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch as actress Desiree Armfeldt and her mother. Later that same year, the 1958 Oscar-winning Gigi became the first film musical adapted for the stage, but it failed to recreate the film’s magic and was gone after only 103 performances. “Sugar,” which opened a year earlier than “A Little Night Music,” was based on the 1959 hit comedy by Billy Wilder, Some Like It Hot. Although it lasted 501 performances, “Sugar” didn’t have much of a life after its Broadway run, but it is on view right now in a wonderfully delightful production that closes this Sunday, Aug. 1, at Drury Lane in Oakbrook Terrace. The stirring Civil War saga “Shenandoah” was a very literal and moving adaptation of the 1965 film of the same name that ran for over two-and-a half years in the mid-1970s. An argument could be made that 1978’s “Ballroom” belongs in this group as well, although its origins were on the small screen, being adapted from the 1975 television movie Queen of the Stardust Ballroom. The story of a lonely widow who finds love on the dance floor is considered one of the decade’s major disappointments, since it was the first project from director-choreographer Michael Bennett following his landmark “A Chorus Line” and starred Dorothy Loudon, who had won a Tony the previous year for “Annie.” But after 116 performances, the “Ballroom” doors were closed. “King of Hearts,” based on the 1966 Alan Bates-starred antiwar film, had the unfortunate timing of opening during a newspaper strike in New York in October 1978 and never found an audience, shutting down after only 48 performances.

The 1980s began with one of the decade’s biggest hits, “42nd Street.” Based on the novel and 1933 film musical of the same name, the backstage musical was a singing and dancing extravaganza that delighted both audiences and critics. It was named Best Musical of the season and ran for eight-and-a half years (although it had to move to a new theater twice during that time), logging 3,486 performances, which ranks it at No. 12 on the list of Broadway’s longest-running shows. An attempt was made to work a similar transformation when “Singin’ in the Rain” bowed at the Gershwin Theatre in 1985, but even an onstage rainstorm couldn’t save the show, which was gone less than a year later.

Songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb took a Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy film about warring newspaper journalists and changed the characters into a TV newswoman and a cartoonist for 1981’s “Woman of the Year.” Lauren Bacall returned to the musical stage in the show and captured her second Tony Award. Foreign films were the inspirations for a pair of Tony-winning musicals in the 1980s. 1982 brought a musical version of Federico Fellini’s acclaimed 1963 story of a film director having a creative crisis, 8?, retitled “Nine,” and the following season welcomed “La Cage aux Folles” to Broadway, although, technically, it isn’t based on the 1978 French hit film, the rights to which couldn’t be secured and led writer Harvey Fierstein and tunesmith Jerry Herman to adapt from the original play instead. At first, the stage musical was going to be reset from France to New Orleans and the title changed to “The Queen of Basin Street,” with Mike Nichols directing. But by the time legal squabbles between producers and the original writers (Jay Presson Allen and Maury Yeston) were settled, the musical was back in a French setting under the original title. Nichols would eventually make his own Americanized version of the story in the 1996 film The Birdcage.

During the ’80s, Broadway witnessed a trio of musical disasters of epic proportions. “Smile” in 1986 and “Carrie” and “Legs Diamond” in 1988 all came to Broadway with big hopes and even bigger budgets, but audiences and critics alike turned up their noses at each, and in the end, millions upon millions of dollars were lost. One might think that such financial ruin would have put the brakes on future stage musicals from films, but that was hardly the case. In fact, the 1990s began an onslaught of such creations, and the results have ranged from artistic and popular triumphs to a few more mega-flops and a slew of shows that fall somewhere in between.

“Grand Hotel” is actually based on Vicky Baum’s original novel, but credit is also given to the 1932 Oscar-winning Best Picture version. Although its existence is obviously inspired by the 1985 film, 1993’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” credits Manuel Puig’s novel as its sole source. And the same is true of 1998’s “Ragtime,” which lists E.L. Doctorow’s novel as its basis. There’s no question as to what inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Christopher Hampton for 1994’s “Sunset Boulevard,” since it was taken from the film written directly for the screen, as was 1993’s failed “The Goodbye Girl.” Also in the failure category during the decade are “Nick & Nora,” a nine-performance flop based on the The Thin Man films; the 36-performance “My Favorite Year” (although Andrea Martin did win the Feature Actress in a Musical Tony for it); the only slightly longer-lived “State Fair,” “Big” and “High Society”; and although “Footloose” ran for 709 performances and “Saturday Night Fever” lasted over a year, their costs far outweighed the shows’ financial returns.

1997 brought the still-running “The Lion King,” which is based on Disney’s 1994 animated film. How successful is “The Lion King”? The musical has grossed more than $700 million on Broadway, and there’s no end in sight for this family-friendly and creative success. “Beauty and the Beast,” which opened in April 1994 and ran for 5,461 performances during its 13-year run, is another live-action hit drawn from a Disney animated feature, but the recent “The Little Mermaid” (2008, 685 performances) and “Tarzan” (2006, 486 performances) didn’t live up to their predecessors’ success.

From October of 2000 to the present, 20 musicals have opened on Broadway that were based on films. There have been some huge hits – “The Producers,” which won a record-setting 12 Tonys and ran 2,502 performances, “Hairspray” (eight Tonys, 2,642 performances), “Spamalot” (three Tonys, 1,575 performances), and the currently running “Mary Poppins” (only one Tony but 1,541 performances as of this past weekend) and “Billy Elliot: The Musical” (10 Tonys, 708 performances since opening in November 2008), which are playing to near-capacity audiences. But the disappointments and failures have been numerous over the past 10 years, from the 485 performances of Mel Brooks’ and Thomas Meehan’s follow-up to “The Producers,” “Young Frankenstein,” and the mere 148 performances the Dolly Parton-musicalized “9 to 5” was able to squeeze out to the two months that both “Cry-Baby” and “Urban Cowboy” survived and the 285 performances logged by both “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and “The Wedding Singer.” “The Color Purple” had a moderately healthy run of 910 performances, and it has done very well in productions around the country. The same is true of both 2000’s “The Full Monty,” even though it only managed to last a little less than two years on Broadway, and the 2002 Tony winner, “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” Time will tell if other recent Broadway disappointments will find more success regionally than on the Great White Way, like “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” “Legally Blonde,” “Xanadu” and an ogre named “Shrek.”