Except for the characters from other colonial-era literature who stopped by to visit.
Why, look, it’s Tituba. How’re things going in The Crucible, Tituba? Oh dear, well yes I suppose you can stay here for a while.
The made-for-TV starring Kelsey Grammar “A Christmas Carol.” There’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.
Wow, 20+ posts and no mention of Grease?
I’ve gotten the impression that the movie version sucked hot monkey nuts when compared to the original play.
I disagree. The stage version seems really clunky and has some downright terrible songs. The movie version is heads above the stage show.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the film, but the play had some really stupid songs that were taken out of the film, and replaced with new, better songs. You’re the One That I Want is an improvement over the ridiculous All Choked Up. Not to mention the ridiculous Mooning, which is based on a dumb pun. Is this a play or an issue of MAD?
Well, this is interesting, indeed. There was a thread some time back in which numerous Dopers wished Grease into the cornfield (can’t recall exactly when the thread was - my serach-fu is off today).
IIRC, it had more to do with the cast being too old for playing high school students than anything else. Olivia Newton-John was 29!
What about Little Shop Of horrors? I’ve not seen the stage musical, but I’ve heard a song or two on the radio that wasn’t in the movie version. I’ve also heard they changed the plot. Anyone seen both, and can compare? (I like the movie).
My late wife was a high school English teacher and was forced to teach The Scarlet Letter. The students were warned when the book was assigned that you can’t watch the movie and use that and expect to pass this class. Needless to say, there were always 2 or 3 who watched the movie and flunked that part of her course. They would complain either that they should get credit for having watched the movie or that it wasn’t their fault the movie adaptation was so little like the book! Some would deny that she had ever warned the class not to depend on the movie. They were inevitably shouted down by their classmates.
OK, this is the first time that something I read online literally made me spit on my monitor. Well played, saoirse.
I wasn’t part of that thread.
Don’t forget the film adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play “The Children’s Hour” which is about two teachers who may or may not be lesbians who are beset by a whispering campaign among their students, to the effect that they are … lesbians. The film version dropped teh gay and had the rumors be about the teachers having adulterous affairs with men. Kinda changed things, yup.
As for book to play, don’t forget the Godawful adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s “Damnation Alley” which completely soured Zelazny on Hollywood adaptations of his work, so there are no others. And the “Nine Princes In Amber” books SCREAM to be a TV series.
The second paragraph should read “book to movie” not “book to play.” Though Damnation Alley the Musical has its possibilities:
“I’m Hell Tanner
Not Bruce Banner
A biker riding through Hell
Mutant butterflies and
Bad weather
Will not my doom spell!”
(That oughtta get a few RPMs out of Roger.)
Same thing with James Thurber’s wonderful short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
I suppose it might be possible to enjoy the Danny Kaye movie if you had never read the story.
But UGH.
Sometimes it works the other way and the movie is better than the book although I only know of one example. In my opinion the movie Maltese Falcon outdid Hammit’s story.
Anything Goes (1956) bears so little relation to the play of the same name, it makes me wonder why they didn’t just call it something else. It wasn’t awful, it just wasn’t Anything Goes.
Paint Your Wagon: Not sure, but didn’t the movie actually come first?
Jesus Christ Superstar (circa 1976) stuck pretty much to the script, but the movie was just shoddy and charmless, with a smirky and unearned “Aren’t we cool?” quality to it. There was a filmed-on-stage version on PBS a few years back that was much better (although the stylistic swipes from Star Wars and The Matrix were a little distracting). Interesting that there have been so many Andrew Lloyd Webber plays and so few fully-realized films based on them, but I attribute that to the fact that plays go directly to film a lot less frequently after around 1970 than before (I’m hard-pressed to think of a major stage musical from pre-1970 that hasn’t been adapted successfully to film, but they’ve gotten rarer in the intervening years). Trivia note: The film version of Superstar was Ron Jeremy’s first film credit
Well, I saw the movie before I read the story. I liked the movie. Mind you, I was pretty young, and haven’t seen it in years.
[QUOTE=Krokodil]
Paint Your Wagon: Not sure, but didn’t the movie actually come first?/QUOTE]
No..
Cartooniverse
A Chorus Line. Better they had set up a camera in the 17th row and just filmed a Saturday matinee.
The film version of Forum had its moments and kept most of the Broadway cast (and among those they added was Buster Keaton, so who can complain?) but they added silly sideplots and slapstick. One sideplot was a chariot chase like DUKES OF HAZZARD BC. They filmed in Roman ruins in Spain, which might have worked except the play was set in vibrant Rome and the ruins looked like… well, ruins. Just a bit too done.
I never saw the stage version of Annie but it’s had two film adaptations and neither worked. The first one had good talent but was just too oversung, over choreographed and over hyped, though the scenes with Tim Curry, Carol Burnett and Bernadette Peters singing together (Easy Street and its reprise) and Carol Burnett’s rendition of Little Girls were worth the price of admission- she brought a wonderful element of crazy drunk to the role). The second version, with Kathy Bates, was perhaps the most pointless remake in screen or stage history, with Victor Garber’s Daddy Warbucks going from indifference to love where Annie was concerned with such speed and inexplicability that HR would investigate.
Night of the Iguana was almost completely rewritten for the screen. It’s still set in a run down Mexican beach hotel but gone are the WW2 elements and much of the subtext from the play. You Can’t Take It With You also didn’t make the crossing well or intact.