The Producers went from a box office disappointment on screen to a Broadway blockbuster many years later. Spamalot, based on MP & the Holy Grail, is the current king of Broadway and * The Color Purple* (which while originally a novel is best known for the film version) opened on Broadway this week. Hairspray and The Lion King are huge hits and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Blvd (in some ways actually an improvement on the movie [which made no money in its initial release] and * Whistle Down the Wind* both had some critical and commercial success. Dolly Parton is currently writing the songs for a stage production of 9 to 5 (still set in 1980- I don’t see it being a huge hit, but I could be wrong), Mel Brooks is working on musical versions of Young Frankenstein and the producers of Hairspray are developing Cry Baby. Moulin Rouge has also been touted as a possibility, though I would imagine that getting all the necessary song rights would be very daunting. Dead Man Walking is now an opera (Dead Man Singing?) and Andre Previn wrote and produced an opera of Streetcar Named Desire.
On the less than successful side: Big, the musical version of the Tom Hanks film, was a disappointment, a British stage musical of Gone With the Wind tanked and Carrie was the biggest Broadway flop up to that point in history.
So assume you’re a great big Broadway producer and you’re so huge that every studio is willing to let you have full access to their catalog to musicalize their movies. Which ones would you select?
My pics:
The Addams Family- I think with the write clever and macabre lyrics, it could make the transition (and Antonio Banderas could be a great Gomez).
Fried Green Tomatoes (at the Whistlestop Cafe) (whose musical potential I’ve touted before on these boards)
Don Juan Demarco- didn’t work as a movie, but I think that as a light musical it could have potential (particularly if it ran on a rotating basis with my other favorite psychiatrist/patient centered fluff piece, EQUUS).
Creator which I (and I believe Cal Meacham) have listed as a favorite sleeper movie, has some singability about the nature of love and life and technology.
Movies I wouldn’t option for now:
Apocalypse Now- “Just stand back Kurtz!/That goes for your blackshirts!/I’m just gonna give you one last morning!/I so hate Cambodia/it makes me need my Immodium/and I hate the smell of napalm in the morning!”
Police Academy (though George Gaynes is in fact an opera singer and Michael Winslow will work for food)
Big Mama’s House
Dreamgirls
Citizen Kane (though “He’s dead… and had a sled” and “Rosebud… hose dud” have possibilities as lyrics)
The Godfather- could work as an opera, but not really as a musical, for though “weeps with the missus” can rhyme with “sleeps with the fishes”, what rhymes with “toll booth” or “you don’t talk to a man like Moe Greene like that!”?
Leaving Las Vegas- not enough rhymes with cirrhosis