Movie Musicals - One Step Forward, Ten Steps Back
August 6th 2007 05:42
Nothing but changes make this movie musical nothing but cheese
I walked out delighted by a pleasantly funny movie - all the while feeling robbed! Without posting a review I will simply state that the producer/director Adam Shankman and screenplay author Leslie Dixon have taken one of the most wickedly funny, irreverent scripts written in the last decade and dumbed it down to create just another teenage movie. The cast should undoubtedly have been an early warning sign that this was in the works, but seemingly everyone missed it!
Zac Efron... that pretty much says it all. Basically a mass appeal to the High School Musical crowd, and it's worked.
Pairing down a Broadway show is a trick dating back to the 1930's, when a movie-musical was created to take a luxury available to only a small portion of the population (Broadway lives in New York after all, and tickets were/are pricey!) and give it to the American public at large.
The result was generally a ninety minute glamour-ama with a billing-war worth of star names, ornate sets and costumes, dubbing galore and a hundred and fifty piece orchestra. It also usually meant the removal of half of the songs and a great deal of judicious pruning to the more risque lyrics.
Chop and change?
While hacking up a musical to make it fit Hollywood's rigorous demands may have made sense in the 30's and 40's, today, now ... much has changed.
Broadway musicals are a ubiquitous thing now, with budgets registering up to seven zeroes, gigantic stages and sets to work with, often over a hundred costumes to play with and lighting which grows more technologically advanced daily. By the week, tens of thousands flood through the doors of theatres along The Great White Way as theatre runs extend now to be counted in years, decades even!
National Tours are almost a given for any blockbuster - International Tours even, carrying shows to a larger audience than ever before. This makes the movie musical a horse of a different colour.
For starters it makes it a rarer commodity. Why make a movie version of a stage show that is already easily accessible? The audience appeal has to be collosal, and the content and the characters have to be tailor made for a roster of hot Hollywood talent - stars.
More over it seems producers believe that the movie version has to be different - it has to have a fresh appeal. This automaticvally means new songs - giving the composer a chance for an Oscar nomination - songs cut and dialogue being sexed up (or down) to bring it in line with the vernacular of modern audiences.
The result is usually a supremely altered version of the original stage show and rarely is it to be considered superior. It seems that a winning formula is no longer enough so far as musicals are concerned. Certainly this is the case with Hairspray.
The stage show was a mass of double-entendres and carefully worked site-gags and irreverent pokes at every subject you would care to name - especially showbiz!
The movie does away with all of them, replacing it with "clean by comparison" cheese-humour that is more suited to an audience of teenage girls.
Credits must go to the creative team. The alterations have paid off and audiences have turned out in droves, making Hairspray a bigger commercial sucess than Dreamgirls even.
But at what cost?
Ten years on Broadway? Pfft! Re-write it
This is the fact that seems to have been forgotten. Future generations will view these movies (with the stage shows long gone) as the definitive edition, and they must be created with this in mind. If you examine the most successful musicals of all time you will find shows that stuck to the original stage conception and rather relied on the screen to expand upon the plot and the characters rather than have them be constricted by it.
Movie musicals such as My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Oliver, Gigi, South Pacific, The Sound of Music and Funny Girl have all gone on to become part of the modern pop-culture, and remain inviolable screen classics.
The same can hardly be said of The Producers or Dreamgirls - and the issue is not to be had with the subject matter, only with how it has been presented.
Hairspray is as different to it's original stage incrnation as black to white, and while the upcoming film versions of Sweeney Todd and Mamma Mia! are both earning a great deal of excitement and attention, the directors of both films have admitted that cuts have been made. It seems that devaluing the Broadway musical is the only way it will work on screen. A travesty considering the money, the talent and the technology available to film makers today and a sad loss for the art form that is musical theatre.
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