Will ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ be a West End hit?
How many times have you been watching a film and thought, “Do you know what this needs? A show-stopping dance number, a printed programme and someone to sell me ice cream in the interval.”
Alas, these desires make going to the cinema very disappointing. But, happily, these days it seems there’s almost no film that hasn’t been made into a musical and plonked on stage. It’s a Wonderful Life is the latest. The book is being written by the playwright Lee Hall, who wrote the stage musical of Billy Elliot, and the songs are being provided by the actual Sir Paul McCartney. It’s due to open in 2020.
Clearly, it’s very tempting for producers to make films into musicals. Billy Elliot, The Full Monty, Kinky Boots, School of Rock, Legally Blonde, The Producers, Made in Dagenham… we could spend all day listing them. It’s not even the first time that someone’s tried to make a musical out of It’s a Wonderful Life: a 1986 adaptation by Sheldon Harnick (who wrote the lyrics for Fiddler on the Roof) didn’t do particularly well when it was first performed or when it was last revived in 2006. Hopes will be higher for the rhyming dream team of Lee Hall and Sir Paul.
One of the reasons that films are so often picked to become musicals is
that the rewards for writers and producers can be enormous. Billy Elliot ran in the West End for 11 years, won dozens of awards, and has been staged in more than 25 different productions around the world.
Stage musicals based on films are attractive to audiences because, as theatre tickets are an expensive treat, you want to be sure you’re going to have a good time. If you already know you’ll enjoy the story because you’ve seen the film, then you can predict that you’re going to get a good return on your investment. Plus it has songs that offer a fresh way of experiencing something you already know you like.
Another reason that these adaptations happen so often is that there’s a formula. Once you have a tight plot and some good characters, which are handily provided by any decent film, shaping a story into a musical is a matter of following a few simple steps. Just find the bits in the story that Irving Berlin called “posts” – the emotional turning points on which you can hang a song – and add in some songs. There’s almost always an “I Want” song in the first act, for instance, which establishes the motivation of the main character, and an “11 o’clock number” (socalled because it happens at about 11pm in a performance that started at 8.30pm), late on in the second act when said main character comes to a deeper emotional realisation about their predicament.
But makers of musical adaptations should beware. The simplicity of the formula is seductive but deceptive. Adapting a musical isn’t as easy as it sounds, as proven by the fact that so many have flopped. The Lord of the
Rings musical, which I suppose is technically an adaptation of the books but was heavily inspired by the films, opened in the West End in 2007, with 50 actors, at a cost of £12million. Perhaps inevitably given the returns required, it didn’t thrive and closed after just over a year. It did better than the infamous 2008 musical adaptation of Gone with the Wind, which closed at the New London Theatre after just 79 performances, loathed by audiences and critics alike ( The Telegraph’s theatre critic, Charles Spencer, said he “felt like screaming every time a new song started”). Even worse was Carrie in 1988, which ended on Broadway after 16 previews
and five performances. These productions suffered a variety of problems.
Gone with the Wind, critics agreed, was just profoundly boring and much too long, its grand and sweeping screen presence failing to translate to the stage. Lord of the Rings was also criticised for its length and for a general aura of mediocrity. Carrie, on the other hand, was largely just a chaotic production beset by lastminute rewrites and cast changes, with general disorganisation probably its ultimate downfall.
So success is far from guaranteed. Maybe the really canny move would be going in the other direction and turning phenomenally successful stage musicals into serious screen dramas. Plenty of stage musicals have been made into films – Chicago, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera
– but they usually keep the songs. Where’s the black-and-white, musicfree, French-language version of
Wicked? That’s what I’d like to know.