Stop adapting indecent old films for the stage
Some mornings I wake up and feel something weird has happened overnight; there’s been a rift in the space/time continuum and part of history has been erased. That happened this week as I absorbed the news that Pretty Woman and Indecent Proposal the musicals were set to open in London. If your memory needs jogging, both stories were originally Nineties films where the dramatic premise centred on multimillionaires who paid to have sex with beautiful women.
So you can understand why I felt as if third- and fourth-wave feminism, a second woman prime minister and the entire MeToo movement had never happened. Those films felt outmoded when they opened, although Pretty Woman was elevated above its hooker-as-Cinders plot by the billion-watt luminosity of a young Julia Roberts. At that moment in time she could probably have played Rose West and we’d still have forked out money to see her.
Thirty years later, there’s no escaping the fact street prostitution is the tragic realm of the exploited, vulnerable and drug-addicted. There’s not a hope in hell that a ravishing ingénue like Roberts would slide into your passenger seat, and Richard Gere would be a kerb-crawling salesman, not a handsome tycoon.
Indecent Proposal, on the other hand, had nothing lovable about it whatsoever and I write that as someone who’s always fancied Robert Redford – which was part of the problem. I’d happily ditch my husband to make whoopee with a younger RR. More than that, the proposal itself wasn’t dramatically interesting. If you’re young and passionately in love then you wouldn’t surrender the beloved to anyone, not for kingdoms and vast rubies. If you’re older and long-spliced (the couple in the new Southwark Playhouse production are middle-aged) and some rich dude offers you a million pounds to have sex with your spouse you’d almost certainly pimp them out in the interests of the joint bank account. The self-reproaching’s nothing that a little therapy and a villa in Levanto couldn’t remedy.
I’m not alone in feeling narked. Heather Rabbatts, the chairman of the Time’s Up UK campaign, said this week it felt “slightly ironic in a post-MeToo and Harvey Weinstein world that two big new musicals … are both about women having to earn a living through the sale of their bodies to rich and powerful men.”
But my greatest objection, as a lifelong lover of musicals, is that neither of these movies has the key ingredients for a West End hit: they lack heart and larger-than-life characters and they’re not ludicrous enough to be kitsch. Worse than that, they’re cynical. It’s almost impossible to make the whole bursting-intosong thing work if there’s something misanthropic at a story’s core.
The recent musicals that have triumphantly evolved out of films have had something camp or darkly witty in their DNA that’s begging to be translated into lyrics; remember Kinky Boots, Legally Blonde and Return to the Forbidden Planet? You’ve got to want to sway and sing along, even if the subject is teenage alienation and homicide, as it was with recent success Heathers.
When I started musing on the hit films of my youth and which would make more fitting song-and-dance springboards (the few that haven’t yet been adapted), my first thought was 1988’s Working Girl, starring Melanie Griffith. It’s comedic, it has a great big beating heart, there are two lead parts for chanteuses and it offers the potential for an epic score of Eighties hits. There’s also the lure of a fascinating topic: how much things have changed in the workplace within the span of one generation.
On top of that there’s the central debate – still topical – about female rivalry in competitive situations (women beware women!). So it wasn’t a huge surprise to find the film has already been optioned for a Broadway musical with Cyndi Lauper in charge of the score. Now all they need to do is give the lead role to Jessie Buckley and cast Renée Zellweger as her duplicitous boss. It’s not that much to ask for, surely: musicals where the heroine’s goal is a great job, not a seedy bloke.
It’s impossible to make the whole bursting-into-song thing work if the story’s core is so misanthropic