SCREEN SHOTS
Broadway looks to Hollywood for a batch of movie-based musicals
LOVED the movie? See the show! Broadway hopes you’ll do just that this spring, when the curtains rise on “Groundhog Day,” “Anastasia,” “Amélie” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” — the musicals.
Name recognition aside, there’s no guarantee that what worked on-screen will fly onstage. For every hit like “The Producers,” there are dozens of misses, as those who saw “Big Fish,” “Doctor Zhivago” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” will tell you.
No wonder Andy Karl was skeptical about stepping into Bill Murray’s shoes for “Groundhog
Day,” opening April 17 at the August Wilson Theatre.
“It’s such a great movie, and it had such an indelible performance,” says Karl, who starred on Broadway in the short-lived musical “Rocky” in 2014. He says that when director Matthew Warchus approached him about playing Phil Connors, he didn’t think he was right for the part.
“Then I read the script and heard Tim Minchin’s music,” he says, “and I knew they weren’t setting out to ruin it!”
Hardly. The book is by Danny Rubin, who teamed with Harold Ramis on the 1993 film about a selfish soul forced to relive the same day over and over. Karl headlined the show in London, where it won warm reviews.
But he has yet to meet Murray. He says he saw the “SNL” great just once — strolling down Fifth Avenue, holding a grapefruit. Who knows where he’ll turn up next?
TERRENCE McNally was pretty sure he didn’t want to write another musical. “They move with the speed of lead,” the Tony-winning playwright tells The Post. “Choreographers, lyricists, composers — there’s just so many people. With a play, it’s just you.”
And then “Ragtime” songwriters Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty asked him to team up on “Anastasia” (April 24, Broadhurst Theatre). After checking out the 1997 animated film (for which they wrote the score) and the 1956 Ingrid Bergman film, McNally was won over by this “modern fairy tale” about a young woman who may or may not be the daughter of a deposed Russian czar. “There were scenes I couldn’t wait to write, and that’s always a good sign,” he says.
Just don’t expect to see Rasputin or any singing animals in this show — although that didn’t seem to faze the “Fan-tasiacs” who caught its Hartford, Conn., tryout, McNally says. “It’s a totally new look.”
STAY tuned, too, for “Amélie” (April 3, Walter Kerr Theatre), starring Phillipa Soo (“Hamilton”) as the angelic waitress of the 2001 movie, and “Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory” (April 23, Lunt-Fontanne Theatre), based on the Roald Dahl classic that inspired a wonderful Gene Wilder film (and a creepy Johnny Depp remake). Christian Borle, the popeyed pirate of “Peter and the Starcatcher,” stars as Willy Wonka.
This season is huge on revivals, including “Miss
Saigon,” which landed, helicopter and all, at the Broadway Theatre on Thursday. Watch, too, for “The Little
Foxes,” with Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon alternating roles in that Lillian Hellman melodrama (April 19, Samuel J. Friedman Theatre); “Present Laughter” (April 5, St. James Theatre), with a rare Broadway outing from Kevin Kline in Noël Coward’s midlife-crisis comedy; and “Six Degrees
of Separation” (April 25, Barrymore Theatre), with “West Wing” and “Mom” star Allison Janney as a well-heeled woman brought low by an imposter. And then there’s “Hello, Dolly!” (April 20, Shubert Theatre), whose $40 million advance can be summed up in two words: Bette Midler.
Want something new? Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole are going nose-tonose in “War Paint” (April 6, Nederlander Theatre), and perennial sweetheart Laura Osnes (“Grease,” “Cinderella”) plays a singing World War II widow in “Bandstand” (April 26, Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre), which shockingly has nothing to do with the old Dick Clark show.
New plays are sparse this spring, but Laurie Metcalf’s back in town in “A Doll’s
House, Part 2” (April 27, John Golden Theatre). Paula Vogel’s “Indecent” (April 18, Cort Theatre), about a Yiddish drama whose lesbian kiss scandalized the city in 1923, was an off-Broadway hit, as was “Oslo” (opened Thursday, Vivian Beaumont Theater), about a Norwegian couple working for peace in the Middle East.
Then again, maybe you just want to laugh. That’s what J.J. Abrams is banking on by producing “The Play That Goes Wrong” (April 2, Lyceum), a British farce about an inept group of actors. If all goes right, perhaps he’ll turn it into a movie.