Stephanie Styles and Drew Gehling in “Roman Holiday: The Musical.”
New show uses familiar numbers by Cole Porter
Producing Broadway shows is not for the faint of heart. But it takes a special sense of adventure to adapt a film like “Roman Holiday” into a major musical. Paul Blake and Mike Bosner, the producing team behind “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” have done exactly that. Their “Roman Holiday — the Musical” opens its pre-Broadway run at the Golden Gate Theatre on May 23 and is expected to transfer to New York this fall.
It’s an ambitious endeavor: William Wyler’s 1953 romance, about a restless princess who meets a scheming photographer on a night out in Rome, launched the career of Audrey Hepburn, who played opposite Gregory Peck and won the Academy Award for best actress. (Blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo posthumously received credit for best screenplay, which also won an Oscar.) For the score, they’re using the songs of Cole Porter, mixing standards like “Night and Day” and “Begin the Beguine” with lesser-known tunes.
Their endeavor has the imprimaturs of Paramount Pictures, the Porter estate and Judy Wyler Sheldon, the director’s daughter. (In the film, she’s the girl whose camera Peck tries to steal beside the Trevi Fountain.) “It sounds wonderful,” she said by phone from her San Francisco home. “I think it’s much better to try and do something a little different than to try to remake (the film) exactly. And my goodness, with Cole Porter music, how can you miss?”
The show could make a star of 25-year-old Stephanie Styles, who will make her Broadway debut in Hepburn’s role. Drew Gehling of “Waitress,” “Beautiful” Tony Award nominee Jarrod Spector, Sara Chase of TV’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and Georgia Engel round out the main cast.
At their offices on 54th Street in Manhattan, Blake and Bosner talked about their take on “Roman Holiday,” playing San Francisco and the significance of trampolines.
Q: Why turn “Roman Holiday” into a musical?
Paul Blake: It’s a Cinderella story in reverse. Cinderella stories make great musicals. (They) don’t always have happy endings.
Q: Why did you use Cole Porter’s songs?
PB: You need someone who understands music of that period, so rather than find someone new who
doesn’t know how to do it, we went to Cole Porter. (In) “Easy to Love” he says, “We’d be so grand at the game/ so carefree together/ that it does seem a shame/ that you can’t see your future with me.” That’s the whole story. Once I had that, we then worked backwards. Q: You also had to adapt the film to the stage — that’s a complicated puzzle. Mike Bosner: It’s the exact same process (as writing an original story). The only difference is that … we know where the show is going. With “Beautiful,” you know that she is going to become Carole King. In “Roman Holiday,” we know that they’re gonna go off on this adventure and explore Rome together. Q: Those two shows use music differently. PB: In “Beautiful,” we don’t do any songs out of dialogue, because they were written as pop songs, and pop songs do not translate very well to musical diction. In “Roman Holiday,” they are singing out of characters. We can do that with a theater writer, but it’s very hard to do with a pop writer. … We have to find songs that fit the sensibility of the individual characters. Q: What changes have you made so that the story works on the stage? PB: We’re not changing it, we’re embellishing it with music. The Mouth of Truth, the Vespa ride — those are all in the show. And you can’t change the end. So many people said, “They have to get together in the end.” And I said no! And the dialogue, some of it is the same. MB: The hope is that the music is telling you a lot of what that dialogue in the movie is telling you. Q: You did invent a character — Francesca. PB: If you spent the whole evening with just (Ann and Joe), it gets to be a chamber piece. So we said let’s give (Irving, played in the film by Eddie Albert) another woman. Then they can sing about love in a way that’s more explicit than the two of them. Q: You’ve brought on Marc Bruni, who directed “Beautiful.” MB: Marc has a love of the golden age of musicals in a way that is hard to find these days. PB: All the trendy directors these days have to make it theirs. You give them “Roman Holiday,” and they would say, “Wonderful story. What if it was all done on trampolines?” Marc appreciates that this is a very old-fashioned musical. There’s power in that if you just do it and don’t comment on it.
Q: Why do your pre-Broadway run in San Francisco?
MB: We want to know how an intelligent audience responds to a big, commercial show like this. We follow up with surveys, we encourage a dialogue. I think audience members enjoy that. It allows them in to be part of the process, and they know that they’re along for the ride with us.
PB: That San Francisco audience, to me, is like entertaining my friends. (They say) show me what it’s gonna be, and I’ll go on the ride with you, and I hope I have a good time.