STAGE TO SCREEN FAILURES
There are some things only a live performance can accomplish. Jamie Portman explains.
There are some lessons that Hollywood never learns.
Otherwise we would have been spared such cinematic follies as Cats and A Chorus Line — historic stage musicals that simply did not work on screen. Indeed, even the film version of The Phantom of the Opera was, at best, an honourable failure.
The recent catastrophe of Cats further demolishes the assumption that if a show is a success on Broadway or in London’s
West End, it is destined to attain even greater triumphs on the big screen. History tells us that the road to Hollywood is littered with the corpses of major stage musicals — Paint Your Wagon, Mame, Annie — that failed to glitter on screen because of colossal bungles by filmmakers.
However, Cats, which has now lost more than $100 million, belongs in a different category. It was doomed from the beginning, and the biggest error in judgment by its much-maligned director, Tom Hooper, was to take it on in the first place. To be sure, the critical knives were collectively out as soon as those creepy shots of people like Judi Dench and
Ian McKellen in digital fur began appearing on the internet. But the real problem was that the original stage musical, a one-ofa-kind entertainment adored by millions, was essentially unfilmable.
Anyone who attended the original productions in the early 1980s would have encountered a total-theatre experience, the kind of experience that can engulf a live audience in a way impossible in a cinema. On paper, it may have seemed a preposterous idea to turn T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats into a musical. It succeeded because of a magical fusion of extraordinary theatre talent: composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Trevor Nunn, choreographer Gillian Lynne, designer John Napier and an amazing cast.
Nunn and Napier were crucial to fulfilling the unique vision of the show. It wasn’t just Napier’s junkyard set, with its quirkily garbed feline characters emerging out of old tires and garbage cans. That was only the beginning: Napier was setting out to create an “environment rather than a set.”
In London, he replaced the theatre’s traditional proscenium with a thrust stage that reached into the auditorium. The aim was a genuinely immersive theatrical experience: glowing cat eyes peered at you from the darkness, and when the show opened on Broadway the Winter Garden Theatre’s $2-million renovation included the installation of cat walks allowing feline characters even greater integration with spectators.
It didn’t really matter whether Mr. Mistoffelees, the tearful Grizabella or the Jellicle Ball made any collective sense. Cats on stage seduced the senses — establishing its own insistent, infectious, intoxicating make-believe reality, one that could not be reimagined on film.
In 1997, Cats became the longest-running musical in Broadway history. It supplanted A Chorus Line, another legendary show that confounded the doomsayers by happening on a bare stage and focusing on a group of Broadway “gypsies” auditioning for spots in the chorus line of an upcoming musical. Its 15-year New York run was a testament to the unique vision of its director and choreographer, Michael Bennett.
Bennett was briefly creative consultant for the film version, released in 1985. But he and Universal Studio parted company because of disputes over how the essential vision of the original could be fulfilled on film. Top directors, including Mike Nichols and Sidney Lumet, kept turning it down until England’s Richard Attenborough finally agreed to take it on. His approach worked after a fashion — but at the expense of the original. Most reviews were devastating. “They said A Chorus Line couldn’t be done, and this time they were right,” commented Vincent Canby in The New York Times. The Washington Post, horrified at the abandonment of the original’s mythic core, found it less an adaptation than an assassination.
Lloyd Webber’s sing-through musicals can also be problematic.
Evita spent more than 15 years in development hell before director Alan Parker agreed to tackle it. He at least fought the somewhat resistant material to a draw, managed to deliver something more than an overblown music video, and coped with the challenge of having Madonna as his star. But you were also left wondering about what Meryl Streep, an earlier candidate for the starring role, might have brought to Parker’s film. Her tests indicated she would have been stupendous.
Canada’s Norman Jewison, entrusted with Jesus Christ Superstar, released in 1973. took his cue from the original bestselling recording of the songs rather than from Tom O’Horgan’s flashy Broadway production, bringing his own creative sensibility to what many deemed a cinematically intransigent project, and succeeding with perhaps the most satisfactory Lloyd Webber film adaptation so far.
But The Phantom of the Opera, so stunning to watch on stage that fans kept returning to it again and again, was another matter. Joel Schumacher, a gifted and often underrated visual stylist, took it on and suffered an honourable defeat. His 2004 movie had its share of powerful moments, but it could never in a million years evoke the texture and immediacy and excitement of the live theatre production.
Phantom, which has now replaced Cats as Broadway’s longest running show, owes its mythic status to the wizardry of veteran director Hal Prince, who died only a few months ago, and designer Maria Björnsson. Their legacy endures in a production that continues to flourish on both sides of the Atlantic. The type of total experience they created speaks a mysterious language unique to the living stage, a language to which film can only aspire.
Recent decades have seen Broadway and London’s West End push the musical envelope more and more. That can create difficult new challenges for the filmmaker. Clint Eastwood failed to find an equivalent cinematic language for Jersey Boys, and director Chris Columbus was critically lambasted for the film version of Rent. On the other side, director Milos Forman’s brought a sardonic Eastern European sensibility to Hair and made it work.
So how will an upcoming screen version of Hamilton fare? It turns out that Disney is playing it safe. There’s been no ambush-ridden effort to rethink the one-of-a-kind hip-hop hit for the big screen. Instead, Disney has opted for a “live capture” of an actual stage performance featuring members of the original cast.
An Oct. 15, 2021, release date is planned.