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Golden musicals from movies

Posted by:	peter3053 01:19 am EDT 03/18/14
In reply to:	re: Daily Beast: Is Broadway Brain-Dead? - garyd 09:48 pm EDT 03/17/14

I think the difference is that the great movie-to-musical adaptations have been done by people who understood that the theatre is a more intensive word-, as well as imagination-, experience than visual one. Consider the literacy of A Little Night Music, and Nine, and even, arguably, Phantom of the Opera - there is a coherent theatrical dramaturgy grounded in language, a poetic heightening of the words. Musicals which take from the visual medium of film and then simply try to revisualise them on stage often come off as smaller in dimension and more simplistic. (Consider how the magic carpet ride in Aladdin the movie seemed larger than life but on stage seems trite). Somehow theatre shows up vacuousness of language, perhaps because it is staged on a platform, and whatever is on a platform, from earliest cultures, audiences attend to listen to more than to see. This does not mean that, once the fundamental difference in medium is acknowledged, a great designer and director and lighting and costume designer can't further enrich the experience visually. But the essential force at work will always be different, and straight movie-to-stage transfers will always wind up, erm, rocky.

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