I'm just as sorry as the next theater lover that Julie Andrews wasn't asked to recreate her Eliza on the big screen (to choose but one of countless examples), but there's a certain naïveté to cries of "Why weren't the original stage people asked to make the movie?"
Ashmanskas, Leavel et al. are very talented, and beloved by their New York public, but their names mean nothing to the wider audience. (Hell, they weren't even big enough draws on Broadway to keep the show running much more than 300 performances, and that was with love-letter reviews.) Who on Earth would fund a movie starring them, or at least who would do so and expect to draw a large audience?
Moreover, automatically using the stage stars guarantees nothing. RENT notoriously suffered from exactly that choice, both artistically and commercially, but there are plenty of other examples. Sitting through the movie of THE PRODUCERS, for instance, I felt again and again that retaining so many of the Broadway people -- worst of all, perhaps, Stroman herself behind the camera -- was a fatal mistake, since everyone involved seemed to assume that the magic from their stage success would automatically transfer. |
