Today we've turned the blog over to Tom Mizer, one half of the songwriting team Mizer & Moore...
Musicals have alwasy been adapted from non-musical material
by Tom Mizer
Can I admit something and you promise not to judge me? My writing partner and I are working on adapting some movies into stage musicals. If eye-rolling made a sound, I bet I would hear a thousand violent swooshes. “Not another movie made into a musical! Why can’t there be original musicals?”...
Here’s the deal: musicals have always been built largely on the foundations of other forms, whether adapted from novels (South Pacific, Show Boat) or straight plays (Oklahoma, My Fair Lady) or, yes, movies. Musicals are incredibly difficult to make work; there are so many moving parts that having the framework of a good story already in place can be an enormous advantage...
Secondly, and I’ll be blunt now, it’s difficult to make money writing musical theater. Unless you happen to be the writer of Wicked, even writers with shows on Broadway struggle to make ends meet from theater. But movie studios are actively attempting to monetize their vast catalogs of intellectual property by seeking writers to adapt properties for the stage. (I can’t tell you how many meetings we’ve been on with studios and we aren’t Lin Manuel Miranda.) In the process, the studios are serving as unintentional patrons of the arts by paying for drafts...helping writers eat while they work on ALL their projects.
Finally, in my best Mae West voice, it’s not what you got, it’s what you do with it. For us personally, we try to find properties with these three attributes in mind:
A story should have a reason for being told now.
Universal has hired us to write a modern update of Remember the Night, a Preston Sturges’ comedy about a road trip shared by a thief and the prosecutor assigned to put her away. It’s a delight to ride the rhythms of Sturges’ crackling dialogue (though terrifying to write new dialogue alongside his), but what really grabbed us is how contemporary the ideas felt. As Barbara Stanwick’s character in the film says:
“Right or wrong is the same for everybody, you see, but the rights and the wrongs aren’t the same.”
Doesn’t that sound like our current state of disunion?!
Musical theater is theatrical
(Hint: it’s right there in the name).
We’ve also been commissioned to write a musical version of an obscure noir called The Amazing Mr. X. It’s a terrible movie. No, really. It’s terrible. But the bones of the story, mainly three big plot twists, are so gasp in your seat fun, we took a second look. And what we found underneath absolutely screams to be on a stage—night clubs and magic tricks and seances and billowing curtains—-all things that can be more thrilling on a real, happening-right-in-front-of-you stage.
Some stories didn’t work as films.
Maybe they just needed to learn to sing. I get why people turn to successful films to make musicals, but perfect screenplays are perfect and are in exactly the medium they should be in. (And if you’re counting on a title to guarantee a hit, Broadway is littered with the corpses of name brand shows.) Our instinct is to find the films that are a little (or a lot) broken. Perhaps Remember the Night is so-called “second tier” Sturges because it needed songs. Certainly no one would go to see our Mr. X expecting to hear a famous line of dialogue recited for nostalgic buzz. We feel this gives us the opportunity to shake up the plots and throw out antiquated tropes and make something fresh in our voice.
Who knows if our shows will work, but try to keep an open mind before you dismiss another movie-to-stage project. It just might be a new classic like these five movie-to-stage adaptations that I wouldn’t want to live without:
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Little Shop of Horrors: One of the reasons I am a lyricist today, the smart, silly, heartfelt lyrics of Howard Ashman adapting a B-horror film with Alan Menken are a humanist wonder.
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A Little Night Music: Sondheim/Wheeler meets Bergman in a swirl of waltzes and romantic folly. Sophisticated and gorgeous.
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The Band’s Visit: Based on a 2007 Israeli film, this warm breeze of a musical manages to slow your tempo until you can clearly hear the quiet beauty of ordinary people and their longing. That’s the power of music.
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Once: I think the stage version actually improves upon the film, giving the characters higher stakes and making every moment lift with the magic of live, collective music making.
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Silk Stockings: There are plenty of others I could name but I’m going to cheat here. I have a strange fondness for the movie made of the stage musical adapted from the movie Ninotchka. It’s of its time and has some questionable casting, but those delightful Cole Porter songs and Cyd Charisse succumbing to capitalism in dance (!) are worth the price of admission.
all posts by Tom Mizer...
Childhood movie love
Oscar winners for Best Original Song
Filming Mrs Maisel's Musical Numbers
Movies to Stage -Musical Adaptations
Meeting Barbra Streisand