Ebook PDF Twenty First Century Musicals From Stage To Screen PDF
Ebook PDF Twenty First Century Musicals From Stage To Screen PDF
Ebook PDF Twenty First Century Musicals From Stage To Screen PDF
Linda Mokdad is an Assistant Professor of Film and English, and the Director of
the Film Studies programme at St. Olaf College, Minnesota. She is co-editor of
The International Film Musical (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and is currently
finishing a book on post-9/11 American cinema (under contract with Rutgers
University Press). Her teaching and research topics are diverse, and include
everything from classical Hollywood to world cinema.
Auteurship and Directorial Visions (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama) and The Disney
Musical on Stage and Screen: Critical Approaches from Snow White to Frozen
(Bloomsbury Methuen Drama).
Mark Shields is a graduate of the University of Leeds (2011) and the Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama (2016). His research interests include queer theory
and actor training pedagogy, verbatim theatre techniques and practices, and
research ethics. Mark has worked as an educator and activist with the HIV
community for the past eleven years, holding positions at the Terrence Higgins
Trust, the leading HIV and sexual health charity in the UK, and as a member of
the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP), London. Mark is currently a
visiting lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Other publications include The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience
and Performance (Rodopi, 2013), Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song
and Dance (OUP, 2013), and Studying Musical Theatre: Theory and Practice (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014). He is also a co-editor of the book series Palgrave Studies in
British Musical Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan) and Critical Perspectives in Musical
Theatre (OUP).
Julian Woolford is a British theatre director, playwright and lyricist, based in the
UK and working internationally. He is currently the Head of Musical Theatre at
Guildford School of Acting at the University of Surrey. Julian’s plays and musicals
have been produced in the UK, the USA, the Netherlands, New Zealand and
Bermuda and he has directed productions in the West End, off-Broadway,
Germany, Australia, Poland, Holland and Austria. In 2015 he became the first
person to direct a commercial musical in Egypt when he staged The Sound of Music
in a tent in the desert outside Cairo. Julian is the author of How Musicals Work
(Nick Hern Books) and a forthcoming book in Routledge’s The Fourth Wall
Series on The Sound of Music.
I would like to thank Ben Piggott at Routledge for his genuine interest in my
research on Musical Theatre, Kate Edwards and the editorial team at Routledge for
all their help and guidance towards the final steps of the publishing process.
I am grateful to all the contributors of the volume for their excellent contributions
and working together to ensure the smooth publication of this volume. I also need
to thank Dr Duška Radosavljeviü for her feedback on the initial proposal and
constructive presence in everything I do.
Sincere thanks to the editors of Studies in Musical Theatre, Dr Dominic Symonds
and Dr George Burrows; the members of the Music Theatre Working Group of
the International Federation of Theatre Research for all their feedback, discussions
and encouragement throughout the years; Arthur Pritchard for his guidance in the
past fifteen years; Dr Tim Stephenson for our inspiring co-teaching on the
‘Exploring the Musical’ modules; Ms Susan Daniels, Professor Alice O’Grady, Dr
Joslin McKinney, Professor Jonathan Pitches, Dr Scott Palmer, Dr Kara McKechnie,
Dr Fiona Bannon, Dr Tony Gardner, Dr Philip Kiszely, Dr Ben Walmsley, Dr
David Shearing, Dr Anna Fenemore, Steve Ansell and all my colleagues, technical
and support staff, stage@leeds and students at the School of Performance and
Cultural Industries for their support.
Additional thanks to Professor Barry Keith Grant, Professor Robert Gordon, Dr
Olaf Jubin, Dr Demetris Zavros, Dr Angela Hadjipanteli, Georgea Solomontos,
Varnavas Kyriazis, Stergios Mavrikis, Jordan James Taylor, Dave Wright, Kate
Hughes, Kelli Zezulka, Michael Fentiman, Michalis Christodoulou, Dimitri
Biniaris, Scott Harris, Todd Cijunelis, Joel Jenkins, Tom Colley, Rebecca Young,
Patrick Bannon, Jon Dean, Sheila Howarth, Nikolai Foster, the West Yorkshire
Playhouse, the cast and creative team of Body Faded Blue at the Theatrical
Organization of Cyprus (THOC), and all the performers I worked with for helping
me develop and shape my directorial practice in Musical Theatre. Special thanks to
xiv Acknowledgments
Biddy Hayward and Mike Markiewicz at ArenaPAL for their tireless help regarding
the photographic material and Ken Cerniglia at Disney Theatrical Group.
I would like to thank my sister Marina Rodosthenous and my brother Nektarios
Rodosthenous for their continuous support of my work. And, finally, my mother
Aphrodite and my late father Andreas who generously introduced me to the
pleasures of musical theatre.
Dr George Rodosthenous
Associate Professor in Theatre Directing
FOREWORD
Barry Keith Grant
There may be fewer musicals today than in the past, but they are as important now
as they have ever been. True, the golden ages of the Broadway stage musical and
the Hollywood film musical may be gone. The great songwriters are no longer
producing great tunes, and in the cinema Hollywood is producing fewer musicals
than before, certainly fewer than during the classical era when the studios, as one
historian of the genre has written, ground them out like sausages. During the
period of the New Hollywood in the 1970s, with few exceptions male cinephile
auteurs concentrated on the ‘masculine’ genres of the western, horror, and gangster
and crime film while virtually ignoring the musical. It has never recovered its
dominant place in the genre system since.
In today’s uncertain and dangerous world, perhaps audiences find it more
difficult to be charmed by song and dance. Yet musicals continue to loom large in
the cultural landscape. Some, like Mamma Mia!, The Phantom of the Opera and
Beauty and the Beast, for example, are now fully ensconced in popular culture, no
longer merely theatrical productions but, as the hyperbolic publicity for blockbuster
movies is fond of putting it, significant events. Musicals today, such as those
mentioned above, often participate in, and are part of, larger cultural mega-texts:
each belongs to a larger network generated by a cultural property comprised of
multiple texts in a range of cultural forms, including various forms of print, recorded
and live music, a panoply of merchandising possibilities and, of course, film
adaptation.
For this reason musicals are at the centre of the evolving structures of cultural
production, distribution and consumption within today’s corporate and globalized
cultural industries. As media corporations have merged in recent decades, franchise
synergies have become an increasingly important and defining feature of the
contemporary mediascape. Narratives, characters and concepts migrate across a
range of media forms and platforms, and fans follow the developing ‘universe’ of
xvi Foreword
properties while media producers gain increased brand awareness. Just as the stage
musical and cinema are hybrid forms, a transmedia confluence of cultural forms, so
film adaptations of stage musicals are by their nature an essential component of
contemporary transmedia and convergence culture.
The musical should be of more interest to scholars than has been the case. While
there has been a more or less steady trickle of work on the genre for decades, some
contributing greatly to our understanding of its history and ideology and the
workings of the genre system, the musical hasn’t enjoyed nearly the same degree
of attention as, say, westerns, science fiction or horror. When the musical film is
discussed, scholars today sometime seem more interested in the cultural signification
of sound design and the various levels of the soundtrack than in detailed explication
of specific musicals and their life across media. Given the increasing transmediality
of musicals in the twenty-first century, the musical film adaptation offers a
potentially rich but thus far largely unexamined area of study.
George Rodosthenous’ Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen is thus
an especially timely and welcome book. The first scholarly collection to focus on
film musicals adapted from the stage, the book brings together scholars with the
kind of interdisciplinary knowledge required to understand musicals today. In
these pages the authors discuss the most important musicals since the millennium.
And in doing so, they reveal a keen understanding of multiple areas of cultural
studies including, but not limited to, camp, popular music, gender studies, and
adaptation theory. At the same time they make a major contribution by remaining
sensitive to, and appreciative of, the particulars of both theatre and cinema as
distinct and different expressive forms.
INTRODUCTION
George Rodosthenous
The key area of investigation of Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen
is to understand the different ways that the film adaptations provide new contexts,
layers and dimensions of meaning. The volume aims to revisit the genre by
discussing fifteen case studies of film musicals from the early twenty-first century
that have been adapted from the stage. How does each case study make the ‘move’
from a work of stage musical theatre to the medium of film? The authors provide
detailed and extremely articulate critical analyses of the works, in juxtaposition
with issues of drag, camp, race, identity and performativity, satire, irony and failure.
Cari McDonnell’s extensive survey, ‘Genre Theory and the Film Musical’ in the
Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies identifies some gaps in the study of the film
musical and suggests that new academic writing should cover these unrepresented
areas of ‘style, structure, and specific musical makeup of performance’, ‘the
relationship between character and star persona’ and ‘the genre’s relationship with
the popular music industry and the star system’ (McDonnell 2014: 245). Through
the range of case studies, this book aims to address other under-represented areas
and also answer some of the questions raised above.
After Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Moulin Rouge (2001) the film musical changed
for ever. In the former, the songs became the only moments of happiness in a sombre
narrative that, despite paying homage to the classic The Sound of Music, usurped the
traditional narrative formula, concluding in the gloomy Bjorkian despair of the
execution of a coerced murderess. Along the way, its infamous director Lars von
Trier broke nearly every single rule from the Dogme 95 Vows of Chastity. In Moulin
Rouge we had the opposite: an excess of spectacle, innovative treatments of well-
known songs (‘Like a Virgin’ by the Duke) and flirtations with Bollywood (‘Hindi
Sad Diamonds’). Its excesses redefined entertainment and star casting, and brought
MTV and reality show TV culture to the forefront of the film musical. These
novelties have affected the way musicals are created and experienced ever since.
2 George Rodosthenous
The case studies offer narratives that develop our understanding of the traditional
norms of film musicals, which stem from the Golden Age of the film musical and
reach to the works produced at the end of the twentieth century. Barry Keith
Grant, in the Foreword to this volume, reminds us that ‘[j]ust as the stage musical
and cinema are hybrid forms, a transmedia confluence of cultural forms, so film
adaptations of stage musicals are by nature an essential component of contemporary
transmedia and convergence culture’ (xvi). And it is this hybridity that essentially
makes binary discussions ineffectual. In the film musicals produced since the
beginning of the millennium, relationships no longer have to conform to the dual
boy meets girl formula (Dyer 2002), and non-heteronormative narratives emerge
(Rent) featuring characters who were originally marginalised (Hedwig). Impressive
female personas achieve emancipation (Chicago) and liberated taverna-owners are
having fun on Greek islands (Mamma Mia!), while original classics such as Phantom
of the Opera and Sweeney Todd are reinvigorated through receiving the full post-
millennial cinematic treatment. The aesthetic of the musical becomes heavily
politicised (Dreamgirls) and important racial issues are no longer overlooked but
explored in depth (Hairspray). The theme of disaster becomes a structural device to
create new narratives in Nine and The Producers, and even if the end products of the
film versions have themselves proved to be non-commercial successes, the formula
of rags to riches is now challenged. The jukebox musical gains a new heightened
role within the production of The Jersey Boys, while film companies such as Disney
take risks by exploring dark, adult Sondheim works that were previously regarded
as solely suitable for the stage (Into the Woods). Perceptions of time are also
challenged in works such as The Last Five Years, where linear narratives are reversed
and juxtaposed, while multiple adaptations of works such as Annie from TV to
stage and film and then vice versa provide a platform for new, diverse readings.
Finally, the twenty-first-century revolution abandons traditional melody completely
and uses speech patterns and intonations to provide the vocal lines for new verbatim
works such as London Road, where the lyrics, pitch and rhythm are constructed
entirely from everyday spoken utterances.
These revolutions in narrative, sexual and racial politics, linear representation
and thematic content give us the opportunity to see the musical in a different light.
The structural revolutions (in the musical’s form) are intimately connected to the
thematic considerations and politics of musical theatre performance, including the
politics of its reception. Mike Alfreds writes about the power of the theatre:
‘During a performance, we are all growing old together, actors, audience – and
characters. The transience of theatre is part of its uniqueness, its poignancy. As
soon as it’s happened, it’s gone’ (Alfreds 2007: 18). The ‘transplantation’ into the
new medium inadvertently invites a discussion of the resulting aesthetics and
audience reception, as well as politics. This is yet another gap in the literature that
is expanded upon by the chapters of this book. The millennial generation has been
raised on Disney musicals and Glee, so it comes as no surprise to anybody of
that age group when people on screen suddenly burst out singing and dancing.
Indeed, they expect characters to burst out singing and dancing, which contradicts
Introduction 3
Dyer’s (1979) earlier writings about the ontology of the film musical (Dyer 2012).
One cannot underestimate the effect of reality competition shows and the television
series Glee (as well as Smash) and this revitalised, positive-effect attitude towards
musicals. The shift is reflected in the attitudes towards works that are now designed
for younger audiences (Billy Elliot, Frozen, Matilda, The Lion King and Wicked). In
the same way, the presence of political statements is evidently more prominent.
Musical theatre is not just mere entertainment – it never was. But when it deals
4 George Rodosthenous
with immigrants, deaths of prostitutes, AIDS, weight issues, racial issues and
deformity, then it transforms into a powerful tool for political change.
Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen endeavours to provide
multiple perspectives on key film musicals of the twenty-first century, to unlock
hidden narratives and sub-texts that are evident in the film adaptations, to critique
and expose the differences of the film adaptations in relation to the original stage
works, and to offer new insights and contexts. All the authors were prompted to
tackle the same research questions covering areas such as:
• How does the film adaptation provide a different viewing experience from the
stage version?
• What themes are highlighted in the film adaptation?
• What does the new casting bring to the work?
• Do camera angles dictate a different reading from the stage version?
• What is lost/gained in the process of adaptation to film?
Disney has been around for over ninety years, so it is possible that some
audiences associate watching a Disney musical with how they felt when they
(or their parents, or grandparents, or great grandparents) first encountered
the source material. This creates an invaluable dynamic: the nostalgia of
reimagining one’s childhood.
(Rodosthenous 2017: 12)
Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast (2017), directed by Bill Condon, will be
followed by 22 more live-action movies of its animated classics.
With the regular production of ‘filmed live versions’ of musicals such as Love
Never Dies (2010), Billy Elliot (2014), Gypsy (2015), Miss Saigon (2016) and Disney’s
Newsies (2017), the producers take on the ‘challenge of translating stage to screen
to create premium theatrical content’.2 The filmed production of Newsies (see
Figure 0.3) had an original three-day cinematic release, which took $3.47 million
at the box office3 and will be released digitally and on demand, thus providing a
6 George Rodosthenous
FIGURE 0.3 The cast of Disney’s Newsies from the filmed live version.
Photo © Disney
new digital form of engagement with the work. Steam Motion and Sound managed
to deliver stage versions of musical theatre to its audience, shot and finished in 4K.
Its co-founder Brett Sullivan reflects that
[i]t’s got to be filmic because it’s going to be projected onto a big screen, but
it also has to feel like live entertainment … Those two worlds can be hard to
reconcile. Often in live cuts, the cameras are all at the back of the room and
you feel removed from the action. We want to get close, so close that you
can see into the eyes of the actors. When you see the eyes of actors on the
screen, the story becomes much deeper.4
And as The Stage reviewer Mark Shenton remarks, the audiences get some
additional bonus shots: ‘Once or twice, we also get a view no theatre audience
would get, as the camera observes the action from above.’5
A plethora of new film musicals is being prepared, or are rumoured to be in
development for the immediate future, which proves that the revised interest in
the film musical genre continues unabated. Film adaptations in progress include the
musicals Hello Again (an adaptation of Michael John LaChiusa’s musical based on
Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde), Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again!, West Side Story
(Steven Spielberg), South Pacific (Michael Mayer), Oliver (Toby Haynes), Guys and
Dolls (Michael Grandage), Jason Robert Brown’s 13, plus American Idiot, Beautiful:
The Carole King Musical, Cats, Finding Neverland, Gypsy, In the Heights, Jekyll &
Introduction 7
Hyde, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Little Shop of Horrors, Lysistrata
Jones, Matilda, Memphis, Pippin, Spring Awakening and Sunset Boulevard.6
In discussing the creative teams of the (film) musical, the contributors to this
book expose the issue of gender inequality. Out of the fifteen case studies it
becomes clear that the film musical world remains stubbornly patriarchal and male
dominated, with only two film musicals being directed by women (interestingly,
both of them are directed by the original stage director: Phyllida Lloyd for Mamma
Mia! and Susan Stroman for The Producers). All the composers of the film musicals
discussed here are male.7 What is also noteworthy is the inclusion of British stage
directors in the film musical-making canon. One of the most eagerly awaited new
film musicals, Wicked, is directed by eminent British stage director Stephen Daldry.
In addition, Michael Grandage, another celebrated British director, will be
responsible for Disney’s stage version of Frozen.
Celebrity casting has always been a major part of film musicals. There were
some fortunate surprises in Moulin Rouge, with both Ewan McGregor and Nicole
Kidman singing wonderfully – but this trend has led to some embarrassing moments
in the recent history of the film musical. It must be really frustrating for triple threat
actors to see major films being cast with celebrities who cannot sing, at least at the
standard audiences are used to in stage productions of musicals. While the work’s
artistic integrity may have been slightly compromised, the decision will be justified
by the box office benefits. Even so, die-hard fans of Russell Crowe walked out
when they realised Les Misérables was not an action film but a musical. With Nine,
not even the decision to cast seven female celebrities managed to save the film from
being regarded as a financial and critical catastrophe.
Film musicals usually operate in linear time fashion, using flash-forwards/backs
and (day-)dream sequences as a means to disrupt this conformity. While in Merrily
We Roll Along the whole narrative is presented backwards, this is still an exception
to the canon. Only a few other composers have experimented with non-linear and
experimental time narratives, most notably found in concept musicals. The Last
Five Years is a fine example of mixing the timescales of the two protagonists and
presenting them in opposing time (Jason Robert Brown was inspired by his
mentor’s Merrily We Roll Along). This device gets an even more complex treatment
in the film version, as discussed by Sarah Browne in Chapter 12.
Back in 1951, Singin’ in the Rain exposed, and made comedy from, one of the
film making techniques used extensively: dubbing the voice. And there are
plenty of examples where the actual actor the audience sees on the screen is not
the one whose voice the audience is actually hearing.8 Tom Hooper’s adaptation
of Les Misérables, though, has brought a double revolution. The singing takes
place live during the filming, so that moment is captured live. This process
removes the divide between voice and image, ‘severing the body from the voice’
(Dyer 2012: 16), and provides new opportunities for discussion, evaluation and
analysis.
Live singing was a common practice in some of the first movie musicals (Love
Me Tonight, The Gay Divorcee), but the idea of capturing the image and the voice
8 George Rodosthenous
live still offers a closer, intensely intimate and perhaps more authentic single
performance than the obvious attempt to lip-sync to an existing pre-recorded
soundtrack. According to Mordden, it offers ‘a solution to a problem almost as
old as the talkie itself: how to project above all dramatic music when the actors
aren’t being musically dramatic during the actual shooting’ (Mordden 2016:
223). Demetris Zavros discusses this further in his chapter on London Road and
concludes that it tries to capture (but actually inescapably fails to capture) the
‘reality of the moment’ and its ‘transient quality’ by not resorting to the more
‘traditional dubbing of the singing’. In addition, he comments on the fact that
the ensemble numbers sung by the chorus are occasionally treated through rather
intimate sound localisations (effectively, extreme sound ‘close-ups’ coupled with
their visual counterparts) as we focus down to a particular performer’s voice
within the ensemble sound. This last technique produces ‘an illusion of a (hyper)
“realistic” approach and also acts as a faint reminder of performing these pieces
live’ (Zavros: 224).
The notion of ‘faithfulness’ in the adaptation, and the departure from it, can
take different guises in the case of a cross-medial adaptation. But this is an essential
part of the discussion in the book. Zavros is suggesting that the adaptation needs to
use the new medium’s aesthetics to get to the core of the politics of the original
performance (and perhaps how this is not completely achieved in the case of
London Road). What counts as ‘failure’ or ‘success’ in the adaptation is not exhausted
at the box office. As film critic Andrew Lapin asserts,
Musicals excite senses and erase distances, and audiences shouldn’t need to
be weeded out for them. The walkouts […] could be a blessing in disguise:
They’re an excellent opportunity to rid the landscape of such knee-jerk
aversion to the form, and start critical dialogue about a place for musicals in
today’s cinematic ecosystem. Maybe a few walkouts are just what this genre
needs to check in.
(Lapin 2015)