Musicals: From Stage to Screen

In fact, I loved what Spielberg did with West Side Story, just as I was wowed (again, during 2021) by two other movie musicals: the first, made of an erstwhile Tony winner, In the Heights; and the second, a three-character Off Broadway entry from 2001, tick, tick...BOOM!, that came to full-throated, lovable screen life under the empathic eye of the begetter of In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda. Marking his feature-film directing debut, the Hamilton composer showed an affinity for the musical’s creator and protagonist, the late Jonathan Larson, that was revelatory in every way; and he was helped no end by his leading man, the sublime Andrew Garfield who – in my view anyway – was robbed of an Oscar well before Will Smith’s now-notorious slap.

That this 2021 stage-turned-film trifecta looks like no accident can be evidenced by Netflix’s 13 (which premiered on August 12), whose composer Jason Robert Brown enthused about the results on Facebook in the run-up to its debut. ‘When I started working on 13 back in the Pleistocene Era, in my head, I really did hope it would look like this,’ he said of the journey taken to the screen of a show seen first seen on Broadway in 2008. As if to prove the mutability of stage pieces on film, the screen 13 features three original songs just as the films of Evita, Phantom and Les Misérables all included at least one new song to ramp up their Oscar prospects (‘You Must Love Me’ from Evita won the Original Song Oscar in 1997). The result may not have set the world on fire but it enlarges awareness of the show that brought a very young Ariana Grande to Broadway.

The bright young cast of Netflix's 13 (Alan Markfield/Netflix © 2022)

As with so many films these days, 13 has arrived courtesy of Netflix. So, too, has Matthew Warchus’s film adaptation of his Royal Shakespeare Company spawned Matilda, arguably my favourite British stage musical ever (sorry, Oliver! and others). The sure-to-be highlight of October’s London Film Festival and beyond has already been positioned as a major awards contender: a circle made from movie, to stage musical of that movie, to movie of the subsequent stage musical, that invites comparison with Hairspray, another much-adapted title whose leading female on stage was in fact played by a man. (Not in this screen Matilda, however, where Emma Thompson, and not the originally mentioned Ralph Fiennes, plays the fearsome Agatha Trunchbull.)

Emma Thompson as the fearsome Miss Trunchbull in the movie adaptation of Matilda (Dan Smith/Netflix © 2022)

And so confident are all concerned about the screen potential of Wicked that the movie version of this billiondollar (yes, billion!) phenomenon will be released in two parts. Far better, presumably, to build upon a stage show running to nearly three hours than to cut or compress or lose any of what has made that title, so, well, ‘popular’. No pressure, then, for director Jon M Chu, who also directed In the Heights, or his leading ladies, the aforementioned Grande and Cynthia Erivo, with the unstoppable Jonathan Bailey along for the ride as Fiyero. And at least the two Wicked movies will be seen this decade: the slow-aborning film of Merrily We Roll Along is being shot by director Richard Linklater across 20 years, so as to follow the trajectory of the 1981 Stephen Sondheim stage musical, itself due back on New York stages during the season ahead. Let’s just hope I am around to see the finished celluloid result!

We’re talking here of films newly fashioned from stage shows and custom-made for the screen. There’s an altogether different phenomenon now afoot with, say, the celluloid version of Hamilton, which is about preserving the stage original. But watching Spielberg refashion a mighty 1957 stage title, or witnessing a smaller, inevitably more marginal stage show like Everybody’s Talking About Jamie find a vitality on film that it didn’t quite deliver for me on stage, is to marvel anew at the power of a medium that doesn’t have to just be about Marvel: Garfield understands from the inside the aspirations and vicissitudes of the thrusting young talent, Jon, he plays in tick, tick... BOOM! This wannabe composer/lyricist swings his way through the opposing realms of self-doubt and burgeoning confidence with an ease his Spider-Man would surely applaud.

tick, tick...BOOM! (Courtesy of Netflix)

Miranda’s film matches the nervy, untrammelled energy of a New York creative attempting to find his own place in a forbidding, competitive world. That Jon finds an ally of sorts in none other than Stephen Sondheim allows Miranda to acknowledge Sondheim’s Broadway supremacy in the tremendous commingling in the diner (you can watch this scene on YouTube) that pays glorious homage to the first-act finale of Sunday in the Park with George and its original leading lady, Bernadette Peters, in whose presence Jon, clearly overwhelmed, reaches towards his heart. The assemblage of Broadway royalty gathered for a scene filmed during draconian Covid-era protocol exists on an altogether different level than any stage iteration of tick, tick...BOOM! could ever be able to accomplish.

And the very engine of Larson’s show – his angsty alter ego turning 30 – directly echoes Sondheim’s Company, and the attendant anxieties at that musical’s singleton hero (or, now, in Marianne Elliott’s version, heroine) turning 35. That Sondheim died within weeks of the film’s Netflix unveiling only amplifies the poignancy of his dual screen presence as an actual character – played with perfect Sondheimian-sardonic pitch by Bradley Whitford – and heard via answering-machine recordings voiced by the great man himself. On stage, tick, tick...BOOM!, which I saw first in lower Manhattan with Raul Esparza and then in London in 2005 in a smashing Menier Chocolate Factory production which starred Neil Patrick Harris, was a smart, snappy, movingly self-aware miniature. Enlarged for the screen, the material reaches far greater – you’ll forgive the word – heights, its testimonial to Larson only layered in ways Miranda could never have anticipated by the honour which it additionally and unforgettably pays to Sondheim.

Garfield powers the film in ways I hadn’t thought possible, which isn’t always a given in such circumstances unfortunately. Watching the film version two years ago of the Broadway musical The Prom, I was struck by the disconnect between the name players on view (Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman) and the likeable if essentially flimsy material that didn’t really seem to warrant their attention. And though Jennifer Hudson won an Oscar for playing the heartsick Effie Melody White in the Dreamgirls movie, I’m old enough to remember Jennifer Holliday tearing up the stage of the Imperial Theatre in New York in December 1981 – a performance of raw fury that I doubt will ever be equalled in that part. Conversely, the presence of Rita Moreno – the Oscar-winning Anita from West Side Story’s first screen iteration – playing a different role in the reboot, and one that was new to the story as a whole, gave Spielberg’s approach to this story of New York tribalism both a nod towards its screen past and a unique sense that a fresh identity was being forged: as Valentina, widow of the store owner Doc, Moreno brings a sad-eyed world-weariness to the grievous arc of the narrative which exists worlds apart from the immigrant spitfire that made the career of a protean talent who is soon to be 91.

(Photo by Niko Tavernise. © 2021 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved)

Add in screen performances from Tony nominees and/or winners like David Alvarez (a one-time Billy Elliot on Broadway, here cast as Bernardo), Mike Faist (an utter revelation as Riff), and the movie’s much-laurelled (including with an Oscar), newly vibrant Anita, Ariana DeBose, and the Spielberg film courses with an authenticity that Wise’s film doesn’t always achieve: there is a world of difference between the ceaseless earnestness of Natalie Wood (Maria’s singing dubbed by the then-ubiquitous Marni Nixon) and Spielberg’s choice for the same part, Rachel Zegler, who was 20 at the time. The newcomer’s wordless gravitas in the final, sorrowful passages of the film gives the material the tragic heft towards which it aspires but doesn’t automatically achieve, too many other handlings of West Side Story in whichever medium faltering at the first hurdle of casting. Spielberg’s film is helped, too, by a wide lens that allows one to take in the full sensuality and savagery, as needed, of Justin Peck’s knowing, cunning choreography. I had the surreal experience late-August of revisiting the film in an outdoor screening in the piazza of New York’s Lincoln Center – the heart of the very West Side where the material takes place.

(Photo by Niko Tavernise. © 2021 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved)

Casting is a curious thing. Ben Platt became a sensation in Dear Evan Hansen, that genuine rarity – a stage musical not adapted from a pre-existing source – which grew incrementally into the Tony-winning phenomenon. Retained for the role in last year’s film version, Platt seemed whiny and narcissistic, the character’s moral dubiety writ disconcertingly large on screen: the film did a fast fade, taking down with it supporting performers like Amy Adams and Julianne Moore, neither of whom seemed to register.

Conversely, I admired the energy of the sleeper British hit Everybody’s Talking About Jamie on stage, and the leggy bravura of John McCrea in the title role of the aspiring drag queen, Jamie New. But it wasn’t until I saw Max Harwood inherit that role for last year’s film version that the story resonated for me emotionally. In that film, Harwood’s open-faced warmth is complemented, and then some, by Sarah Lancashire as his ever-supportive mum and Richard E Grant in beautiful form as the older, more experienced Hugo, whose own story gets an incalculable boost on screen that wasn’t possible on stage. A song new to the movie, ‘This Was Me’, gives historical and thematic weight to a story about gay lives then and now, helping unlock a delicacy in Grant that Jonathan Butterell, director of the show and the film, was keen to tap into. ‘I remember saying to Richard that I’m drawn to a sadness in your eyes. What he gave in return was something deep and profound,’ Butterell told me in a late-summer phone chat during which he was quick to praise ‘the power of the intimate moment’ on screen. 

‘Film can deepen something,’ says Butterell, who explains that he now thinks of the theatre and movie realisations of that same real-life story as ‘two separate entities’. At least a decade too old to recreate Jamie on screen (though that didn’t stop Ben Platt, one might point out), McCrea ceded his stage role for the movie to a newcomer in Harwood, whom Butterell plucked from his second year studying at London’s Urdang Academy. ‘I told him, “I’ll look after you and you look after me”,’ says Butterell, who was himself a film-directing novice when he took on the job. The result may be small-scale by comparison to such juggernauts as West Side Story – not to mention Wicked – but in its way seems perfectly formed. ‘We can never know, can we?’ says Butterell, speaking rhetorically about the mystery involved in the artistic process in any form. ‘It’s so ephemeral what an audience receives.’ It’s tempting at such moments to feel as if that audience might in some way be twice-blessed: those who were able to can savour the memory of the show in three dimensions, leaving the screen version as an indelible marker that can be returned to repeatedly, to coincide with the curtain calls that we all carry with us in our heads.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 1 OF MUSICALS (OCTOBER 2022)