Written by: Ember Sappington, Staff Writer
Sitting in my public high school’s rather bleak library under the fluorescent lights, a busted Chromebook sits on the worn wood laminate table. The dinky old thing has way too many websites blocked on it, one of my online classes had even gotten blocked once, but the website I was focused on wasn’t. In the cold sterile library in the middle of a cold sterile school in a cold blank tundra of snow-covered cornfields and frozen lakes, I was scrolling through Playbill’s website. Specifically, I was pouring over the page that listed every show that was open on Broadway at that time.
And I was disappointed.
And then, as I continued down the page, I was frustrated.
How many movies were getting turned into musicals this year?
Tootsie
Beetlejuice
Moulin Rouge! The Musical
Three. That was quite a lot. And then I thought, didn’t this happen last season? So, I went to check.
King Kong
Pretty Woman: The Musical
Two. Odd, I thought to myself. The year before?
The Band's Visit
Mean Girls
Two again. How long had it been since we’d had a season without a movie-to-musical adaptation on the great white way?
Holiday Inn, the New Irving Berlin Musical
Amelie, A New Musical
Groundhog Day
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Not that season either. Four? Four in one year? How far did this go back?
At this point, I was curious. Of course, I’d noticed how many movie-to-musicals had gone up in all the years I had been doing theatre. But exactly how many had there been? When did this start? Who thought of it? Why? What are their stats? How long do they run? Are they more successful than originals? Does name recognition help? Why is something that already exists as a highly accessible movie being rebooted on Broadway? And also, why does it catch my eye more than other types of adaptations? Why does it feel…off?
A key thing to note: I am a dramaturg. I possess, as do most of those who find themselves devoted to the dramaturgical craft, what the great Prof. Shteir would call “a questioning spirit”. And then because of this “questioning spirit”, my natural next course of action was to pursue the questions prompted by that spirit.
So, this is going to be a series, a series born from the frustration and curiosity of a cold high school senior sitting in front of a Chromebook on its last leg and a hyper fixation on Broadway shows. It’s going to explore the history of, the mechanics behind, and also be a critique and examination of, the interesting phenomenon that has been (depending on where you stand) plaguing or gracing the American commercial theatre stage way longer than you knew.
Buckle in, because this is going to be a wild ride.
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