Written by: Ember Sappington, Staff Writer
So, how many movie-to-musical adaptations have 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? To answer this question I decided to start at the very beginning, which is (as any true musical theatre nerd knows), a very good place to start.
Step One: Figure out when this started.
Now, this was a shocker for me. You might guess that movie-to-musical adaptations became a thing in the 2000s, right? We’ve got The Producers, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Hairspray, Spamalot, Little Shop of Horrors, Legally Blonde, 9 to 5 The Musical. The list goes on and on. Going into this, I figured this would be the start. But no, it’s way, way earlier than I ever could have guessed.
The inciting incident of the movie-to-musical phenomenon actually went up in 1906 at what was then known as Daly’s Theatre (now the modern day location of the New Amsterdam). It was called The Spring Chicken and it ran for 115 performances from October 1906 to April 1907. The average run of a Broadway show that year was only 55 performances, making The Spring Chicken’s run twice a little over 2x the average.
The Spring Chicken was originally Coquin de Printemps or The Spring Rascal, a film by Adolphe Jaime and Georges Duval released in 1897, only nine years after the first motion picture, Roundhay Garden Scene, which was made in October 1888. Jaime and Duval were playwrights who worked in vaudeville at the time and this is their only known foray into film. The important conclusion to take from this research-born data is that the Broadway musical The Spring Chicken is the first example of producers taking what was first a film and then transferring that to the stage. They added music, fleshed out the book, and quite literally brought the show to life. This example is a fascinating start and stands out in stark comparison to what we see now with films that are moved to the stage.
Pictured above: Various stills from the 1906 production of "Spring Chicken."
With a film from 1897, you’re working with a flickering blurry image in black in white, with no sound. When you bring that to the stage and make it a musical, it becomes something “live in living color” as another movie-to-musical, Catch Me if You Can, would put it. They are two completely different mediums that aren’t really comparable. It also must be taken into account that during this season, famous works of realism and naturalism were being staged frequently, including Hedda Gabler, Miss Julie, and The Kreutzer Sonata. This was a period where the stage was highly invested in trying to replicate life as closely as it could. Film did not provide the same level of realism that it developed to be able to accomplish in later decades. “Talkies”, or movies with sound weren’t mainstream until 1927 with the release of The Jazz Singer. What happened with The Spring Chicken was not the process that we see today with movie-to-musicals; there was no screenplay already written to simply be grafted with songs and pushed out on stage. Even if Coquin de Printemps had been wildly popular and seen by large audiences, which there is no record to show that it was, the experience of seeing it on stage as a musical is not comparable to a fan of Mean Girls going to see Mean Girls: The Musical today.
A film would not be adapted for the stage again until almost 30 years later in 1935, and would not be done with notable success until the opening of Fanny in 1954 at the Majestic Theatre.
Pictured above: A spreadsheet showing the every movie-to-musical from 1906 - 1960. Blank sections indicate no movie-to-musicals being produced during that season.
And that, my dear readers, is where things start to get interesting. Stay tuned.
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