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A moment that I barely noticed in the 2019 Broadway production of David Byrne’s “American Utopia” jumped out at me with new resonance in the Spike Lee movie for HBO.
It was then that Byrne, in his introduction to the song “Everybody’s Coming to My House”, recounted having performed it by students at the Detroit School of Arts. Without altering a word or note, the high school students had transformed the number, which in Byrne’s original version is presented as an anxious monologue about being inundated with otherness, into a joyous choral invitation.
“I sort of liked their version better,” Byrne said, apparently surprised at the mutability of the material: the song was the same but had “a completely different meaning.”
I knew what he meant; after all, I was watching an even more elaborate translation, in which a concert staged like a Broadway musical was transformed into a televised film captured live for cable. And while Lee’s sleek, exuberant adaptation included many shots of the Hudson Theater audience skipping to the beat and dancing the aisles, it was now, like “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” the same but totally different.
Theater-goers are familiar with this feeling. These days, it seems like everyone comes to our house – and leaves with the furniture. In decades we haven’t seen so many Broadway shows, whether it’s musicals (“Hamilton”, “The Prom”) or plays (“What the Constitution Means to Me”, “The Boys in the Band “, “Outside Mullingar,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) or unclassifiable offerings like “American Utopia,” picked up by Hollywood, squeezed through the camera lens and turned into a film.
The pressure is certainly more subtle now than it was before. Words are rarely massacred to avoid being offended as they once were; I expect Steven Spielberg’s version of “West Side Story,” scheduled for release in December 2021, will revert to Stephen Sondheim’s original rhyme for “buck,” which had to be edited for the 1961 film. .
Plus, countless songs are no longer thrown like dead plants in escapes of fire. (The 1966 film version of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” dropped at least half of Sondheim’s 14 issues.) Musicals – and, in a way, plays, too – are now filmed because of their music, not despite it.
Of course, you’d expect that hands-off treatment of Disney Plus’s live-action capture of “Hamilton,” which in content, if not in effect, was a close replica of the famous stage version. But even “The Prom,” while not a Broadway blockbuster, came out of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix translation with all of his songs and more.
This does not mean that these works are unchanged. Compared to the stage version, Lee’s “American Utopia” feels grander, higher – sometimes literally, with its shots from above.
“Hamilton,” on the other hand, with its frequent close-ups, especially of female characters, is a much more human-scale story on screen than it appeared to be on Broadway. Swirling handheld cameras suggest the intimate chaos of the lived experience in a way that no framed choreography for a pre-show could. Whether this is an improvement may depend on whether you prefer your personal or formal story; I like both and I refuse to choose.
The movie from “The Prom” definitely went for the staff – in part because of Murphy’s biographical connection to Bob Martin and Chad Beguelin’s musical book. Like Emma’s character, Murphy grew up in Indiana, had an unhappy coming out, and couldn’t catch the date he wanted at his prom.
The show on stage seemed to alternate between telling this story and satirizing four narcissistic Broadway performers who, needing a good publicity, decide to help Emma, whether she wants to or not. In the movie, however, three of those four intruders feel like supporting characters, despite being played by Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells.
The fourth, played by James Corden, receives so much more emotional weight – not to mention an on-screen mom briefly mentioned on stage – that the film is as much about healing his own gay scars as it is about Emma’s dancing. . with his girlfriend.
I understand, and I was even moved by this choice, but it takes a lot of the sparkle off the material, replacing it with syrup. And the cast, however starred it may be, cannot compensate. I was hoping that the original top Broadway performers – companions such as Beth Leavel, Brooks Ashmanskas, Christopher Sieber, and Angie Schworer – would descend on the film as the story’s Broadway characters descend to Indiana, to show the Rubies how it works. happens.
Redesigning a game with stars for the screen was the rule; I only have to say the words “Lucille Ball is Mame” to make music theater fans tremble. The excuse is always money: it takes big names to sell enough tickets to make up for huge movie budgets. I don’t know if Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan are those kinds of names, but their appearance in the screen adaptation of “Outside Mullingar,” called “Wild Mountain Thyme,” is the least of the film’s problems.
The plus is John Patrick Shanley, who wrote both versions and, catastrophically, directed the film. (His directing of the film version of his play “Doubt” was better, but so was the raw material.) Exaggerating all that is bad about “Outside Mullingar” – its strange twist, its encyclopedia of Irish clichés – it stifles the little spark was what was good in it: the story of a man so locked in shame that love hardly finds any way in.
Following what was once stage-to-screen protocol, Shanley also made the mistake of “opening” a story that was best closed. Placing Blunt and Dornan in sightseeing shots of the Irish countryside doesn’t make the filmic material any more than adding an unnecessary character played by Jon Hamm, paired with an even more unnecessary character, makes it richer. This is a case where the filmmaker does not respect the material of the playmaker, which is particularly odd given that Shanley is both.
Today’s best adaptations don’t look like rescue missions or charity makeovers; they appreciate the theatricality of their sources and try to enhance it, not hide it. Joe Mantello’s powerful Netflix rendition of “The Boys in the Band,” based on the 2018 Broadway production, makes some poetic forays into the story, but most of the time, like the play, stays in one place the same night . Compression spins it all around like a time bomb.
This is also how I felt about Viola Davis’ huge and extremely pressurized performance as blues singer Ma Rainey in the otherwise uneven Netflix adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”. Her expressionist makeup is wise compared to her emotional makeup: she’s a woman who knows that her voice is the only asset she has in a world ruled by racism.
Whenever director George C. Wolfe and screenwriter Ruben Santiago-Hudson get closer to the original August Wilson story and its claustrophobic setting – a Chicago studio Ma is set to record in with his band – the film maintains the long-term tension of the part. But that power wears off the moment it takes it out of context, as if context is needed in a plot whose themes of appropriation and resistance are as relevant today as they were in 1982, when the play was first released. been written – or for that matter in 1927, when It’s settled.
The best scenes in the film – like the one in which Ma insists her nephew be allowed to deliver the introduction of a song even if he stutters – use the camera as a highlighter, emphasizing the structure of the argument. These moments don’t try to simplify or, worse, overstate this argument, but to believe that the film, contrary to its reputation as a flashier but less intellectual brother of the theater, is capable of delivering complex verbal ideas like Wilson’s. .
But is it a movie? Most of these recent adaptations have been made for streaming services, with a completely different economy and aesthetic than the studios that made the classics. People who saw the 1972 film “Cabaret,” to name an almost universally admired cinematic transfer of a musical, saw it on a screen even larger than the front stage of the Broadhurst Theater, where it. originally aired on Broadway. But most people who see “The Prom” today will see it on devices that fit in their dens or in their palms. No wonder his story caught on fire.
The best of recent adaptations do something more subtle. Instead of making the action bigger, they bring it closer, pulling us to the edge of the cauldron and then throwing us into it.
For me, this was especially true of “What the Constitution Means to Me,” Heidi Schreck’s play about lives lost in the shadow of our foundational legal document. Marielle Heller’s captivating live capture for Amazon doesn’t change the subject at all but, in a way, reverses the angle. We are asked to situate ourselves in Schreck’s consciousness rather than our own – just as Viola Davis demands that we understand what it is to be Ma Rainey and like Spike Lee, in “American Utopia”, forces us to see the world through that of David Byrne. anxious eyes.
In the theater, we are our own cameras and editors. We see what we choose, frame it as we wish, and relish the right to hold the shot from afar. The paradox of the best movie adaptations is that we love them for doing the opposite: they put us on stage with the story and don’t let us say anything.
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