Musicals glean inspiration from movies

Recently opened ‘Hairspray’ and theater workshop follow film trend

By Jake Tracer, DAILY BRUIN SENIOR STAFF, jtracer@media.ucla.edu

When Marqui Konzem, a 2003 theater graduate, auditioned for the national touring cast of the musical version of “Saturday Night Fever,” she had no idea what the show was about. She had never seen the movie. But her mother was excited.

“It’s a nostalgia thing,” Konzem said. “My mom said, ‘I remember “Saturday Night Fever.” It was such a great movie!’”

Konzem’s mother wanted to see the musical before her daughter was cast in it and before knowing anything else about it other than that it was based on the famous 1977 movie of the same name.

It’s a recent trend in musical theater, as new musicals based on movies have been able to keep audiences paying higher ticket prices to offset growing production costs and declining interest in live theater.

“Saturday Night Fever,” although panned by most critics when it opened in New York in 1999, was commercially successful because audiences wanted to see the film’s characters live and on stage.

“It’s like going from a Broadway show to doing a theme park show,” Konzem said. “It’s that kind of entertainment. You go to Disneyland to see the characters you saw in the movie.”

Since musical versions of “The Producers” and “The Full Monty” competed for the Best Musical Tony Award in 2001, a plethora of shows based on movies have filled Broadway stages, including “Saturday Night Fever,” “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “Urban Cowboy” and “Sweet Smell of Success.” Another, “Hairspray,” recently opened in Hollywood’s Pantages Theater and will run there through Sept. 5.

What links most contemporary musicals based on movies together is the way in which they’re composed, relying heavily on pop melodies and sounds instead of more traditional Broadway fanfare.

Gary Gardner, a theater professor who teaches a class on the history of American musical theater, explained that the change in composition style may be more important than choice of source material.

“It’s easier on writers because they’ve been raised on television to write pop,” he said. “The audiences that will go to Broadway now don’t remember great old Broadway, so they want something more familiar.”

The shifting sound of the American musical requires changes in the way actors prepare for auditions and study the art. This summer, UCLA’s Ray Bolger Musical Theater Program will change some of its faculty, and the program’s new look may reflect Broadway’s discovery of popular music.

“If we are trying to be more with it, that’s fine,” Gardner said. “But fads change. I know in 1969 everybody in musical theater was ready to give it up because it seemed dead, but then (composer Stephen) Sondheim came along, and everybody wanted to have trained voices and be good actors.”

Still, Konzem felt the program treated her well when she was in school, before the faculty changes were under way.

“(It) prepared me well,” she said. “The program was so comprehensive. In our dance classes on Fridays, we’d have a teacher come in and teach us anything from hip-hop to ballet, and we had another teacher coming in teaching us choreography from shows on Broadway right now.”

The prevalence of pop scores on Broadway could be a result of bringing movies — the champions of pop art — into the musical theater scene.

But while many debate the artistic merits of basing a musical on a movie, they may be debating the wrong issue.

Marc Shaiman and Margo Lion, the composer and head producer, respectively, of “Hairspray,” based on the 1988 John Waters movie, believe using movies as source material is a logical step for contemporary theater.

“Saturday Night Fever” may have been a critical flop, but “Hairspray” was a huge success and even won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2003, suggesting the type of source material isn’t the most important thing to consider for quality, regardless of commercial popularity.

“If I see a commercial on TV that has a great story, it could be a musical,” Shaiman said. “All it takes is a great story.”

Shaiman noted that most musicals, regardless of era, are based on some sort of previously existing material, so using a movie as a source isn’t such a new idea.

Rather than exhibiting a lack of creative storytelling, good stories facilitate the complex and creative art of musical theater composition.

“It’s important 99 percent of the time to base a musical on a preexisting plot,” Lion said. “Movies are the source now.”

But with the Hollywood movies on which musicals are being based come the pressures to entertain audiences like the movies did. As movies entertain the masses through pop culture sensibilities, so must the musicals based on them.

“Most young performers today have started training fairly early so they’ll be adaptable to any new choreography,” Gardner said. “The problem is that a lot of people are training for musical theater like ‘Carousel’ when they have to audition for (something else).”

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