Carol Burnett and the Ends of Variety

This chapter examines Hollywood’s great rival, television, in a study of how television adapted the Broadway musical. Rather than looking at conventional stage-to-small-screen adaptations, however, the chapter focuses on how Carol Burnett’s TV show provided adaptations of another kind, that is, parodies of famous musicals. For example, the chapter explains how ‘Hold Me, Hamlet’ can be read as a parody/adaptation of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate, even retaining the doubling of the onstage/backstage musical format of the latter. Meanwhile, The Wiz is the clearest referent for ‘Cinderella Gets it On.’ These Burnett shows approach poesis because they take the form of the musical, and they often do comment upon it, but they are also genuine expressions of the form and the creators’ deep love and understanding of it.

Little Shop of Horrors

This chapter examines the movie adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors. The musical was a huge success Off-Broadway and it would have been natural to move it to a larger, Broadway theatre. But David Geffen, who had underwritten the musical’s move from its original, ninety-eight-seat Off-Off-Broadway theatre, the WPA, to the Off-Broadway Orpheum, was now working in the movie industry, developing projects for Warner Bros., thus providing lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken with the unusual opportunity to develop a film adaptation of Little Shop. The film reconciles a broad understanding of what made the show work on the stage (by not allowing the landscape of the movie to become too large) with the need to accommodate a different medium (songs were dropped and new ones added). The movie was a huge success, showing how the behind-the-scenes decision to move to film rather than a Broadway theatre (as happened with the Off-Broadway Hair, for example) sustained Little Shop’s commercial and critical success.

The Producers and Hairspray

Marketability is the focus of this chapter on The Producers and Hairspray, movies that were based on stage musicals that were originally based on low-budget, largely nonmusical movies. The chapter compares the two movie adaptations, noting that Susan Stroman restaged her original work for film, and many of the original creative team (including costume designer William Ivey Long) reprised their Broadway visual contributions for film, while the producers of Hairspray selected Hollywood professionals instead of the original Broadway creative team to supervise the making of the film. In another contrast, the 2005 film of The Producers is 134 minutes long to Hairspray’s 116, and The Producers used its Broadway stars rather than using the latest Hollywood names; Hairspray chose movie stars. With these contrasting strategies, and their relationship to the audience demographics for cinema today, it is unsurprising that Hairspray was a hit on the screen and that The Producers was a flop.

Adapting Pal Joey

This chapter on the liberal movie adaptation of Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey situates the musical in the context of postwar America, when traditional forms of gender and domesticity were being challenged and replaced by something more sexually ‘progressive.’ In the film, Joey is now a singer rather than a dancer, vulnerable rather than a heel, and he gets the girl in the end. The chapter explores how the film’s promotion of a set of emerging gender archetypes that defy traditional, middle-class, suburban constructions of masculinity and femininity is reflected in a new treatment of the score, which is reworked, repurposed, and in some cases eviscerated in order to promote the ethos of the film. A good example is the film’s presentation of the song ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’ (an interpolation from Babes in Arms), which, in Sinatra’s version, emphasize[s] that he is offering his body to her. The chapter concludes that despite the lyrics, it is Joey who plays the part of the ‘tramp.’

Rescoring Anything Goes in 1930s Hollywood

This chapter concludes the volume with a study of Hollywood’s commercial approach to making musicals. Focusing on the 1936 movie adaptation of Anything Goes, the chapter looks at its production environment, one in which interpolations were common, song sales mattered more than wit, and risqué content was frowned upon, a combination that proved deadly for Porter’s score. Although some of Porter’s songs were retained, the studio’s music department head Nathaniel Finston assigned Leo Robin, Richard Whiting, and several others to write some new numbers for the film. In the context of a Hollywood in which studios capitalized on purchasing publishing companies and then copyrighting new songs by (usually, staff) Hollywood songwriters to in-house publishing firms, it is unsurprising for the chapter to conclude that faithful film adaptations are unlikely. Hollywood was devoted to commercial music while Broadway was divorced from it; and fidelity to Broadway’s canonized songwriters ran contrary to the commercial goals of Hollywood’s tunesmiths. Such tensions run throughout this book and help to explain the culture behind the unsettling but fascinating phenomenon of the stage-to-screen musical adaptation.

‘An Elegant Legacy?’

Different issues challenged the screen adaptation of Finian’s Rainbow, which was one of the most successful Broadway musicals of the 1940s but took more than twenty years to be released as a film. Using archival research, this chapter reveals the frustrated early attempts to make Finian’s into an animated film musical, partly blighted by the blacklisting of lyricist E. Y. Harburg in 1951. Ex-Disney animator John Hubley was hired to work on the film and created more than 400 storyboard sketches, designs, and character drafts for the movie. By 1954, ten key songs had been recorded by leading artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong; indeed, in an attempt to make the project as commercial as possible, Sinatra was assigned a part in nearly all the songs. A new prologue was added and changes were made to the story to soften its vigorous political message, but for a mixture of political and financial reasons the production was abruptly closed down; Finian’s Rainbow would not reach the screen until late the following decade.

The Many Faces of Rio Rita

This chapter focuses on the adaptations of Rio Rita. The first adaptation was released in 1929 and rereleased, due to its enormous popularity, in 1932; though largely faithful to the stage version, it contained numerous changes to the script and score, including the addition of a new number. In 1942, MGM bought the screen rights in order to readapt it into a vehicle for the celebrated comic team of Abbott and Costello. This was a much more liberal adaptation: only two of the original songs made it into the film, with a miscellany of other numbers being added, including a new song by Harburg and Arlen and a performance by Kathryn Grayson of the ‘Shadow Song’ from Meyerbeer’s Dinorah. As with The Desert Song, Nazi characters were added to the film from this era. On its own patriotic terms, the 1942 version served its purpose; audiences would be entertained by the antics of its stars but also be made aware of the secret foreign intruders who were threatening to overthrow the American way of life.

‘Is This the Right Material, Girl?’

Alan Parker’s film version of Lloyd Webber and Rice’s Evita (1996) provides a case study of how a star’s agency can affect a film musical’s narrative. This chapter on the movie reveals how adjustments made to the piece for its movie incarnation result in a change of presentation of the title character, played by Madonna. Whereas the stage show depicts Eva as a figure of moral ambiguity, the film turns her into a probably well-meaning, mostly sympathetic, inherently romantic heroine. A series of newly created flashbacks, scenes, lyrics, and entire songs were crafted for the purpose of gaining insight into and empathy for Eva. For example, Eva, rather than Peron’s mistress, now sings ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall,’ one of the hit songs from the score, and the ‘Waltz for Evita and Che’ is staged as a romantic duet, without conveying the cynicism of the lyrics. The addition of ‘You Must Love Me’ adds a new insight into her realization that if Peron can still show her such attention and affection when she is dying and no longer of any use to him, then he must love her after all. In these and many other ways, Eva is humanized in a way that is not the case in the Broadway original.

‘A Great American Service’

This chapter looks at the musical biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy. George M. Cohan was still alive when the movie about his life was made and his influence is seen on how it depicts aspects of his life to suit his own account of it. But the chapter also explores how the movie is a self-reflexive backstage musical and how its attention to theatrical authenticity served to deflect scrutiny from the lack of veracity in Cohan’s biography. Examples include the changing of details in scenes from the stage musicals George Washington, Jr and I’d Rather Be Right to serve the movie’s hagiographic depiction of Cohan’s life, as memorably played by James Cagney. But on the whole, the chapter reveals that fidelity was the byword in the treatment of Cohan’s musical oeuvre and the staging of musical numbers. James Cagney also took great care to capture Cohan’s renowned, distinctive dancing style; his instructor Johnny Boyle had even performed in Cohan shows and staged dances for Cohan.

‘You Will Know That She Is Our Annie’

This chapter identifies intertextual relationships among different screen adaptations of Annie. The 1982, 1999, and 2014 films not only offer different takes on the material, but they also contain connections to one another as part of the cultural influence of Annie as a larger cultural text stemming back to the 1924 comic strip. This gives rise in the chapter to an exploration of the reinventions of Annie rather than passing judgement on their respective levels of commercial, cultural, or musical merit. The chapter observes how the 1999 Disney version is more influenced by the Broadway original than by the 1982 film, but the 2014 remake combines influences from Broadway and from the 1982 movie, including a chase through Manhattan that closely matches the climactic sequence from 1982; the 1999 version has not had an obvious influence on the 2014 movie, however. In this manner, each film’s reinventions offer just enough of the original narrative and music for a new generation of viewers to recognize and accept it as their Annie.