Movie Musicals You Wish They Would Do Again & Right This Time — Page 2

Evita. And Madonna stays far, far away from it.

I'd say Annie too. I actually hate the movie, but like the TV version sort of. I'd keep Victor Garbor as Warbucks, Audra McDonald as Grace, Kristin Chenoweth as Lily St. Regis, and throw in Bernadette Peters as Hannigan.

EVITA

Take out the recitative, keep the main songs, add spoken dialog and more characters and it could be good. I don't think a direct translation would ever work as a movie. For one, the wall-to-wall singing gets tiresome on film. It's akin to being bombarded with CGI effects. It's too much for the senses.

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Updated On: 4/3/10 at 01:05 AM

Guys and Dolls! Yes! They chose "Pet Me, Poppa" and "A Woman in Love" over "A Bushel and a Peck" and "I've Never Been in Love Before"? WTF!?!

Carousel, Gypsy and Tommy.

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Phantom of the Opera. I love the show, despise the film.

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I'll agree with A Chorus Line. As many of the original cast stated in the book On the Line, when you watch the opening of the Tony's when they performed the opening number, you could see that Bennett was already planning the film in his head. Too bad it got into the hands of Mr. Attenborough.

Hair!

Hair
A Chorus Line
A Little Night Music (actually it's on my Netflix Que, but from the youtube clips I have seen, I'm sure I won't like it) haha

btw, I actually enjoyed the movie version of Phanthom better than the show..go figure

Sweeney Todd - I wish they had taken a more realistic approach such as it was originally intended to be when Meryl Streep was rumored for Lovett.

A Little Night Music - Amazing show, but the film is a mess! I mean Liz Taylor is visually loosing and gaining weight from scene to scene. I think they should have made an adaptation that stands totally alone from the stage show, but retains Sondheim's charm and wit.


I honestly can't believe people are mentioning West Side Story and Cabaret; in my opinion, they two of the most perfect film adaptations of all time

SharpCookies, if they had filmed The Producers on stage it wouldn't look all that much different than what the movie adaptation looks like, which was one of the big criticism lobbed at Stroman in the reviews. Even Nathan Lane commented on how stagey the film looked after the release. If I remember correctly he called it "the most expensive Lincoln Center archive recording ever done."

I'm fine with The Producers. But, I would like to see a directors cut released some day with all of the musical numbers included in the deleted scenes restored.

A directors cut of The Fantaskicks would also be cool. It's a pretty good adaption of the stage version, but all of the best stuff is in the deleted scenes.

The problem with THE PRODUCERS is that the stage musical pales by comparison to the far superior original 1968 film which won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. The 1968 film, which starred the incomparable Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, was not a musical but featured about 3 songs, two of which, "Springtime for Hitler" and Prisoners of Love", were retained for and are the best songs in the stage adaptation. A third song, "Love Power", was done hilariously by Dick Shawn in the film but it was not composed by Mel Brooks and the character Shawn played in the film was changed for the stage musical. I think the inferior stage musical will always be fun to experience where it clearly belongs, on a stage but no re filming of the musical will ever solve the problem with the recent film version in that the story sinks like a lead balloon under the weight of the songs on film, where the tighter, funnier 1968 screenplay clearly works better as a motion picture. Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick are great on the stage but even they look like amateurs in these roles when compared to Mostel and Wilder. The 1968 film will always be the preferred film version of THE PRODUCERS.

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