I don't know FEDORA, but I agree about SOME LIKE IT HOT. No reason it couldn't have made a great musical comedy (and, frankly, Robert Morse's performance in it was one of the funniest I've ever seen).
But besides the drag numbers, there's simply nothing going on in SUGAR as written. It's another "Why?" musical.
There's also the whole question of how to adapt your source material. Today, it's generally more a process of slavish adherence to the existing story, with the lazy addition of redundant numbers (i.e. Shrek, Legally Blonde, 9 to 5, The Color Purple, etc.).
But, to return to the previously mentioned R&H, Oklahoma is more than just Green Grow the Lilacs with tunes (Peter Filichia, I believe, once did a good analysis of that adaptation).
To me, the best adaptations bring something new to the work - a new way to view the story, additional dimension to characters, even additional characters that help support the main story line.
Sunset Blvd does none of this; instead, it waters down the great movie to a flavorless, generic mush.
Obviously, I agree, newintown. There's an excellent doctoral dissertation at UCLA that charts how Hammerstein slowly edged toward OKLAHOMA! structurally, beginning even before GREEN GROW THE LILACS premiered. The resulting musical was more a case of finding a narrative that fit the musical Hammerstein wanted to write than it was of the source material inspiring the new form that resulted. Either way, of course, the result was quite different from the source.
(I regret that I can't remember the name of the scholar who wrote the dissertation.)
I still really need to read Green Grow the Lilacs, if just to somehow understand what Sondheim meant about his comment about it being a gay Cowboy play (and he seemed to mean gay in the modern sense).
If there's one Billy Wilder movie that would make a fantastic Broadway adaptation and would add to the story, it's A Foreign Affair. It's not one of his most famous, but it's funny, dramatic and it would be impressive to see post-war Berlin on a Broadway is a natural choice to play the Marlene Dietrich part, and you could even make it a "jukebox" musical of Friedrich Hollaender songs - in addition to "Black Market" and "Illusions," you could easily add "Falling in Love Again," "The Boys in the Backroom" etc.
It's always been a movie that organically "sings" to me.
So I saw a production of this show tonight at Tulane and it was so good. I really enjoyed the songs for the most part even though some could've been cut. The Norma Desmond character songs were my favorite, while some of the ensemble songs felt a little superfluous. But I really liked it for the most part, especially the end.
It was so great to see songs that I knew (With One Look, As If We Never Said Goodbye, Sunset Boulevard) in context and to find new favorites (Salome, New Ways To Dream, The Perfect Year). Norma was so over the top, I loved it. Most laughed during the final scene but I couldn't, it was so sad to me. I'd definitely go see it again.