What source material would never work as a musical?

Musicals have been adapted from everything from plays to books to movies to paintings to photographs to early 1960's counterfeiting cases. What's a story that you think would never be able to be musicalized?

Not so much a fan of this thread topic. I think you can be skeptical of a lot of musical source topics (today's announcement of the Princess Diana musical is one for me, for instance), but when in recent years alone we've had a rap musical about Alexander Hamilton, a pop opera about War and Peace, a contemporary piece centered around a high schooler killing himself, and a folksy-sounding musical about a Canadian town on 9/11, it's hard to rule out anything as never working as a musical.

It's really all about having the right creative team. Always.

Ulysses.

A musical about cats

A 3 1/2 hour musical about the French revolution

A musical about a lesbian and her gay dad who ends up killing himself

A musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence



Kind of a silly thread.

I agree with the sentiments already in this thread - anything has the potential to make a good musical if (a) the right creative team is behind is and (b) they go in the right direction with it and (c) they actually manage to execute it.

I would even go so far as to say that many of the terrible musical adaptations we've seen in the past not only had great potential to be good musicals, but actually made a lot of the right big picture decisions, and they mainly screwed up in the execution. Take Spider-Man for example: many will disagree with me, but I think the decision to make it a huge-budget spectacle with rock music and a forced perspective comic-book look was actually spot on. If the book and score has just been better quality I think it could have been a surprise artistic success like Spongebob has been.

And I think that's the case with many bad musical adaptations; that they were sort of "almost there," but screwed up in a major way with the execution.

Jurassic Park.

Would the T-Rex be a tenor or a baritone?

A 3 1/2 hour musical about the French revolution

Do you mean Les Miserables? Because it wasn't about the French Revolution. That would be their first show, La Révolution Française, which is fascinating in its own right.

That's the really wonderful thing about Les Miz - so many of its fans have absolutely no idea that it's not about the French Revolution.

CindersGolightly said: "A CPR handbook, probably."

I’ve heard this is LMM’s next project.