Skip to main content
My Shows
News on your favorite shows, specials & more!
Home For You Chat My Shows Register/Login Games Grosses

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

New Post Search Report Abuse Rules

Welcome Guest. Please Login or Register.

#4

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/9/13 at 10:57pm

Since at least the 1920s, Broadway musicals have usually been adapted from works from other media. (There are plenty of exceptions, of course.) Doing so helps to "pre-sell" the adaptation because the public already knows the source material.

Now that fewer people read and hit straight plays are rare, movies are the only medium that gets enough attention to make an adaptation salable. (Also TV, of course, but adapting TV shows into Broadway musicals seems to pose its own problems.)

So, yes and yes. Yes, there will be original musicals. And, yes, many if not most commercial musicals will be adapted from films (unless they start adapting them from video games).

IMO, obviously, since I don't own a crystal ball.
#7

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/10/13 at 12:18am

I agree! Let's go back to the good ol' days when musicals had no source material whatsoever!
Without bread we'd just be hungry but without theatre we'd be dead
#8

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/10/13 at 12:37am

A very brief Google search shows at least two musical versions of Topper done regionally that don't seem to have had much of an afterlife.

I love the sublime Blithe Spirit but I just can't consider that it wasn't heavily inspired by Topper. The original 1937 film with Cary Grant and Constance Bennett had been a huge hit and Coward wrote his play just 3 or 4 years later. (I certainly am not implying it was a rip-off but the closeness in time and the similar plot elements and tone and are too much to be just coincidence.) So High Spirits, the musical version of Coward's work, is semi-close to the bill.

And, vaguely related, Sondheim wrote 11 episodes of the wonderful 1950's TV version.





Updated On: 1/10/13 at 12:37 AM

#9

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/10/13 at 12:55am

People point to book of mormon as an example of this, but if it was the exact same show except without the star power and "cool factor" of the South Park guys, I'm don't think it would be the success that it is
Nancy Reagan, meanest and thinnest of the first ladies moves into the white house. Yabba dabba! It's the eighties.
#11

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/10/13 at 12:59am

Also in the last 20 years or so,
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,
The Last Five Years (off Broadway),
Chess (a bit farther back),
Passing Strange,
and Taboo.
#12

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/10/13 at 1:18am

Thread jack for a moment, was there ever a Topper muscial considered?

Over the years I've heard of two "considerations" when it comes to TOPPER.

1) A musical version interpolating Cole Porter songs.

2) A musical version with an original score by Jerry Herman.

Can't remember if Herman actually wanted to do it, or whether it was something he was approached to do, or whether it was wishful thinking. Either way, it clearly never happened.

But TOPPER seems IDEAL source material for Herman. All of Herman's successful shows have a "free-spirit vs. conservative" theme, which TOPPER definitely has. TOPPER even has a spot for Herman's requisite "live life" song... only it this case the singer can literally mean live life!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. - Eleanor Roosevelt
#19

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/10/13 at 9:56am

I don't see why original musicals are any better than those adapted, at least in their conception. There are poorly written movie adaptations, sure, but there are extremely poor original musicals as well. And let's remember that Promises, Promises; Sweet Charity; A Little Night Music; Little Shop of Horrors; Nine; Passion are all based on movies. Perhaps most importantly, MOST of the canon of good musicals throughout the artforms history are in fact adaptations and not fully original, and this shouldn't and doesn't diminish their achievement in any way.
#20

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/10/13 at 10:05am

I'm actually surprised more people haven't started producing Original Musicals. Look at the hits from the past few seasons. Memphis. Book of Mormon. The Drowsy Chaperone. Etc. They were all hits, and did not come from any sort of recognizable source material.

And I think you're wrong about Book of Mormon. It already has a title that attracts attention. It got glorious reviews, and amazing word-of-mouth. And there was no 'star power' when the show opened. No one knew who those two guys were.
#21

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/10/13 at 10:12am

"Original" musicals aren't any better or worse than adapted ones- whether the source be a painting, a poem or a video game. But bitching about lack of originality in musicals is easy and people who do it think it makes them look erudite.
#22

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/10/13 at 10:27am

"I'm actually surprised more people haven't started producing Original Musicals."

To me it always seems to point to the way musicals are made. Many many many times composer/lyricist teams go off and write music in the absence of a book writer. I think "In the Heights" was put together this way. Sure "song cycles" can evolve into shows, but let's face it, if you don't have a story, you don't have nothing.
#23

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/10/13 at 1:46pm

I think the question should be when did we go from saying "oh god, another musical based on a movie?" to "i think this and this and this and this should be a musical!"


"Hey little girls, look at all the men in shiny shirts and no wives!" - Jackie Hoffman, Xanadu, 19 Feb 2008
#24

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/10/13 at 3:37pm

I think that movies can be a perfectly valid source for musical adaptation, as long as those adapting it aren't merely trying to cash in on a film's popularity by plopping it on stage relatively unchanged, with some pedestrian songs plugged in here and there (as in Legally Blonde, 9 to 5, Shrek, etc.).

The best adaptations have their own integrity as significantly different entities that surpass their source material.
#25

Will Broadway ever bring back originally written shows?

Posted: 1/10/13 at 4:25pm

Not a huge fan of Legally Blonde, but that source material was perfect for a musical. The whole idea sings, the lead has a great hero story, the premise is hilarious. It's just a great animal to work with. Not saying it was a great piece of anything, but the story is as strong.

← Back to Message Board

BroadwayWorld TV

View all Videos

Ticket Central
Ticket Central
Ticket Central
Hot Show
Tickets From $59
Hot Show
Tickets From $71
Hot Show
Tickets From $71
Hot Show
Tickets From $95
More Hot Shows Discounts

Recommended For You