HowlRound: The musical Aladdin on Broadway has gotten rid of Abu, Aladdin’s trusted if mischievous monkey companion, as well as the pet tiger Rajah, both of whom were in Disney’s 1992 animated film. In Rocky on Broadway, you cannot see the real streets of Philadelphia, nor in Les Miserables on Broadway can you see the performers’ nostrils; both loomed large in the film versions.
About a third of the forty two new shows in the 2013-2014 Broadway season were either adapted from a movie or so closely associated with one that the film serves both to lure an audience into the musical, and to raise audience expectations—the former a godsend for the producers, the latter a terror for the creative team. How do you offer something both comforting and exciting, familiar and surprising; what can Broadway offer as compensation for the loss of Abu, Philadelphia and Hugh Jackman’s shapely nose?
2 comments:
I am honestly fed up with Broadway. It's like all the recycled material is getting all the attention and no new material is surfacing. It's one thing to base an idea off of something but when it is basically word for word from the film, it is just distasteful. Especially when it is done wrong. I'm surprised they took the turntable out of Les Mis. It was such a trademark thing from the show and to strip and replace that with media seems a bit much. I guess that this is where Broadway is going.
I'm interested that in the list of Broadway cliches early in the article they lump in moving scenery and video projections with such specific effects like confetti cannons and lights shining into the audience's eyes. While the second two examples are indeed cliches with not much room for growth, moving scenery is simply a new means of creating a setting, and video projections are a growing field where I feel there is still a lot of room for innovation. With that being said, a lot of Broadway does seem to depend on flash and stage magic- effects that are more to impress for the sake of impressing than to serve the plot of the show. This might be because it's the only way to get audiences in the seats. One of the coolest things about theatrical magic is that something that would be taken for granted or passed over in a film, like a flying carpet which would easily be done with special effects, is way cooler on a stage in real life.
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