Thursday, July 26, 2007
Can films ever make great plays?
Guardian Unlimited: "The point is, film remains so ubiquitous and omnipresent a cultural form that it all but swamps the most potent attempts to theatricalise its banner achievements. Perhaps that's one reason why more films than ever these days are transformed into stage musicals - and then back into movies again (like Hairspray or The Producers), this time with added song and dance."
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The core issue here is between showing and telling, between being theatrical verse being cinematic. Although both tell the story in two hours, each has a specific general related method of telling it. In the movies we look for special effects and angle shots to show us the story. While on stage we listen more to the actors, and interpret the designs to tell us the story. When you take a movie that has been written into pop culture and attempt to tell it onstage it can’t be the same. Yes, it can be the same story, but it physically can’t be told the same way. Any movie they attempt to put onstage is only a highly regarded, highly memorized pop culture movie, and people don’t like change. Going the other way there has been more success, I would gather, because movies don’t have the same limits as stage and people, generally, prefer to see it than figure it out for themselves anyway.
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