The Peacock is in the early stages of working out an agreement with Sorkin to mount a live telecast of the play that put him on the map as a writer when it hit Broadway in 1989. The 1992 feature starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore was a hit for TriStar Pictures.
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While reading this article, I find myself thinking about a discussion we had in acting class.
It seems that England is always two steps ahead of American theatre. Its much more edgy, truthful, and usually, a lot better. Cameron said this is due to the "business" side of the American theatre industry. Broadway is constantly thinking about which star they will bring in to do the roll, what show they could produce to draw the most audience. It's constantly about making money, which is exactly what NBC is doing with the televised version of Of Mice and Men.
It is business moves like this that will keep American theatre behind England. It will only be when the art comes before money that America and England will actually be strong competitors of one an other.
I'm not sure how I feel about this movement towards live plays on TV and especially not one such as A Few Good Men since it has such a great movie adaptation already. I think there are other plays that would a better venue for moving into live telecast of plays than A Few Good Men. I think that the live telecasts are a interesting move for the future of theatre since it gives a larger audience and currently higher production value to these performances. While I think these shows are more Television and film that normal theatre they are an interesting move for the industry and it'll be great to see how they are received in the future. It's interesting hearing about Fail Safe since I've never heard of this endeavor. I don't remember this at all but then again at the time I wasn't concerned with this type of thing. I know Sound of Music was well received and it'll be interesting to see how Peter Pan and Few Good Men will be received.
I think the idea and motivation behind this is coming from an optimistic place, but I don't think this project will pan out as successfully as they're hoping it will. The movie was already so successful and I'm not sure if they're depending on the success of the movie to estimate how many viewers they'll have of this live show. I'm really happy that NBC is bringing back live telecasts of shows, but I think part of that success comes from doing big, well-known, mostly upbeat musicals like The Sound of Music and Peter Pan. I think it's a little ambitious for NBC at this point in time to dabble in doing a straight, serious show since doing the whole live telecast thing is still relatively new, but it's nice to hear that they want to branch out and do something other than big musicals. It'll be interesting to track how this will pan out.
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