The Theatre Times: David Yazbek burst onto Broadway a quarter century ago with the musical “The Full Monty” and immediately gained recognition as a composer, writer, musician and lyricist. All of his subsequent musicals, such as “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (2004), “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (2010), “The Band’s Visit” (2017), “Tootsie” (2019), and “Dead Outlaw” (2025), have earned Tony and Grammy Awards.
The musical “Dead Outlaw,” which opened last year, was nominated for seven Tony Awards.
3 comments:
Adaptations are always a hard balance to strike. You’ve got to tell the same story, but have a reason for re telling that story, there's got to be some reason to do it otherwise the adaptation will fall flat. And, unfortunately there's a lot of adaptations and such that feel like they only exist because some studio knows that they're going to make a ton of money off of it. And as this article touches on a bit, that's someone true for musical adaptations, but at least for this guy it seems like he wants to do it for the sake of telling a story which is always nice to hear. I’m sure adapting a movie into a musical is difficult because by including songs, you're cutting the amount of time the actual plot can happen down significantly, and it must be difficult to fit the same story in around the same run time with significantly less dialogue.
I feel like Yazbek answers in a more gut experience sharing way. He prefers to share more of his story with a certain movie, which further pushes him to select it as his work to do on stage. I just want to hear more about the difference between onstage shows and stories in front of the movie screen. There must be something about those movies that made them suitable for stage productions. Also, I believe famous movies and their production show are in a relationship where both are helpful to each other. Since famous movies already have an existing audience, the crowd will know about the story, and attract more audience. The movie audiences can attract more theatre audiences, and the division between the two will blur. Also, it will be challenging for the production team to create something that satisfies the original movie audience, and also respects the nature of theater production. There will be a lot of changes to the original story, but if it is good in other aspects compared to the nature of it as a movie, then there will be people paying to see the show. Maybe more theater audiences will also be attracted to become movie audiences.
I feel like adapting a film into a musical is always difficult. Some may be easier than others but overall it’s gonna be difficult, especially if a film doesn’t have a recurring setting and is always changing. I feel like a lot of adaptations just happen because the people creating it wanted to and were able to. If people kept adapting film into stage musicals, live entertainment would start to fall off like film has been recently. There’s also so many other aspects that go into adapting. As David Yazbek said when talking about adapting Tootsie, they had to do extensive research because the movie didn’t age well because of certain aspects of feminism, and ended up incorporating aspects to appeal to trans rights activists to appeal to the modern age. When thinking about that I feel like a lot of films that would end up being adapted would be films from the past and it would be pretty difficult to adapt to an on stage musical when times have changed drastically.
Post a Comment