From stage to screen
– some work better than others
Mamma Mia! Starring Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried and Pierce
Brosnan
I’ve seen lots of musicals, both on stage and on screen. Some
are based around the weakest of plots. Andrew Lloyd Weber’s
”
Cats,
”
after all, is pretty much a two-hour recitation of poetry by T.
S. Eliot that he wrote for his nieces and nephews set to music and
dance, where people dress up as cats. But for some reason it is
enjoyable.
From stage to screen – some work better than others
Mamma Mia! Starring Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried and Pierce Brosnan
I’ve seen lots of musicals, both on stage and on screen. Some are based around the weakest of plots. Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Cats,” after all, is pretty much a two-hour recitation of poetry by T. S. Eliot that he wrote for his nieces and nephews set to music and dance, where people dress up as cats. But for some reason it is enjoyable.
Mamma Mia!
Writing a musical around the songs from ’70s sensation ABBA probably isn’t the best way to come up with a plot, but if the T. S. Eliot thing worked, why not?
“Mamma Mia!” has been a hit on Broadway for years and has reportedly been produced live 2,600 times in North America since it first opened. For fans of the Broadway show, the movie, directed by Phyllida Lloyd and written by Catherine Johnson, is probably a great chance to see the production once more on the cheap in their hometown.
But for those who aren’t familiar with the play and who only know ABBA’s most popular songs, the movie may come across as overacted and the songs as jarring. What works on stage – over exaggerated facial expressions, singing out of nowhere and lines of backup singers and dancers – doesn’t necessarily translate to the big screen.
The story in “Mamma Mia!” is simple enough. Young Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is determined to marry her sweetheart, Sky (Dominic Cooper). They are both working at her mother’s shabby hotel on a tiny Greek island as they prepare for the wedding. Sophie’s mother Donna (Meryl Streep) can’t help thinking her 20-year-old daughter is making a mistake, but her focus quickly changes when the wedding guests begin to arrive. Two of Sophie’s best friends arrive as do Donna’s best friends Rosie (Julie Waters) and Tanya (Christine Baranski.)
But it is the three guests whom Sophie secretly invited that get everyone up in arms. Sophie has never known who her father is, but when she discovers the diary her mother kept the year she was conceived she decides to invite the three men her mother dated that summer to her wedding. None of the men know about each other, or Sophie.
First is Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), an adventurer who has never settled down. Next is Harry Bright (Colin Firth), who used to be a punk rocker but settled into a life as a banker with two dogs and a housekeeper. Sam Carmichael (Pierce Brosnan), a New York architect and father of two, is the man who broke Donna’s heart and led her into the arms of the other two.
Laughs ensue as Sophie tries to figure out which man is her father while hiding all three of them from her mother on a tiny island. The plot doesn’t start out too badly, but there are huge holes in it. The characters seem angry or ecstatic at one turn, and suddenly the opposite seconds later. These are moments when there would probably be a set change on stage that would have helped explain the change in time.
In addition, sometimes the singing seemed to come from nowhere and didn’t necessarily move the plot along. After all, there is only so much growth a character can get out of singing ’70s pop songs such as “Dancing Queen,” and “Take A Chance On Me.” Seyfried had the strongest voice of the people in the movie, while most of the other actors seemed to struggle with the musical part of their roles. And Brosnan said it best when he reportedly told a celebrity mag that his children told him never to sing again. One viewer who saw the movie said she wished she’d never seen James Bond that way. Actually the best scene in the movie is after the credits start rolling, so stick around until the very end for the longest laugh.
Chicago
So what does it take to successfully transform a stage show into a blockbuster movie? Rob Marshall did it with the 2002 hit “Chicago.”
The first thing is to get well-known actors, but make sure they know how to sing. Sure, Catherine Zeta-Jones looked sexy in the lingerie-inspired costumes of the play, but she could belt out the tunes to go with it. Everyone in the movie, from the lead roles to the backup singers, all had singing talent. Some of the best singing comes from Richard Gere as Billy Flynn, Renee Zellweger as Roxie Hart and John C. Reilly as Amos Hart.
Ditto to dancing ability – and this is especially important since the emergence of shows such as “So You Think You Can Dance” and “Dancing with the Stars.” Running around the film location or pantomiming bad disco moves – as happened in “Mamma Mia!” doesn’t cut muster since we all have seen some good dancing on TV.
Next, embrace the sparseness of a theater stage. The sets in the film “Chicago” were kept simple and sometimes they felt a lot like what viewers would see if they were to watch the show on stage. It kept the focus on the actors and the songs instead of the props and the background.
Last is an engaging plot and well-defined characters. Who wouldn’t be drawn in by Bob Fosse’s story about two sexy singers who find themselves on death row in 1920s Chicago? And the songs here definitely add to the story. “Cell Block Tango,” one of my favorite songs, explains how Velma Kelly ended up on death row in the first place. And we all know what motivates Kelly, Hart and Flynn.
The stage to screen transformation can be done, but some filmmakers definitely do it better than others.
