That Guilty Season
When this year’s Tony Awards are dealt out Sunday night, a curious (unspoken) development will overshadow the entire game: Broadway’s desperate, guilty dependence on movies.
It’s not originality that explains the small but persistent phenomenon of new and expensive theater productions being based on already established film productions such as Sister Act, Catch Me If You Can, Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Brief Encounter. It’s not simply economics behind the borrowing of cineplex names to light the marquees for Good People (Frances McDormand), Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Robin Williams), The Book of Mormon (Trey Parker and Matt Stone), The Motherfucker With the Hat (Chris Rock), That Championship Season (Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric) and How to Succeed in Business (Daniel Radcliffe).
Broadway swallowed up Hollywood this season due to a combination of professional coincidence—agents and stars routinely trading-off projects and profits—and capitulation to the flashiness of our noisiest pop trends that undeniably dominate our culture. Besides, what is Julie Taymor’s accident-prone production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark except an attempt to make an in-your-face, live-action movie on the stage? No longer a comic book, Spider-Man denied its obvious roots in the circus (where trained acrobats safely perform death-defying stunts) to simulate the visceral flash and excitement of Sam Raimi’s three blockbuster films.
It’s especially apparent in this season’s high-profile musicals that Broadway steals from sequel-and-remake-crazed Hollywood when theater artists are equally bereft of ideas; or crave the past successes of Hairspray, Billy Elliot, Mary Poppins, Legally Blonde and The Lion King—all movie-derived. The Broadway version of Priscilla Queen of the Desert illustrates the interminable repurposing of a dreary idea.
The 1994 movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, by gifted Australian filmmaker Stephen Elliott, was already a compendium of borrowed pop (gay) archetypes, largely dependent upon its irresistible disco soundtrack of oldies empowered by Alicia Bridges’ "I Love the Nightlife"—an authentic source of rebel imagination. On the stage, Priscilla’s drag-queen revue trades nightlife excitement and subversive threat for bus-and-truck mediocrity: the banality of domesticated queerness; silly, over-the-top costuming; and makeshift drama about self-acceptance. A better, more challenging stage show might have come from Elliott’s little-known 2001 movie Welcome to Woop Woop, an extraordinary satire that reinforced the primacy of Broadway songcraft through its topsy-turvy paean to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Elliott’s Woop Woop saluted Broadway tradition as a source of cultural renewal. Its adult conception bests Wall-E with a ribald and perfectly restorative response to end-of-history cynicism. On stage, Priscilla drags Broadway’s originality down to a tranny dive.
Sister Act is also a drag act. Based on the 1992 Whoopi Goldberg movie (a big enough hit to have a sequel that featured the movie-musical debut of Lauryn Hill), the stage version diminishes the born-again thesis. Goldberg’s Delores Van Cartier, a small-time nightclub performer escaping murderous mobsters, finds asylum in an inner-city Catholic church where she revitalizes its choir, rebuilding the parish and her own self-esteem. It was a gimcrack version of Hollywood boilerplate—everything from Going My Way and The Trouble With Angels to The Singing Nun and Elvis Presley’s Change of Habit, but it held the genuine surprise—and appeal—of sanctifying secular pop music. (Turning Motown’s "My Guy" into "My God"—corny but powerful.) In this stage derivation, only cliché gets born again—even unconditional love gets rerouted into New Agey humanism.
Patina Miller takes on Whoopi’s role with hard-driving professionalism (an unstoppable smile). Plus, she can really sing. Fortunately, composer Alan Mencken jettisons the movie’s jukebox score for serviceable songs that—unfortunately—sound just like Mencken’s score for Disney’s cartoon Beauty and the Beast ("Be Our Guest" becomes "Bless Our Show"). Obviously contrived as a tourist-trade sideshow rather than substantive musical theater, Sister Act aims low and hits its target, but it doesn’t heighten Broadway musical aesthetics by finding the theatrical essence in Delores’ spiritual and musical rebirth. Director Jerry Zaks merely goes for spangles and vamping, using a known Hollywood quantity (and Goldberg herself producing) as a crutch.
Since Catch Me If You Can was one of Steven Spielberg’s less popular movies (although still financially successful), it’s dumbfounding that Broadway producers chose to adapt it. The team (director Jack O’Brien, composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman) that already bowdlerized John Waters’ Hairspray seem attracted to the film’s brand rather than Spielberg’s personal vision and stylistic tour de force. This cynical stage show about Frank Abagnale, a teenage conman and imposter, reveals its real impetus in the line: "Your ability to pull myth out of manure is truly impressive." The myth here is that Shaiman and Whitman’s pastiche tunes are songs or that Terrence McNally’s book doesn’t simply rip off the screenplay.
This show is itself an imposter: Broadway veterans impersonating a genuinely moving film with extravagant production values and dreadful sexual innuendo that intrudes upon the story’s Oedipal basis. Better the conspicuous expense and parodistic sensibility be employed on a film like Nia Vardalos’ Connie and Carla—a movie about theatricality—rather than faking a cinematic panorama. Since Catch Me was not a crowd-pleasing film, this show’s lack of appeal matches its crucial lack of Leonardo DiCaprio’s galvanizing star presence. It’s puzzlingly hollow.
Ironically, the theater’s infatuation with Hollywood climaxes this season with Sanaa Lathan—a genuine star presence—in Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. Lathan embodies the humor and determination of a black actress limited to playing subservient stereotypes in 1930s Hollywood. The fact that little has changed in contemporary Hollywood gives a special charge to Lathan and Nottage’s humor. Their confrontation with the realities of show business and sociology reflects upon the feeble, insubstantial movie-based musicals now on the Great White Way.
Director Jo Bonney uses Nottage’s premise to expand the play’s perimeters; at times actually employing cinema as another part of the show’s deconstructed theatricality. Footage of Vera Stark’s screen work enhances Nottage’s thesis about the struggle and solidarity that actresses (women) importantly—secretly—share. It confirms Lathan’s talent and radiance. Through this bounty (including some brief but trenchant song performances), Meet Vera Stark examines the politics of popular culture and the personal motives of the people who sustain and challenge its practice—from actors to producers, directors and critics.
Nottage’s first half is a nearly perfect comedy of the longings beneath Hollywood Jim Crow—Vera Stark’s frustration is equal to her wiliness. The second half splinters into unfocused satire 40 years later of Vera Stark as a has-been, and then 70 years later of her legend as a historical afterthought being dissected by a panel of three perfectly satirized scholars of gender and race studies. The epic nature of Nottage’s vision explodes this small Off-Broadway show. Not that it needed Catch Me If You Can’s scope—only its promotional budget. Yet Nottage skips the portion of Vera Stark’s life that the opening farce conceit had promised. It doesn’t deepen into the affecting and infuriating and awesome careers like those that Ethel Waters, Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen and Louise Beavers had, but leaps ahead into the bewilderment of contemporary culture’s inability to understand the folly and potential of our national cinematic legacy.
That same inability is common to the season’s Broadway musicals that misconstrue Hollywood’s influence without adequately remaking it. Nottage’s insight that the Hollywood system’s lowliest worker never gave up is missing in this year’s Broadway capitulation to Hollywood. Some deep-seated unacknowledged cultural guilt drives Broadway toward gaudy, extravagant imitation. Those movie-based musicals reveal Broadway’s desperation—a condition of being without hope.