Singing! Dancing! Adapting! Stumbling!
HOLLYWOOD has a long history of bungling the movie versions of hit Broadway musicals, but believe it or not I held out hope for “Mamma Mia!” In retrospect this seems a little deranged, but let me explain.
The story of my responses to the Abba musical onstage is a strange one, moving through several phases, sort of like those stages of grief famously diagnosed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. I first saw the show shortly after it opened in London in 1999 to giddy reviews from the local critics. My reaction was a mixture of bafflement and dismay as I watched rows and rows of middle-aged Englishwomen — and quite a few mildly embarrassed-looking Englishmen — bouncing to their feet with glee to join in the megamix finale. There was sorrow too at what I immediately perceived as a dubious but obviously popular new genre of musical theater.
A few years later the musical splashed down on Broadway. Perhaps that initial vaccination had inoculated me against continued irritation. I still found it deeply silly, but also tolerable fun. And really, in contrast to the run of karaoke musicals that had by then begun to inundate the stage, “Mamma Mia!” does have a sweet little mother-daughter story nestled inside its iPod shuffle score of Abba tunes.
Still later I saw another production, this time in what I have come to consider the musical’s natural spiritual home, Las Vegas. The third time was the charm. Maybe it was the novelty of the cup holder at my seat, into which I nestled one of those luridly colored frozen drinks they serve you in big, cutely shaped plastic vessels. But at last I succumbed entirely to its ditzy glory, achieving serene acceptance. I saw the light, though I still refused to sing along. So I can honestly say I looked forward to the movie version with at least a happy sense of anticipation, intrigued by the curious casting of Meryl Streep in the leading role.
I really should have known better. Every few years, with depressing regularity, a hit Broadway musical makes the leap to the big screen and goes splat! Or thud. Or zzzzz. “Mamma Mia!” does a little of all three, to a frantic disco beat, becoming yet another milestone in Hollywood’s repertory of enjoyable stage musicals transformed into lumbering messes on screen.
The movie is actually doing strong if not superhero-size business, despite receiving some of the most amusingly awful reviews meted out to any movie this year. Even Ms. Streep, the country’s Greatest Living Actress by the reckoning of many, got knocked around. Many critics seemed to want to avert their eyes from the sorry spectacle of the great Streep cavorting in the Aegean with such frenetic zeal. I share the general mortification. The movie has brought me full circle in my “Mamma Mia!” journey, back to Stage 1: bafflement, dismay and sorrow.
For the uninitiated “Mamma Mia!” is set on an idyllic Greek island that doubles as both a funky resort and a lunatic asylum for people suffering from a distinctive disorder, the compulsive need to sing Abba songs at all hours of the day and night. The movie follows closely the plot and pacing of the original show, but the hard gaze of the camera puts into queasy relief the inanity of people lurching suddenly from natural conversation to leaping around singing lyrics with a mighty tenuous relationship to the situation at hand, as synthesizer chords churn away in the background. (For instance, when Ms. Streep’s character, Donna, evinces clear signs of emotional distress, a girlfriend opens her mouth and sings, “Chiquitita, tell me what’s wrong.” Chiquitita? Who she?)
Leaping isn’t the half of it either. I wouldn’t want to say Ms. Streep gives the worst performance of her career, as some aver, but it has got to be the scariest. When she is called upon to sing the title song — just after stumbling upon three ex-boyfriends she hasn’t seen for years — she flies into a spasmodic frenzy that concludes with her writhing on the roof of a goat house. Later she sings a syrupy ballad, “The Winner Takes It All,” with an operatic intensity that’s unsettling. It’s not exactly “Rose’s Turn,” after all, or even “My Man” from “Funny Girl.”
Staunch fans of the stage musical as an art form regularly have to weather scorn from nonbelievers when the movie versions of Broadway shows go galumphing across the screen. The subtext of many reviews is a smirky disdain for anything with its roots in old-fashioned theater, an unspoken belief that musicals and even plays are quant relics of another era beloved only of octogenarians, nostalgists and the irredeemably unhip.
The problem is, on the evidence of the movie versions of most musicals — and you have to keep in mind that only the most popular musicals warrant attention from Hollywood — their disaffection is hard to refute. If you saw the movie version of Mel Brooks’s musical “The Producers,” you’d have little notion of what a gut-busting joy the Broadway show was. The filmed “Rent” was a blunt, literal-minded translation of material that really had a sizzle onstage. “The Phantom of the Opera” was numbingly dull. Even “Mamma Mia!” — which I can now soberly see was never exactly “South Pacific” on the stage — might have made for a spryer, funnier, more zesty movie.
Theater is a stylized medium. We know that the guys up there fighting with swords are not going to draw real blood, and we don’t flinch when purportedly real people burst spontaneously into song. The great musicals from the glory days of Hollywood — the Fred and Ginger movies, the Arthur Freed classics from MGM — likewise offered up frothier visions of contemporary life. They emerged during an era when movies gussied up reality for purposes of enhancing their escapist appeal.
But since the 1960s film’s ability to capture the sights and sounds of the world more or less as they meet the eye and ear has been its signature aesthetic, at least for mainstream fare. The conventions of musical theater tend to assume a ludicrous aspect in this context; in life as we know it people do not communicate in song, trailed by a personal orchestra. (Those superhero movies are obviously pure fantasy, but they achieve their intense appeal by seeming to take place in a version of the real world.)
Theater is at the same time an intimate art form, allowing actors to make a direct connection to the audience and send complex messages. Watching the stage version of “Mamma Mia!” you often got a sense that the actors were in on the gag, fully aware of how patently ludicrous it was for their characters suddenly to bust out a flimsy but catchy 25-year-old pop song.
That sense of complicity in a collective joke can’t make it easily past the impersonal barrier of the movie screen. Winking at the camera is not really allowed. (Although I’m told there is collective audience participation at some screenings of the movie: When Pierce Brosnan first breaks into “S.O.S.,” his big number with Ms. Streep, viewers explode in mirth.)
A similar give-and-take between performers and audience basted the hoary jokes in “The Producers” in a shared warmth. The performances of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, which fed happily on a live audience’s affection onstage, seemed canned and forced on film. “Rent” would have made a far more effective movie if it were filmed concert style, I expect. (And my hopes are high for Spike Lee’s planned movie of the sadly underappreciated “Passing Strange.”)
In the long history of stage-to-film transcriptions, Hollywood has found all sorts of ways to make mincemeat out of solid successes. On many occasions the decision to shunt aside the magnetic stage performer at the center of a show and cast an established movie star has proved fatal, as when Rosalind Russell replaced Ethel Merman in “Gypsy,” or Lucille Ball took over from Angela Lansbury in “Mame.” Even the great Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra didn’t do much for the movie version of “Guys and Dolls.”
Entrusting musicals to esteemed film directors with no affinity for the material has often been a sure path to disaster. John Huston was all wrong for “Annie.” Ditto Richard Attenborough for “A Chorus Line” and Sidney Lumet on “The Wiz.” On the other hand, stage directors handed a camera to replicate their success on screen have also come a cropper with some regularity, as Harold Prince did on the notoriously awful film version of “A Little Night Music,” and later by Susan Stroman on “The Producers” and now Phyllida Lloyd, the director of “Mamma Mia!” on both stage and screen. Theater and film speak different languages; very few directors are fluent in both. Bob Fosse is one, and his film adaptation of “Cabaret” might top my list of the best stage-to-film translations. (Notably Fosse eliminated the “book” songs in which characters spontaneously sing, retaining only the numbers at the nightclub.)
I also particularly admire Norman Jewison’s “Fiddler on the Roof,” William Wyler’s “Funny Girl” and Carol Reed’s “Oliver!” Stanley Donen, a stage hoofer who became a skilled filmmaker, profitably teamed with the stage vet George Abbott to direct the likable films of “The Pajama Game” and “Damn Yankees.”
In recent years there has been a marked upward trend in the general quality of stage-to-film transcriptions. The more successful recent movie adaptations of popular musicals — “Chicago,” “Dreamgirls,” “Hairspray” and “Sweeney Todd” — only fitfully captured the energy and excitement of the stage versions, but they were respectable as movies, and entertaining.
“Chicago” is probably the best, although the movie was mostly Fosse-derivative and drained away a fair amount of the stage version’s snazzy wit. “Dreamgirls” felt to me like a two-hour montage, a frenzy of scenes and images that never really found a natural rhythm. The stage-size humor of “Hairspray” often clunked on screen, and the charm of Harvey Fierstein’s drag performance as Edna Turnblad lost much of its camp appeal when John Travolta was squeezed into a weirdly porcine fat suit. “Sweeney Todd” turned Mrs. Lovett into the title character’s goth twin, stripping away the contrast that gave their relationship such fizz and the show its variety. But each had its merits, and none was a disaster, suggesting — at least until the advent of “Mamma Mia!” — that an ongoing aesthetic rapprochement was being achieved.
Still, in my view the best movie musicals of the past few decades were not based on stage shows at all, in keeping with history. (“Singin’ in the Rain” is possibly the best movie musical of all time.) Herbert Ross’s “Pennies From Heaven” and Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!” both used film’s endless flexibility to enhance the stylized nature of the material, to thrilling results.
And, most promisingly, a small movie coming out of nowhere managed to make the old-school conventions of musical theater bloom naturally in a strictly realistic, indeed even grungy environment. The indie movie “Once,” which ultimately won an Oscar for best original song this year, depicts a romance between two street musicians in Dublin. The scruffy Irish protagonist and his Czech girlfriend glide into their music with the ease of Fred and Ginger wafting onto the dance floor, reminding us that at its best, onstage or at the movies, the marriage of music and drama feels not just natural but inevitable.
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