ANOTHER WAY TO RUIN A GREAT MOVIE

I’ll join your crusade against colorizing movies if you’ll join mine against stage-izing them.

“Singin’ in the Rain” is the present example. At least one Calendar reader, Larry Roesch of Pasadena, can’t see my objections to this stage version of the great 1952 MGM musical.

“Although the show earned a most enthusiastic ovation,” Roesch wrote in Dec. 21’s Calendar, “our trusted critic found it ‘hard to see the reasoning’ behind the stage adaptation. He compares it to the original movie version, which he reminds us is ‘available at your local video store.’

“The implications here are troublesome to me. Are we to stop supporting live theater productions once they’ve been captured on film?

“If this is the case, then we should never see another revival of our classic musicals. Certainly ‘The Sound of Music,’ ‘My Fair Lady’ and ‘The King and I’ have received definitive screen treatments. . . .

“Tell me, is Sullivan trying to kill live theater or what?”

No. Sullivan is one of your leading stage chauvinists. He rarely sees the screen version of a play without feeling that something was missed in the carry-over. He has never seen a Broadway musical brought to the screen with all the spontaneity and presence of the original.

Does Sullivan frown on reviving stage musicals in theater once they’ve been “captured on film”? Just the reverse. He takes such revivals as proof that the theater experience can’t be captured on film. How many times has “Show Boat” hit the screen? Three, at least. But people still want to see it in the theater. Sullivan thinks that’s terrific.

However, what does all this have to do with “Singin’ in the Rain”? It wasn’t a Broadway musical that got transplanted to the screen. It was a pure movie musical--by, for and about Hollywood. It was one of the proudest achievements of MGM’s fabled Freed Unit. Each image, each dance move, each camera angle was governed by its creators’ considerable knowledge of how it would all flow together on the screen.

Can such a piece be put on the stage? Certainly, if you do it with the care that went into the original. Can it be just planked down on the stage? Not if you’ve got any respect.

That’s the objection. As with the colorizing process, it’s a question of honoring the material. But it’s also a question of honoring the theater. Not only does the crude touring version of “Singin’ in the Rain” reflect badly on one of Hollywood’s most charming films, it makes the stage look like the most old-fashioned way in the world to tell a story.

And “Singin’ in the Rain” isn’t an isolated case. Stage-ized movie musicals are getting to be a trend. “42nd Street” was a hit; “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” was a flop; “High Society” is in the pipeline. Say the producers: Why not? With today’s ticket prices, audiences want the security of a sure thing. Give ‘em some songs they remember, some jokes they’ve forgotten and a nice-looking cast and they’ll go home happy.

Maybe. But there wasn’t a lot of joy in the house when “Singin’ in the Rain” opened at the Pantages and, later, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The laughter and the applause had a dutiful quality--the sound of an audience not having as much fun as they’d hoped to have, remembering the movie.

Was it legitimate to remember the movie? Certainly. The show’s ads invited it, with its three stars posed in their slickers like Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds. It was also prudent to compare both entertainments, considering that a videotape of the movie could be rented for $3, one-tenth the price of a good seat for the show.

But for a stage chauvinist, it was painful to compare them. You couldn’t blame the players. Stuck with the ungrateful task of following in someone else’s dance steps without imitating him, each tried hard to have fun--maybe too hard, in the case of the young woman playing the screechy-voiced movie queen. In the film, Jean Hagen gives her some of Judy Holliday’s vulnerability. On the stage, the character is shrill, period.

But that was how the actress was directed. One of the most distressing differences between the film and the show is the latter’s coarseness.

“Singin’ in the Rain” on film is as witty and debonair as Gene Kelly’s dancing. But where the film is tongue-in-cheek, the show is elbow-in-the-ribs. Each gag is underlined, each character played like a stereotype, so the folks in the balcony will get the idea. A deft movie becomes a rube show.

And a slow one. One of the things that today’s stage musicals (“Dreamgirls,” say) have learned from the movies is how to dissolve one scene into the next, so that the story never falters. But the stage-ized “Singin’ in the Rain” reverts to the clunky tempo of the old-fashioned musical, with pauses while the scenery lumbers on and off. What time is the next swan?

The rain, we get--700 gallons of it, according to the press release. (Think of that.) And Donn Simione sings and dances in it, just like Gene Kelly.

But Simone only gets about a half-block of sidewalk to splash around in. And when he’s through, the curtain has to come down for intermission, so that they can mop up the stage. Some magic.

(I wish I had seen the performance where the rain machine didn’t work and Simione and his audience had to imagine the stuff coming down. There’s real theater magic.)

The story we get, too. And quite a lot of the original Betty Comden-Adolph Green dialogue. (They’re given credit for the book.) But the cleverness of their screenplay isn’t so much what’s being said, as where it’s being said. Take the scene where Kelly leaps from the top of a trolley car into Reynolds’ flivver. The parallel moment in the play has Simione and Cynthia Ferrer talking at a bus stop. The dialogue is much the same. Guess where it seems funnier.

The passage where the audience laughs the early talkie off the screen is actually painful in the theater--to those of us who find theater amplification offensive. The joke is supposed to be that the crude movie mikes are picking up extraneous noise--the clicking of the pearls on the heroine’s 18th-Century gown. Alas, earlier in the show, the theater mikes have picked up the very same noise.

At such moments, the stage chauvinist wonders whether “Singin’ in the Rain” isn’t a clever plot dreamed up by the movies to show audiences what a dinosaur the theater has become. At other times, the show simply seems a bad idea. And very occasionally--when the chorus is hoofing, when the hero and heroine reconcile at Grauman’s Chinese--it works.

What should “Singin’ in the Rain” have been on stage? As pleasurable and clever a theater musical as the original was a screen musical. That would have meant either reimagining each frame in theatrical terms (a much more rigorous process than simply touching up the old screenplay) or going in a new direction entirely.

Twyla Tharp’s Broadway version may have gone wrong (I didn’t see it), but her impulse to provide a new take on the material was absolutely valid. “Singin’ in the Rain” on the stage should be different --because the stage’s strengths are different. Also because it’s 30 years later. “My One and Only,” for example, was a droll 1980s look at the dream-world of 1920s musical comedy, not too different from the Hollywood spoofed by “Singin’ in the Rain.” There we saw how silky a stage musical can be, with the right people at the loom.

Another model is “The Wiz,” which dared to reinvent Dorothy and the Emerald City, rather than give us clones of Judy Garland and a Xerox of the MGM set. Rather than doing a rip-off of a classic movie, why not give your response to it? It would take thought, of course.