Here’s an Idea . . . Take This Film to Broadway

In the 1984 film “Footloose,” the pop-hit song “Holding Out for a Hero,” sung by Bonnie Tyler, underscores a scene of a tractor race. No tractors grace the stage of the Richard Rodgers Theater, where the musical version of “Footloose” opens Thursday, but the creators of the new $6.5-million Broadway musical are hoping to capture some of the same driving energy that made the movie one of the top box-office grossers of the 1980s.

It won’t be easy. There have been a handful of successes in adapting films to the musical stage--”Applause,” “42nd Street,” “La Cage aux Folles,” “A Little Night Music” and, notably, Disney’s mega-hits “The Lion King” and “Beauty and the Beast”--but the Broadway landscape is also littered with carcasses of shows that have looked to the movies for inspiration. Musical adaptations of “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” “Victor/Victoria,” “Nick and Nora,” “Whistle Down the Wind,” “High Society,” “Big,” “Sunset Blvd.,” “My Favorite Year,” “The Goodbye Girl,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “The Red Shoes,” “Big Deal,” and the notorious flop “Carrie” are just some of the productions that have failed to transfer the cinematic magic of the source to the stage.

Why is it so tough? According to those who have labored long in the field, the challenges are twofold, relating to both craft and audience expectations. “What people forget is that the musical art form is completely different from film,” says Nick Scandalios, executive vice president for the Nederlander Organization, a national producing company. “You can’t just transcribe a screenplay onto the stage, which is a far less literal medium. Unless you can create a suspension of disbelief and moments that require you to sing, it won’t work no matter what the film is.”

Moreover, audiences come to such musicals with their own preconceptions, which can exaggerate otherwise forgivable shortcomings. The more beloved the source--i.e. “Gone With the Wind,” “Sunset Blvd.”--the trickier the endeavor.

“If the show has a history of some goodness, theoretically you co-opt that goodness,” says Michael David, chief of Dodger Endemol, the corporate Broadway powerhouse behind “Footloose,” as well as the Tony-winning “Titanic” (which predates the film and is unrelated). “Of course, with the tangible assets come tangible liabilities, as well,” the producer adds. “The downside is that people come with expectations. The question becomes, ‘Will we screw it up?’ That’s always the nightmare.”

What David and his team are trying not to screw up is one of the most popular films of the 1980s, which in its stage version is being directed by Walter Bobbie (“Chicago”), with book (co-written by Bobbie) and lyrics by Dean Pitchford. Tom Snow has written the music, with the exception of four songs: “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins, “The Girl Gets Around” by Sammy Hagar, “Holding Out for a Hero” by Jim Steinman, and “Almost Paradise” by Eric Carmen.” It tells the story of a troubled youth from Chicago, played by Kevin Bacon in the film, who moves to a small, conservative Texas town where dancing is forbidden. Much to the chagrin of the town’s elders, the teenager soon has the whole town dancing, including the minister’s daughter, who finds herself smitten with the rebel newcomer. The characters in the movie version do not sing, but the film boasts a plethora of pop hits on its platinum-selling soundtrack, including “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” “Almost Paradise” and “Footloose.”

“We’re not trying to put the film on stage,” says Bobbie. “We’re using it as a source for a whole new Broadway musical, and when you do that, you have to find theatrical conceits through which to tell the story. Suddenly you’re asking yourself questions like ‘What does the minister have to sing about? His wife? What does his daughter have on her mind?’ ”

As a result, onstage Ariel, the minister’s daughter played by Jennifer Laura Thompson, has “Holding Out for a Hero” on her mind, a number now set in the local burger joint. Five of the film’s seven songs have been folded into other scenes, supplemented by nine new songs written by Pitchford and Snow, all in an effort to build worthy stage legs.

Despite odds that appear to be against transferring films to the stage, theater producers have been raiding film catalogs more than ever in the past four years, beginning with “Sunset Blvd.” in 1993 and “Big” in 1996. “Doctor Dolittle” is currently playing in London, along with “Saturday Night Fever.” “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “Easter Parade” and “A Star Is Born,” “Sweet Smell of Success” and “Bright Lights, Big City” all are in development. “The Full Monty” and “The Witches of Eastwick” are also being considered for future projects.

The impulse isn’t really new. Since the 1960s, film has been source material for musical theater, with “Promises, Promises,” based on “The Apartment” and “Sweet Charity,” based on “Nights of Cabiria” among the first. But the risk-shy corporate presence on Broadway, increasingly looking to family markets, is turning up the heat to develop product with proven appeal.

“As musicals become more and more expensive, people believe, rightly or wrongly, that their chances are enhanced if your musical is based on a hit film,” says Nederlander’s Scandalios, but he cautions that the fit is not always simple.

Dodger Endemol’s David says the film “Footloose” was an instant catalyst for the company. He points out that on Broadway, where development of a new musical can be “interminable,” a work with tangible assets--such as a recognizable name, a handful of hit tunes--can “jump-start” the process. Indeed, “Footloose” has taken just over two years to get from inception to opening, a relatively short gestation period. Moreover, just weeks after its opening, another company of “Footloose” will go into rehearsal for the first national tour of the musical, which opens in December. The familiarity of “Footloose” as a hit film gave road presenters and producers confidence to take the unprecedented move of buying the show before the Broadway returns are measured.

“Footloose” lyricist Pitchford, who also wrote the screenplay for the film as well as the lyrics to its songs--which were composed by a variety of artists--said that the creative team was not intimidated by expectations. In fact, he chose to proceed with the project only after reassurances from Bobbie and others that the material would be totally reexamined.

“I had no desire to revisit ‘Footloose’ unless we were willing to tear it limb from limb and get back to the real bones of the piece,” he says. The new medium has allowed him to reinstate aspects of his original narrative that were removed when the movie was test-marketed before its release. “The youth audiences we recruited kept wanting to spend more and more time with the kids, so certain adult story lines were jettisoned or trimmed,” he says. The new venue has allowed him to push those emotional buttons.

In fact, the demands of the musical stage forced the issue in adapting “Footloose,” according to Pitchford, who began his career as a New York stage actor (“Pippin,” “Umbrellas of Cherbourg”) before moving to Los Angeles to work in film.

“In film, you can zoom in, express emotion with the tiny flicker of an eyebrow,” he says. “But in theater, if somebody is going to sing, it’s got be a big enough emotion to carry across the footlights, and it’s got to advance the narrative.” Two songs from the film, in fact, “Never” and “Dancing in the Streets,” were cut from the Broadway show because they didn’t serve the story.

Even more important, Pitchford adds, is creating a “musical universe” in which songs can comfortably and seamlessly live. Pitchford’s only other Broadway credit as lyricist is “Carrie,” the 1988 musical flop based on the Brian De Palma classic, an experience that Pitchford refused to discuss. But Ken Mandelbaum, author of “Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Broadway Musical Flops,” noted in an interview that “Carrie” failed to create just that “musical universe.” “It was a very difficult property to musicalize, but not impossible,” Mandelbaum argues. “It had all kinds of passions, emotions and violence, and very good songs, and the scenes between the mother and daughter were very strong. But they chose an abstract universe for what had been the very realistic high school setting in the school, and it was just bizarre. High school kids in Grecian costumes?”

Veteran book-writer Peter Stone adapted Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot” into the Broadway musical “Sugar” and is writing the book for the new adaptation of “Easter Parade,” set to open next season. He says the problem with adapting films into musicals is that not enough thought is given “to whether or not singing is welcome” in whatever film is being adapted. “Sugar” is one of four Broadway musicals adapted from Wilder-written films, which include Cole Porter’s “Silk Stockings” (“Ninotchka”), “Promises, Promises” (“The Apartment”) and “Sunset Blvd.,” and Stone speculates that the precise construction of Wilder’s films, as well as the emotional range of the filmmaker’s characters, may be what attracts theater producers.

“As [composer-lyricist] Frank Loesser once told me,” Stone says, “the characters sing when normal expressions cease to be enough to convey the emotions.” He adds that the failure of the recent “High Society” may be because the characters never had a compelling reason to sing. (Neither, of course, did the characters in the movie, but in that case, suggests Stone, audiences were seduced by the high-powered cast of Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.)

Nan Knighton (book writer for “Scarlet Pimpernel”) wrote the book for the London hit “Saturday Night Fever,” due to come to Broadway in fall of 1999. When first approached for the project, she feared audiences would never accept that Tony Manero could sing: “The film had such integrity and [screenwriter] Norman Wexler so brilliantly captured their inarticulateness that [it seemed] a musical version would never work,” she said. She says her reservations were overcome when she realized that the film had a “continual, percussive pulse,” and that became key to her adaptation. “I kept as much of Wexler’s dialogue as possible. I knew that if I kept that same rhythmic pulse in the book, they could go from high-fiving to singing without a break in reality.”

Like the musical of “Saturday Night Fever,” much of which is set in ‘70s disco clubs, Paul Scott Goodman’s adaptation of Jay McInerney’s novel “Bright Lights, Big City” also takes place in bars and dance palaces of this time the go-go 1980s. The musical premieres this winter at the 100-seat New York Theatre Workshop, where “Rent” began. Goodman says that the setting, as well as the fact that the piece is almost entirely sung-through, helps eliminate some of the so-called artificiality of characters breaking into song. Furthermore, the “raging pulse” of the story lends itself to music. “I’m really basing the musical on the book, which from Word One was all about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. I was humming to myself as I was reading the first couple of lines.”

Goodman says that the film managed “to suck all the soul” out of the novel, partly because it was unable to convey the interior monologues of the lead character, a dispirited Manhattan party boy losing himself in sex and drugs. “The musical form is such that you can readily get inside the head of the character through songs,” says Goodman, “something which you can’t do that easily in film.”

Some Broadway observers decry the musicalization of such film mega-hits as “Beauty and the Beast,” “Saturday Night Fever” and “Footloose” as coming from a poverty of imagination and feel that the beefed-up trend may have an ill effect on Broadway’s health. “It contributes to the banality, the theme-park mentality,” says producer John Hart (“The Who’s Tommy,” the 1992 revival of “Guys and Dolls”). “It’s conservative, safe and doomed to failure because the motivation is opposite of what moves the musical theater forward, what makes it great and thrilling.”

“Footloose” producer David disagrees, describing Broadway as “a theatrical Wild West” where everything and anything is possible. “The notion that it’s cheating in some way is ridiculous,” he says. “If I wanted to do art, I’d try to get a job at [the nonprofit Chicago-based company] Steppenwolf. We’re proud of ‘Footloose,’ and we want to produce shows that we want to see in a manner that doesn’t embarrass our children. And maybe help attract a whole new audience, which might not otherwise come. Somebody else can do the Kafka version of ‘Footloose.’ ”

Indeed, most Broadway producers feel that any idea from a film catalog is fair game for musicalization, even if all bets are off as to their eventual viability. “The Red Shoes,” which failed in 1993 and “Big,” which failed in 1996, looked awfully good on paper. And who would have thought, for example, that one of the most successful musicals of the 1970s--both critically and commercially--could have been based on an Ingmar Bergman movie, “Smiles of a Summer Night”? But such was the case with Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music.”

David’s Dodger Endemol currently is developing some half-dozen musicals, two of them based on movies--”Hans Christian Andersen,” to be directed by Martha Clarke, the avant-garde artist and choreographer, and a musical version of the classic western “Shane.”

“Boy, we could really screw that up!” David says good-naturedly.

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“Footloose” opens Thursday at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, 226 W. 46th St., New York. (800) 755-4000.