Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-05-11 (Saturday)

Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

As an aside, I caught "Funny Girl" on stage.  I couldn't help but
constantly compare it to the movie.  There were obviously lots of
similarities with scenes and bits of dialogue that were identical in
both.  But to my surprise the stage version had Fanny's mother and
Fanny's friend who helped her get her first job as major characters
throughout.  While they were afterthoughts at best in the movie.  And
the lady who played the role on stage knocked it out of the park.  She
was better than Streisand in the movie IMO.

Glad you enjoyed it.

Yes, it can be horrifying the major changes that are made in adaptation.
I've always wanted to see a revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the way
to the Forum because the movie adaptation is so vile (despite how much
of the Broadway cast was kept) but I've never noticed a revival.

Several years ago I discussed a revival of Cabaret that I attended that
was based on the Broadway show before it was extensively revised, and
how very different it was from the movie. A great deal of the score was
dropped for the movie.

The Music Man is pretty much a straight adaptation; one song was
changed.

My Fair Lady, ignoring the controversy that a non-singer Audrey Hepburn
was cast, is different even though they didn't drop any songs. The
musical and Shaw's play Pygmalion are bawdier, as you can see in the
Wendy Hiller/Leslie Howard movie.

Gigi was a movie musical. Amusingly, they bought rights to the Colette
story AND the stage play because her estate kept selling rights they no
longer owned and it was just cheaper to buy the subsequent rights than
to sue to extinguish them. It's been adapted for musical theater but
I've never bothered to see it on stage. It includes a song written for
My Fair Lady!