Other Notes
Universal Pictures, the film company, owns and produced "Wicked", the Broadway Musical. You might think, why is a film company with much bigger fish to fry, dabbling in musicals? The answer is simple: "Wicked" is the most profitable venture in the history of Universal Pictures. Why? The answer is again, simple: how much did your last movie ticket cost you? Oh yeah? Well a ticked to see "Wicked" will cost you about ten times that amount. Multiply that times 3,000 a night, for, say 300 nights, and you have an idea of the scale of the venture. Even with all the dancers and musicians and make-up artists and set-designers and so on, you can make a lot of money.
So we arrive at the real why question. And that answer is also simple. Broadway aint what it used to be. Leaving aside the question of whether "Wicked" is more interesting artistically than "Oklahoma" or "All That Jazz" or "Mame", the people who go to Broadway shows are largely tourists, in New York (no other location of a stage production has nearly the influence), who want something utterly remarkable and amazing which they can tell their friends about when they get back home to Peoria or Austin or Sioux City: we saw "Wicked". It was FABULOUS. Oh, you gotta see it live: it just blew me away!
It is possible to produce a stunning broadway show, nowadays, without any of the difficult artistic stuff involved. Well, all right: someone still has to write dialogue and music and learn how to play an instrument. Then you mic everyone and turn up the sound system and throw in a few pyrotechnics, and you have a hit.
Then why did "Spiderman" bomb? Okay, so even with all the resources of Broadway's technical departments, you still need magic, the elusive unquantifiable indefinable thing that makes people want to rush home and tell all their friends they saw your production.
Right now, Broadway is dominated by "Bridges of Madison County", "Bullets Over Broadway", "Big Fish", "Rocky". There are plans to make "Animal House", "Back to the Future", Tootsie", and "The Devil Wears Prada" into Broadway musicals.
Convergence. Towards the lowest common denominator. My wife and I saw "Hair" a few years ago, and "Godspell" last year, on Broadway. "Hair" originated on Broadway and became a movie. It was Broadway that had the courage and audacity to present a hippie musical on stage. More timid Hollywood wanted a proven success, which "Hair" was a after a few years on Broadway. Hollywood does not take risks. It almost never, lately, takes artistic risks. Want to see an artistic risk? Stop drooling over Leonardo Di Caprio-- he never appears in an artistically audacious film, even if it is Martin Scorcese directing. Has Martin Scorcese directed anything as remotely daring as "Taxi Driver" or "Raging Bull" lately?
To see a movie that takes artistic risks, you need to check out the independent films like "Before Midnight", "Blancanieves", "The Artist", "Moonrise Kingdom", "The White Ribbon".
So all we need is for Hollywood to start running Broadway. But there is a reason a Broadway ticket costs about ten times as much as a movie ticket. It is because Broadway has a lustre to it, a glow, a sense of marvel and authenticity and originality that most Hollywood movies lack. It is because Broadway embraces risk, and change, and real emotions. Hollywood, like a huge, ugly remora, wants to attach itself to this luster. But first it needs to eliminate the risk (and originality) and homogenize the experience (nothing with a genuine edge) and castrate it. Once Broadway is safe for Hollywood, there will be a lot of happy tourists who will get exactly what they expected and will experience the delusion of having seen something that can be mistaken for a Broadway production. And they will invariablly say that it was better than the film version because they damned well paid ten times as much to see it.
You know what's up when you hear people involved in stage productions talk about how important it is that the audience not leave the theatre disappointed. You get the feeling that the disappointment they are talking about is exactly that: "I paid ten times as much as for a movie ticket and I coudn't even undersand the damn play! What a waste!" And so long to "Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolfe" and "Equus" and "Cabaret" and "All that Jazz" and "The Book of Mormon".
The irony of all this, of course, is that Broadway itselt tends to play it safe, and the really daring, original Broadway productions almost always originate off-Broadway, or in London, or somewhere else. Broadway has its own cult of celebrity and a play often does poorly once the famous star moves on. Where do stars come from? They come from off-broadway productions, independent films, and, so it appears, home-made porn films.
What if Hollywood had this great idea and decided that they would establish a street in Los Angeles and they would put on stage versions of their films and charge over $100 a ticket? They would never do that. No one would come. Because it wasn't "Broadway". They will fix that.