Ditto what New Yorker writer Hannah Goldfield says of Disney's 1992 flop-turned-Broadway hit Newsies, though I loathed the tepid romance between Christian Bale's Jack and that useless Sarah girl. Ahem: "A movie is fixed, eternal. Your perception of it may change slightly each time you watch it, but nothing else, not the tiniest of details, will. It’s a precise memory you can return to, over and over—I know I’ve found a movie I’ll love forever if I have the feeling of wanting to watch it again immediately after it ends..." [New Yorker]
Newsies on Broadway has entered the national consciousness, so now I get to say this to all the rest of you: FINALLY. Join me, Fansies, in watching Oscar- and Grammy-winning composer Alan Menken tickle the ivories to a number of his best Newsies tunes from the 1992 cult movie and the Harvey Fierstein-penned Broadway adaptation, and consider: Did he really deserve that Razzie award?
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Open the gates and seize the day! Following a successful run at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse, the Harvey Fierstein-adapted stage musical Newsies -- based on the best period musical of all time about turn of the century paperboys fighting Big Business (that also starred Christian Bale) -- will open on honest-to-goodness Broadway in March. This gives you bandwagon-jumpers plenty of time to catch up to the rest of us Newsies diehards who've known all along that one day, the family-friendly stylings of legions of dancing street urchins just trying to sell some 'papes would catch on like gangbusters. The world will know ...that we're not crazy! (Right?) [Wall Street Journal]
As the makers of multiple Tony winners like Spamalot, Billy Elliott, and Hairspray (among many, many others) know, adapting hit Broadway musicals from movies can be quite rewarding -- commercially and creatively. But since these days it seems like Broadway folk are dipping into the Hollywood playbook for just about any kind of material -- nun-themed disco comedies, '80s-set Adam Sandler pics, even the Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore romance Ghost, complete with potter's wheel cheesiness -- Movieline's got your guide to the five most promising future movie-to-Broadway adaptations to watch for.
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