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Book-to-Movie adaptation news: actually it’s more of a book-to-live
musical-to-movie adaptation. Variety announced during the week
that the Broadway musical version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
gothic novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde, will be
adapted to film. Academy Award winner Alexander Dinelaris will be writing and
producing the film that will share the same name as the live musical,
Jekyll and Hyde. It will be the first full-length feature film
produced through Dinelaris’s New York-based studio, Lexicon. The
live musical was first performed on Broadway in 1997 and then went
abroad. It is partly based on the novel which was adapted for the
stage by Frank Wildhorn and Steve Cuden. But I’m
in no hurry for it to come to the big screen. The problem I
have with horror musicals whether live or on screen is that they take
most of the horror out of the story.
Staged
musicals often have a fantastical element. I
mean, after all, most of
us don’t sing out the
events in our lives as
they happen to us.
The musical has an idealistic
and more simplistic element to it that is almost of a fairy tale
quality, a quality that most horror doesn’t have. Horror is more
realistic in the psychological sense in that a fear of death of some
sort permeates the story. The death is usually either physical or
spiritual. (However, horror in it’s truest sense often has to do
with the fear of spiritual death and so the death of one’s soul.)
So adapting gothic horror novels such as Frankenstein, Dracula
or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into musicals almost never works
and so too easily takes the audience out of the realism of the story.
It’s a realism that the horror element, an element based on fear,
depends on.
There are some
exceptions. Opera is one. Almost all dialogue in an opera is sung and
so, as long as it’s produced accordingly, opera can easily adapt a
gothic horror story really good. This happened with Phantom of the
Opera in
which the theme of the source material, the novel by Gaston Leroux,
was based on music. Which
brings us to another exception: horror based on musical
themes. An example is Phantom of the Paradise, the cult horror
satire from the 1970s which was based on the Phantom of the Opera
story. Now, Phantom of the Paradise
is
one I’d like to see made into a live musical after
all these years of craze of musical adaptations of horror stories.
Which leads to
another exception. Stories that satirize or spoof gothic horror, or
any kind of horror for that matter, can adapt into a musical really
good. Humourous stories tend to be simplistic in nature like comedy
in its wider sense. Phantom of the Paradise being partly
comical did this good and so did Little Shop of Horrors which
was adapted to stage from the 1960s B-rated cinematic horror spoof
that guest-starred Jack Nicholson. As crazy as his masochist
character in that one was, it was still quite far from his psychotic
Jack Torrence role in The Shining.
And please! don’t give them
any ideas to do a musical of that; they already did it with another
of Stephen King’s novels, Carrie,
and it flopped (and rightfully so).
I wouldn’t waste
my time with musicals, live or on screen, that are based on a genre
that is often far from the fairy tale or comical element. Broadway
has capitalised on the popularity that horror has had over the years.
They’ve done this to the point where the horror gets lost from
what’s supposed to be a horror story. It’s an insult to the dark
genre, especially the classics. Variety in another article
even indicates that horror musicals become less art than commercial
attractions, when it says of Wildhorn’s earlier work, Dracula,
the Musical, that it is “a pre-sold . . .
exceptionally well-packaged commodity that gives in wholly to the
idea that theater is less an art than a tourist attraction.” And whether it’s on stage, on page or on screen, horror is an
art—the art of fear. Unless it’s intended to be spoofed or
satirised, you can’t have fear where there is comedy
and that includes where the scenes are sung out.
Do you think
musicals based on gothic horror novels work as horror or do they
become too comical? Leave your comments in the box below.
Until next time . .
.
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