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HELLO AND WELCOME back to a revamped Preview. Speaking of vamping, the jury is still out on whether the musical is making a comeback or whether Chicago was just a very successful one-off. No doubt everyone who can hold a tune (and, given current Broadway trends, quite a few who can’t) will be studying the results very carefully. And the results at the moment would seem to be that Americans love Chicago (it is, after all, their town), while the rest of the world is not quite so sure. The multi-Oscar-winner has yielded lacklustre results in Germany; and in France, the Parisian per-screen average has been almost exactly twice what it is in the provinces. In other words, city slickers go for it, but hicks nix it.
Now, Hollywood trendspotting is a dangerous activity, a little like waiting for a British bus: you can hang around for what seems like for ever, and then two films with very similar stories come along at once. Think Les liaisons dangereuses/Valmont back in 1989, the virus movie logjam in the mid-nineties and the current, somewhat puzzling saga of the battling Alexander the Great epics (one directed by Oliver Stone and starring Colin Farrell, the other from Martin Scorsese with Leonardo DiCaprio).
As a journalist in the movie business, however, you spend a lot of your time looking for trends. Indeed, that august trade journal Variety, in what must have been a slow news week, recently devoted its lead story to whether or not the ‘comeback’ of the musical would prove any more enduring than the comeback of the western in the wake of Unforgiven’s Oscars. The answer seemed to be a definite maybe, with studio execs giving that auto-pilot answer of ‘We’ll look at all proposals on their merits’.
My own feeling is that the two most recent hit musicals - Moulin Rouge and Chicago - were both pretty much one-offs (with the added proviso that the latter took 18 years to bring to the screen). And what about all the misfires? The Fantasticks, anyone?
One definite maybe, meanwhile, is that Joel Schumacher will be directing a movie based on the stage hit Phantom of the Opera. I put it like that because, however decisive the announcement - and the one from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Films in mid-February sounded pretty chipper - with Schumacher, you never know. That man has been attached to more films he hasn’t made than I’ve had cheese sandwiches before screenings. In the present context, it’s interesting to note that he was heavily tipped to make a movie version of another hit musical, Dreamgirls, in late 1996.
Phantom opened in the West End in 1986, hit Broadway two years later, and has been up for screen adaptation since the early nineties. The currently planned film will be an indie production: Lloyd Webber has bought back the rights from Warner Bros, although the latter still has an option to distribute the finished film in the US. Meanwhile, Phantom looks likely to be one of the tastier upcoming titles staring down at festivaliers from the Croisette billboards in Cannes. |
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MORE OF THAT JAZZ…?
Chicago (left) and Moulin Rouge may have proved there is an audience for musicals. But if there is, The Fantasticks (inset) certainly didn’t find it. So what price fame for Phantom of the Opera, which Joel Schumacher (far right) is due to to make, with Andrew Lloyd Webber (right)
producing?
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