While fans of Broadway theatre no doubt are aware of Tony-winner Dan Fogler’s starring turn in the ping pong comedy Balls of Fury, which opens nationally today, I would like to draw your attention to a less prominent theatre-to-film crossover slightly hidden in the credits of another new feature debuting today.
Look closely at the billing for the G-rated comedy Mr. Bean’s Holiday and you’ll spot a “story by” credit for one Simon McBurney, the creative force behind Complicite, the British ensemble whose Mnemonic had an eye-opening commercial run in New York about five years back. McBurney also was a Tony nominee for his revival of Ionesco’s The Chairs in 1998.
Even those cursory credits would seem at odds with Mr. Bean, the largely wordless comic stooge created by the comedian Rowan Atkinson and writer Richard Curtis. The fact that McBurney has neither an actual screenplay credit or better still, a director’s credit, suggests that his original vision has been altered along the way, as is so often the case in the development of film projects.
In theatre, where the writer is both artistically and contractually at the center of the creative process, I suspect there could have been something magical about the merger of McBurney and Bean, with McBurney’s dazzling physical sense blended directly with the often grotesque antics of Atkinson’s everyman. And whatever I think of the film when I manage to see it, I’ll always wonder what the unfiltered version might have been.
Posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 11:14 am
by
Howard Sherman
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