.jpg "Happy Days")
Heading up to Goodspeed at Chester this weekend to see the musical version of Happy Days, I found myself wondering why – given the plethora of film to stage adaptations – we aren’t seeing more shows drawn from the vast archive of classic television. Surely for name recognition and marketing purposes, it’s hard to beat shows that might have run five or ten years in their original runs and which live on endlessly on channels like Nick at Nite and TV Land. But off the top of my head, very few TV-to-stage projects come to mind: there’s the upcoming The Addams Family (although two films followed the series) and I’m aware of efforts, so far as I know unrealized, to do musicals of both The Honeymooners and Bonanza. I’m sure there must be others.
I suspect that we have not seen a flood TV adaptations because of the nature of TV series writing for the majority of TV’s history. In most cases, especially with the classic television that’s frequently rerun, the driving force behind successful shows was taking characters who were fairly constant in their nature, and placing them in situations which would resolve by showing us that happiness came from staying true to their core nature. That’s certainly the essence of situation comedy, and that same dynamic came into play on dramatic series (pre-Hill Street Blues or The Sopranos).
For a stage play to be successful, we want to see a character in real conflict, and either growing, or failing to grow, based upon their experiences over the course of two hours. The same is true on film, so film-to-stage adaptations start from a place where both story and character arcs are already in place. In adapting television, the question will be finding a story that sustains two hours, more or less, and allows characters we know all too well to go on a compelling emotional and personal journey. And that can’t be an easy challenge – especially when we might have the experience of 50, 100 or 200 hours of knowing exactly how they’ll behave.
So the TV-to-stage adaptation challenge may even be greater: can the source material be reconsidered in a way which draws upon the stores of our knowledge, experience and attachment to the series, but also couches it in a new dynamic that does more than just deliver familiar characters acting in familiar ways, to make for a dramatically compelling production?
Posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 9:18 am
by
Howard Sherman
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