Send in the Clones

Send in the Clones

Who'd have thought that movie musicals would come back in again? A few years ago, the only musicals you'd ever see were Disney feature animation films. In a bid to clone the cult popularity of Moulin Rouge and the breakout success of Chicago, Hollywood is clamouring for the film rights to some of Broadway's most beloved modern shows. Hugh Jackman in Sweeney Todd seems like a minor piece of miscasting, but if that's what it takes to bring Stephen Sondheim's grand guignol onscreen, then I won't complain. Word is that another Sondheim show, Into the Woods has also been optioned. The project originally surfaced several years ago, with Susan Sarandon tipped to play the Witch.

I love Into the Woods, but the Sondheim show I really want to see onscreen is A Little Night Music. This gorgeous musical comedy of manners has already made it to film, during the late 70's, but the result was such a mess that it bombed at the box office and has since been forgotten. My guess, however, is that lovers of period pieces -- which is to say, the demographic built up by two decades of Jane Austen adaptations and Merchant Ivory takes of 19th and early 20th-century novels -- would now flock to a remake of this show. I'd love to see who they'd cast as Mme Armfeldt, the acerbic and perennially disapproving matriarch who demurs against her daughter's relationship with a lawyer because it dilutes the pure joy of sex with the base confusions of love. Mme Armfeldt's own fortunes are based entirely on her previous life as a courtesan: "I acquired some position,/ Plus a tiny Titian", she sings of her tryst with the King of the Belgians. Or, recalling an affair with the Duke of Ferrara: "When things got rather touchy,/ He deeded me a duchy." Mme Armfeldt has plenty to say on a treasured Sondheim theme, the distinction between sex and love:

Too many people muddle sex with mere desire,
And when emotion intervenes, the net descends.
It should on no account perplex, or worse, inspire;
It's but a pleasurable means to immeasurable ends.
Why does no one comprehend?
Let us hope this lunacy is just a trend.

A non-Sondheim musical I'd love to see on the big screen is the ever-hummable Dreamgirls. It's a thinly veiled take on the careers of Diana Ross and the Supremes. In the 80's, Jennifer Holliday made the searingly masochistic showstopper, 'And I'm Telling You, I'm Not Going' a cult favourite; more recently, a couple of American Idol contestants have helped to introduce the song to a new generation. Some fans of the show would like to see Queen Latifah play the lead role; much as I love her, I don't know whether Queen Latifah is right for the part. She has the rage, but not the vocal range.