How Classic Movies From ‘High Noon’ to ‘Almost Famous’ Are Getting Reboots – on Broadway | PRO Insight

What do “Some Like It Hot,” “High Noon,” “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Almost Famous” have in common? These popular and beloved films are making their long and winding road to the stage.

Since Disney asked Julie Taymor to find a way to bring Simba to Broadway, virtually every studio has been going through its archives to see what might transfer from screen to stage. (The opposite had been the traditional course of events.) Disney’s catalog of animated hits, alongside franchise spinoffs like “Wicked” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” attract a built-in family crowd. But the scorecard on many recent adaptations has been mixed: “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Tootsie,” “Pretty Woman” and even Billy Crystal’s “Mr. Saturday Night” — which closed this summer after a five-month run — are a few that came and went. (Even Mel Brooks followed megahit “The Producers” with “Young Frankenstein,” which sputtered after just over a year.)

This fall will see musicals based on Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous,” with music by Tom Kitt, as well as “Some Like It Hot,” an update of the 1959 MGM comedy classic about two musicians who go undercover in an all-female band after witnessing a mob hit. Big names are attached here, including producers Neil Meron and Robert Greenblatt, script writers Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin and composer Marc Shaiman. Tony winner Christian Borle stars in the Tony Curtis role, with relative newcomer J. Harrison Ghee in the Jack Lemmon role. Sounds good, but without Billy Wilder’s touch? Well, nothing’s perfect.

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This Broadway season is also bracing for other musicals based on films, from “Back to the Future” (which played last season in London) to “The Griswolds’ Broadway Vacation” (which opens next month in Seattle, based on the Warner Bros. comedy franchise) to “Sing Street” (based on the song-heavy 2016 indie from “Once” writer-director John Carney) and “The Devil Wears Prada,” which drew mostly mixed reviews during tryouts in Chicago despite a score by Elton John. There’s even an Americanized version of the Bollywood hit “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” — renamed “Come Fall in Love” — that’s hoping for Broadway after its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre next month.

Not every old movie is heading the song-and-dance route. Some are following the path of the 2019 hit “Network” (which earned Bryan Cranston a second Tony) and Aaron Sorkin’s reimagining of “To Kill a Mockingbird” — and hoping to avoid the short-lived route taken by recent nonmusical adaptations like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” which lasted just 38 performances in 2013.

A nonmusical adaptation of “High Noon” is aiming for a 2023 Broadway slot. The script is written by Oscar winner Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”), his first for the stage.

“I loved every minute of writing it, with, of course, Carl Foreman’s everlasting screenplay to use and inhabit me,” Roth said. “What was challenging for a dyed-in-the-wool screenwriter was to learn very quickly you can’t write a play in close-up. This has made me feel like 17 again… 60 years on.”

Producer Paula Wagner is convinced that the 1952 Western “is a perfect allegory for these times: At its core, it is about a man who stands up for what he thinks is right.”

Another film classic that’s hoping to hit Broadway is the gritty 1975 drama “Dog Day Afternoon,” which had its first public reading this month at the Ojai Playwrights Conference, with Jon Bernthal in the (non-singing) Al Pacino part. While some of the show’s themes still hit home — cops, crime-hungry TV, losers seeking fame — it remains a period piece from an era before cellphones, 9/11 or the questioning of police tactics.

Stephen Aldy Guirgis, a Pulitzer Prize winner (“Between Riverside and Crazy”) who also wrote the Chris Rock Broadway vehicle “The Motherf—er With the Hat,” admits he was challenged by the task of adapting the material for modern theater audiences.

“I need to find the relevance,” he said. “In the ’70s, the radical people were on the left. Now they are on the right.”

Other filmmakers also find the stage daunting. Take Andrew Bergman, who adapted his own script for the Nicolas Cage comedy “Honeymoon in Vegas” for a musical that lasted just three months on Broadway in 2015. “Except for the breathtaking incompetence of our producers, ‘Honeymoon’ was a wondrous experience,” he said. (There’s sarcasm in there somewhere.)

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Dale Launer is now in the midst of working with a composer to adapt his script for the 1992 courtroom comedy “My Cousin Vinny.“ “I thought Hollywood was hard,” he said.

Patience is a virtue for anyone working in theater. The late producer Margo Lion won a Tony for bringing “Hairspray” to the stage back in 2002, but then spent the next — and last — decade of her life trying to turn the 2001 indie film “Monsoon Wedding” into a live experience. The film’s director, Mira Nair, said the show is now looking to open in London sometime next year.

Warner Brothers’ Theater Ventures Division (which boasts one hit currently on Broadway, “Beetlejuice”) first brought Guirgis into the “Dog Day Afternoon” project six years ago.

“I thought hard about whether to do it,” the playwright admitted. “But then I figured if someone is going to f— this up, it might as well be me.”

Michele Willens is a bicoastal journalist. She writes a weekly theater report — “Stage Right or Not” — for an NPR affiliate and published the essay collection “From Mouseketeers to Menopause” in December 2021.

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