Book, Movie, Musical: Can Broadway Measure Up?

Broadway is serving up a feast of new musicals this spring (nine, by my count, set to open in the last eight weeks of the season, which ends officially on April 25). And, as usual, many of them are based on pre-sold properties — well-known movies, bestselling books, or both. These shows typically have an uphill battle with critics, who automatically take off points for lack of originality. But I always find it fascinating to see how well or poorly these shows manage to capture the spirit of the original while transplanting it to a new medium.

Two new shows, however, presented me with a different challenge. Both are based on popular movies and books that I had not read or seen, or even knew much about. So I came to them fresh (as audiences really should), and watched the movies only later, to help me understand what did and didn’t work onstage.   

The Notebook, based on Nicholas Sparks’s bestslling novel and 2004 movie, is set in a nursing home, where an elderly resident pays regular visits to a woman lost in the clouds of dementia. Each day he reads to her the continuing story of a young couple’s romance, their separation spurred by disapproving parents (and a war), and a reunion years later, just as she is about to marry someone else. The revelation is that the old couple and the young couple are the same: he is reading their own story, in hopes of rekindling his beloved wife’s memory. 

Onstage, all this unfolds pleasantly, if fairly predictably, with a score by indie songwriter Ingrid Michaelson that has just a bit more flavor than the usual generic Broadway pop. It seems unnecessary to have the young couple, in flashbacks, played by two sets of actors (before and after their separation), but the roundelay of couples past and present is nicely staged, and the show has an undeniable emotional kick that almost (but not quite) justifies the boxes of Kleenex in the lobby.   

Still, the movie reveals some of what the musical misses. The Hallmark Cards flashback scenes of the young couple in the film (Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams) are pretty cloying, but the World War II-era setting — updated to the Vietnam years in the musical — seems more suited to this old-fashioned romance. And the movie does a much better job of portraying the class differences that cause the girl’s stuck-up Southern family to nix the relationship.  

One other problem (which most critics have discreetly avoided) is the odd color-blind casting. It’s hardly a surprise, or a problem, to see interracial couples onstage these days; still, it’s a bit jarring to see the same characters change races as they age. Dorian Harewood and Maryann Plunkett are fine as the older couple (though I’ll take James Garner and Gena Rowlands, from the film, any day). But in a story that depends on our ability to see the connection between the old couple and their younger selves, the racial flip-flop has a distancing effect that doesn’t help.      

Water for Elephants, based on Sara Gruen’s novel and 2011 movie, is another love story told in flashback. The narrator is an old codger recalling the time in 1931 when, grieving over the death of his parents in a car crash, he dropped out of veterinary school and joined a seedy traveling circus, tending to the menagerie of animals and falling for the circus’s leading lady — who is, inconveniently, the wife of its dictatorial owner and ringmaster.  

I was impressed with how well Rick Elice’s book immerses us in this sawdust world without clumsy exposition, and with the sprightly songs (attributed to the PigPen Theater Co., an off-Broadway troupe new to me) with its retro mix of country, ragtime, and Kander & Ebb cynicism. But what makes the show a real wow is the dazzling acrobatics and inventive, Lion King-style puppetry, in which the circus animals are conveyed by visible actors with allusive, minimalist props. The elephant of the title, for example, first appears as a performer simply flapping giant ears; later as a disembodied trunk; before we finally behold the fully formed beast, manned by performers hidden inside.  

The show’s weakest element is its central love story — and here again, the movie helps illustrate  why. Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson, despite their Hollywood patina, simply bring more heat and conviction to the forbidden love affair than the merely serviceable actors (Grant Gustin and Isabella McCalla) in the musical. And Christoph Waltz, as the circus owner, is a more menacing antagonist, raising the tension and the stakes of the illicit romance in a way the stage version cannot duplicate.    

Still, the stylized stage treatment (directed by Jessica Stone, who did last season’s Kimberly Akimbo) enhances the fable-like quality of the story, and the climactic animal stampede — rendered by actors in strobe-effect, stop-action tableaus — actually has more impact on stage than the conventional realistic depiction in the movie. Sometimes theatricality triumphs — and Water for Elephants, for the most part, does.